Scandinavia on stage in Canada

A Little Night Music Avon Theatre, Stratford

“Never marry a Scandinavian,” advises the aged Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music. Canadian theatre this year has been doing its best to prove her right. We’ve had Ibsen at Soulpepper, Strindberg at Shaw, and at Stratford another Ibsen and Night Music itself, the musical of an Ingmar Bergman movie. Not a happy domestic arrangement in any of them, though the musical at least suggests that, after the final curtain, one might exist.

One hopes so, because Ben Carlson and Yanna McIntosh, the sadder-butwiser couple here, give performances that are terrific individually, and dynamite together. The show is based on Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and sticks remarkably close to it, in story if not in style.

The transforming factor is Stephen Sondheim’s score, a new kind of operetta, dry and sparkling. The Night Waltz that opens and underpins the action is as tantalizingly beautiful a tune as has ever been heard in a musical, a vocal overture that bewitches the ear even before we hear any lyrics. Stratford’s production, like the Shaw’s Sweeney Todd, has a large orchestra to do the score justice, and also some fine voices, especially those of the quintet who wander in and out of the action.

The principal principals are Fredrik Egerman, Swedish lawyer, and Desiree Armfeldt, Swedish actress. They were lovers long ago; now he’s on his second marriage, to a much younger and stillvirgin wife, she’s involved with a vain and f oolish and married dragoon. The musical’s main project is to bring them together: two intelligent people, compromised by previous bad choices and almost trapped by them.

Carlson’s Fredrik excels at snatching victory from the jaws of ridicule; he’s the only actor ever to make me laugh out loud at the wit of his opening song, in which he fantasizes about seducing his untouched bride while undressing for bed, knowing all along that he will settle for falling asleep. McIntosh’s Desiree is an unpretentious diva who radiates humour and common sense. Their first scene together, when he visits her in her lodgings and ends up in her bed (“what are old friends for?”), is a delight. Their second, the one in which she, thinking she’ll never reach him, sings Send In the Clowns, had me in tears: not just the song, though she sings it beautifully, but the feelings, subtly conveyed by both, that have brought them to this impasse.

At the end, when fate and other people have cleared the way for them and surging strings signal the song’s reprise and they fall gratefully into one another’s arms because really there’s nothing else they can do, we laugh and cry all over again.

Carlson shares another delightful duet with Juan Chioran’s preening dragoon, the two of them warily sizing one another up while lamenting their enthrallments to the same woman. Elsewhere Chioran may be too visibly enjoying himself, but the enjoyment is infectious, and he rises with just the right mixture of nobility and absurdity to his one moment of dignity at the end. You can almost believe his wife would want him back, though Cynthia Dale endows her with so much wounded intelligence that you wonder why she’d bother.

Alexis Gordon plays Fredrik’s unawakened wife and Gabriel Antonacci, the gauche seminarian stepson who adores and eventually wins her, leaving his father ironically free.

They both sing gorgeously and act winningly, though Gordon overdoes the bubbling innocence; she doesn’t let her character grow.

Somewhat similarly, Sara Farb as the Egermans’ maid sings The Miller’s Son, her hedonist anthem, excitingly, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Rosemarie Dunsmore gives an efficient account of Desiree’s mother, the rich retired courtesan as commentator, but she isn’t one of nature’s grandes dames, and she can’t make her sub-Wildean epigrams sound funny; the only Madame A’s who have are Angela Lansbury, by being a great actress, and Hermione Gingold, by being Hermione Gingold.

Gary Griffin’s direction is strong on storytelling, both in and between the songs. Debra Hanson’s sets are all right for the vernal second act, and very strange f or t he urban f i rst one, which is dominated by a line of smokestacks. Mostly, though, this is a lovely production of a piece that seems to grow richer with the years.