Based on Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night, A Little Night Music is set in a weekend country house in turn of the century Sweden, bringing together surprising liaisons, long simmering passions and a taste of love’s endless possibilities. Hailed as witty and wildly romantic, the story centers on the elegant actress Desirée Armfeldt and the spider’s web of sensuality, intrigue and desire that surrounds her.
Set at the turn of the last century, A Little Night Music interweaves a tangled web of former and current lovers among the upper crust elite of Sweden. Esteemed lawyer Fredrik Egerman has recently married a young virgin, Anne, whom his son, Henrik, has also fallen madly in love. Fredrik’s dedication to his blushing bride is tested when he reunites with a former flame, the famed (and fading) actress Desiree Armfeldt. Things grow more complicated when her jealous (and married) lover Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm gets wind of the reunion. The coupling and uncoupling comes to a head when Desirée convinces her mother to host Fredrik and his family for a weekend on her lavish country estate—and the Count, with wife in tow, crashes the party.
"The luminous [Angela] Lansbury is a wonder. The 84-year-old actress does something extraordinary, too: her Madame Armfeldt progressively gets more frail as the evening progresses...the aging process has never been more eloquently put on display."
The Associated Press
Michael Kuchwara
""Bewitching, confident and utterly natural, [Catherine Zeta-Jones] breathes a refreshing earthiness and warm-blooded sensuality into the part [of Desiree].""
Variety
David Rooney
""Sondheim's score...suggests echoes from a distant era. [Angela Lansbury] seems to melt into memory itself. It's a lovely example of the past reaching out to the present.""
The New York Times
Ben Brantley
"“Half-light can be forgiving—to the aging, to the vain, to the furtive philanderer—but in Trevor Nunn’s stunning, twilit, devastatingly good new production of A Little Night Music, it’s as punishing as the equatorial sun. He’s clearly trying to induce an exquisitely heartbreaking case of seasonal affective disorder in his audience, and, fiendishly, he succeeds.”"
New York Magazine
Scott Brown
"There are plenty of new pleasures to be found in [director] Nunn's thoughtful take on this Broadway classic. There is no Night Music without a successful Desiree, and it has one here in Catherine Zeta-Jones."
Backstage
Erik Haagensen