A Lighter, Brighter 'Night Music'

BALTIMORE -- From the outset of Mark Lamos's frisky revival of "A Little Night Music," Stephen Sondheim's elegant game of musical lovers, an audience is enveloped in a perfume of fresh ideas.

The five lieder singers of Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler's 1973 show, who are usually portrayed as a quintet of mature vintage, are embodied by vigorous younger actors. As these quasi-commentators spin and glide in the prologue across Riccardo Hern¿ndez's handsomely minimalist set -- strewn with the luxe detritus of the high life -- the theme set in motion is one of youthful folly rather than middle-age regret.

All the aspects of love that "Night Music" is meant to touch on are indeed covered in Center Stage's voluptuous production, which boasts the formidable presences of Barbara Walsh, Polly Bergen, Stephen Bogardus and Maxwell Caulfield -- and a soignee look worthy of a cover of Vanity Fair. (For the sheer beauty of all the satin and ruffles, costume designer Candice Donnelly should have bouquets delivered to her sewing room every night.)

But it might be youth that is served most rewardingly here, in the infectiously vivacious triangle of Josh Young, as the ardent, lustfully frustrated young Henrik; Julia Osborne, playing the dewy Anne; and Sarah Uriarte Berry, giving added kick to the earthy maid, Petra. This is not to slight their elders, including Walsh, who offers up an appealing if less vulnerable Desir¿e than one is accustomed to. What this production has to say about the romantic illusions of the married, settled and abandoned is a reflection, too, on the young, and how foolish older people seem when, like kids, they let their hormones do the talking.

When in fact Bogardus -- as Desir¿e's old flame, Fredrik -- declares in the final minutes of the show that he now understands that what he really requires in a relationship is coherence, the bland word is conveyed with heart-filling poignancy. As the chaos of life unfolds, it's true: Consistency can become sexy.

With the exception of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," no score of Sondheim's is as buoyant and thoroughgoing an example of musical comedy as "A Little Night Music." Based on Ingmar Bergman's movie "Smiles of a Summer Night," the show is high-end farce, concerning the overlapping infatuations, infidelities, flirtations and long-stewing passions among Swedish swells in the early 20th century.

The songs, composed in waltz tempo, are as superbly crafted and contoured to the demands of the plot as any Sondheim has written. "Now," "Soon" and "Later," a trio of numbers cataloguing the sexual desires and anxieties of Bogardus's Fredrik, his 18-year-old bride (Osborne's Anne) and his son (Young's Henrik) wind in and around one another so astonishingly that by their conclusion, you've been skillfully prepped for all the sexual complications to come.

"Send in the Clowns," Desir¿e's touching ballad of botched opportunity, might be the only melody you know from the show. But listen for the dextrous wit of other numbers, such as the first-act finale, "A Weekend in the Country," for a sense of how much pure storytelling Sondheim is accomplishing in a few pages of warm melodic lines and peerless lyrics.

Lamos is a director with a tastefully composed palette; his gorgeous version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for Shakespeare Theatre Company back in 2003 was a prime example. Here, as a counterpoint to his refined eye, he provides a keen conceit: the comedy of "Night Music" broken down for us and served plain and simple. The turbulent dinner party held for the assorted lovers on the estate of Desir¿e's mother, Bergen's Madame Armfeldt, for instance, is staged without a dinner table; the actors, seated in a row, face the audience and deliver Wheeler's digs and comebacks not to each other but to us.

The jokes seem sharper in this scene when the words are not encumbered by extraneous behavior. It's the only occasion on which this sequence has ever been this funny.

The actors run with the idea. Kate Baldwin's Charlotte, the lonely military wife of Carl-Magnus (Caulfield), the dragoon who has taken Desir¿e as his mistress, is a sillier, broader creature than is observed in most productions. And it works: Her devotion to the equally silly Carl-Magnus, played by Caulfield with hyper-swagger, makes a lot more sense than it does in more dignified portrayals.

Bergen, too, proves swell, one of the best Madame Armfeldts you're likely to come across. When she sings in "Liaisons" about the decline of chivalry in the trysts of the very rich, her reverie is tinged with a longing for a treasured, misplaced keepsake.

The scenes between Bogardus and Walsh sustain the lighthearted tone of the production, even if the bond here between their Fredrik and Desir¿e might not always warm to quite the temperature the musical demands. Here and there during the evening, too, someone might rough up a musical note or two. Even so, Lamos's frolicsome canvas spreads the love in mirthful ways.

A Little Night Music, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by Hugh Wheeler. Directed by Mark Lamos. Set, Riccardo Hernandez; lighting, Robert Wierzel; sound, Scott Stauffer; music direction, Wayne Barker; choreography, Chase Brock; fight director, J. Allen Suddeth. With Mattie Hawkinson, Jonathan C. Kaplan, Whit Baldwin. About 2 1/2 hours. Through April 13 at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., Baltimore. Call 410-332-0033 or visit http://www.centerstage.org.