Performances #5 and #6 of "A Little Night Music" at The Players Guild of Dearborn

The second weekend Saturday and Sunday performances Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the Players Guild of Dearborn went well. The show plays to mixed audience reaction. Some people love the show. Others don't like it at all.

It's Sondheim. The show is "wordy" and Sondheim likes to display his vocabulary. Strategems, imbecilities, ravishment, imperious, broaching, restive, penchant, De Sade, trenchant, Stendhal, De Maupassant, Brontes, blander, dray horse, ameliorate, dragoon, my accustomed leisure, one thousand whims, so lovable in repentance, her reticence, her apprehension, retroactive infidelity, hip-bath, fire-opal pendants, amiable hock, a tiny Titian, false chiffonier, duchy, testamentary, sacred to domesticity ... and that's just Act I.

Funny stuff. Madame Armfeldt has a line in which she tells her granddaughter why Scandinavians are insane. She says, "It's the latitude. A winter when the sun never rises, a summer when the sun never sets, are more than enough to addle the brain of any man." During the Saturday show, our Madame Armfeldt (Diana Reynolds) drew a temporary blank and the line came out like this, "It's the latitude. A winter when the sun never sets, a summer when the sun never rises or is it the other way around? It really doesn't matter, it's enough to addle the brains of any man." As the Madame Armfeldt character is supposed to be a bit forgetful in her age, I told Diana that I thought her line was better than Sondheim's.

The cast photo was taken after the show. I'll post it here when I get a copy of one of the takes.

Six more chances to get it right.

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