Nick Sephton’s Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm and Jason Weightman’s Fredrik Egerman duelling and duetting in Wharfemede Productions’ A Little Night Music. All pictures: Dan Crawfurd-Porter
“LET’S make romance emotionally devastating and funny,” Stephen Sondheim once said, and the New York lyricist and composer was never more playful than in his 1973 musical A Little Night Music.
Here it forms North Yorkshire company Wharfemede Productions’ third show since being formed by Helen “Bells” Spencer and Nick Sephton in autumn 2024.
“Few writers capture the glorious mess of love quite like Sondheim,” posits director Spencer in her programme director’s note, describing Sondheim’s savvy 1902 Swedish sexual shenanigans as elegant and biting, romantic and relentless, funny and quietly heartbreaking, often all at once, in its rumble-tumble of desire, regret, hope and desperate quest for happiness
James Pegg’s Henrik Egerman: As gloomy as his cello playing in A Little Night Music
Her production, eloquent, waspish of wit, balanced between light and weighty, captures all those qualities most fruitfully and fruitily. Precise in style and movement, her direction places equal emphasis on Hugh Wheler’s fizzing dialogue and Sondheim’s confessional, candid songs that call on quintet, trio, duet and solo performance in equal measure, steered with elan by musical director and Sondheim expect James Robert Ball, in charge of his eight-piece band (split between keys, strings and reeds).
Rooted in Ingmar Bergman’s film 1955 film Smiles Of A Summer Night, whose story of several couples’ interlinked romantic lives it mirrors so smartly, Sondheim’s ever-perceptive depiction of love being “rarely simple, frequently ill timed and deeply human” – to quote Spencer once more – is played out by the juiciest of casts, assembling the cream of York and Leeds stage talent (several having appeared alongside Spencer in Les Miserables at Leeds Grand Theatre last year).
They range from Maggie Smales, Theatre@41 trustee and esteemed York actress and director, as wheelchair-bound grande dame Madame Armfeldt, with her glut of putdowns in the curmudgeonly old-stick manner of her fellow Maggie, Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, to Libby Greenhill, A-level student in humanities and creative subjects, who impressed in Pick Me Up Theatre’s Fun Home last September and now plays granddaughter Fridrika with emotional frankness.
Maggie Smales’s grande dame, Madame Armfeldt
Libby Greenhill as Fredrika Armfeldt and director Helen “Bells” Spencer as her mother, Desiree Armfeldt, in A Little Night Music
Crucial to Spencer’s directorial impact is the prominence of the Liebeslieder Singers, alias The Quintet, omnipresent in white dresses and cream suits as they greet you at the top of the stairs, sell programmes, open Act One with the overlapping la-la-las of Night Waltz, then become a cross between a Greek chorus and Shakespeare’s mischief-making Puck, moving the principals into place as if in a dream or a pictorial tableau at the start of various scenes.
Under Rachel Merry’s slick choreography, they slip seamlessly between foreground and background as Mrs Nordstrom (Emma Burke), Mrs Anderson (Hannah Thomson), Mrs Segstrom (Merry herself), Mr Erlansson (Matthew Oglesby) and Mr Lindquist (Richard Pascoe), their harmony singing delighting in Remember? and the Act Two-opening The Sun Won’t Set, as well as when accompanying the principals in the plot-thickening and summarising A Weekend In The Country.
The sophisticated but Tabasco-saucy Scandi scandals of A Little Night Music are led by Spencer’s Desiree Armfeldt, the darling of the Swedish stage, bored by the chore of touring the same old plays but seeking satisfaction from married men, Nick Sephton’s pompous, blustering, time-keeping dragoon buffoon, Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm, forever up for a pistol duel, and middle-aged lawyer Fredrik Egerman (Jason Weightman), yet to consummate his marriage to 18-year-old, hair-obsessed Anne (Alexandra Mather) after 11 months but still desirous of old flame Desiree’s ample, bewitching charms.
Mind the age gap: Alexandra Mather’s 18-year-old Anne Egerman and Jason Weightman’s Fredrik Egerman, her husband, in A Little Night Music
Spencer’s programme note talks of A Little Night Music asking its performers to “live fully inside both comedy and pain”, a state crystalised in James Pegg’s Henrik Egerman, Fredrik’s troubled son, who is taking holy orders but is wholly smitten by his stepmother, Mather’s Anne, who chides his earnest outbursts as comical, the more he vexates.
Pegg’s outstanding, devastatingly honest performance recalls Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev, the suicidal student in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, and let’s hope the York debut of this Leeds actor and higher education professional service leader will lead to further roles here.
Katie Brier catches the eye in the rumbustiously fetching ‘downstairs” role of Petra, whether introducing Henrik to the birds and bees or romping with fellow servant Frid (Chris Gibson).
Swedish actress Sanna Jeppsson’s Countess Charlotte Malcolm
As Desiree’s weekend invitation to her grand and glamorous country estate leads to much web-tangling amid partner swaps, new pairings, sudden seductions and second chances, Swedish-born Sanna Jeppsson comes to the fore as the dunderheaded Count’s exasperated wife, Countess Charlotte, making every ice-cold comic interjection count on renewed home turf.
Sondheim’s romping costume drama is filled with barbed wit, caustic bite and a delicious sense of Scandinavian desperation, topped off by sublime singing, from Weightman, Pegg and Mather’s complex Now/Later/Sooner to Weightman’s Fredrik in his insensitive You Must Meet My Wife duet with Spencer’s Desiree; Jeppsson and Mather’s jilted Every Day A Little Death to the sparring of Weightman and Sephton’s It Would Have Been Wonderful.
Brier maximises her moment in the spotlight in The Miller’s Son; Spencer tops everything with Send In The Clowns, all the more moving for tapping deep into Desiree’s desolation.
Make sure to enjoy Sondheim’s weekend in the country this week in Wharfemede’s combustible combination of courage, comedy, co-ordinated chaos and commitment.
Wharfemede Productions, A Little Night Music, Theatre@41, Monkgate, York, 7.30pm tonight, tomorrow and Friday; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Rachel Merry’s Mrs Segstrom, left, Emma Burke’s Mrs Nordstrom, Hanna Thomson’s Mrs Anderssen and fellow member of The Quintet Matthew Oglesby’s Mr Erlansson in A Little Night Music