A Precious Fancy

"Broadway is rebuilt every time Stephen Sondheim writes a musical," says Producer Alexander Cohen. Such extravagant praise, from a man who has never backed a Sondheim show, is increasingly frequent these days. The reason is obvious. Sondheim has composed the three best Broadway musicals of the 1970s: Company (1970), Follies (1971) and now A Little Night Music (TIME, March 12).

The latest is Sondheim's most brilliant accomplishment to date. That includes the lyrics for such past hits as West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) and the music and lyrics for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). Night Music's success rests on Sondheim's precious fancy, which allowed him to dare to compose the entire musical in ¼ time—or multiples thereof (6/8 and 9/12 are some of the other meters employed). For good measure, in both senses of the word, Sondheim has also thrown in such ancient techniques as canons, fuguettos and Greek chorus. What makes it all work, aside from Producer-Director Harold Prince's stagecraft, is Sondheim's uncanny ability to put a softly dimpled melody at the service of a sharp-chinned lyric. As when the middle-aged widower Fredrik Egerman ponders the seemingly insurmountable virginity of his young second wife:

Now, there are two ways of broaching it: A, the suggestive And B, the direct. Say that I settle on B, to wit, A charmingly Lecherous mood.

A, I could put on my nightshirt or sit Disarmingly, B, in the nude. That might be effective, My body's all right, But not in perspective And not in the light...

The essence of a Sondheim song is its theatrical Tightness for the evening's dramatic tone. In Company, he wrote 13 or 14 songs that dealt mostly with one-to-one relationships—thoroughly appropriate to the show's concern with marriage. In Follies, the songs did not move the play along so much as they suspended moments in time and savored them, following the practice of tunesmiths in the era nostalgically evoked by the show: the 1920s and '30s. Night Music is devoted predominantly to what Sondheim calls the "inner monologue song," in which characters sing of their deepest thoughts, but almost never to each other.

Based on Ingmar Bergman's 1956 sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, imbued with a kind of mocha fantasy more typical of France's Jean Anouilh, Night Music is a masquelike affair, tailor-made to fit Sondheim's flair for depicting confused people experiencing ambivalent thoughts and feelings. Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm flaunts his amours openly in front of his wife, but at the barest hint that she may be following suit, he sputters out:

She wouldn't... Therefore they didn't... So then it wasn't... Not unless it... Would she?

As for the Countess Charlotte, she is found later on sipping tea and discussing her husband's unfathomable hold on her:

I'm before him On my knees And he kisses me. He assumes I'll lose my reason, And I do. Men are stupid, men are vain, Love's disgusting, love's insane, A humiliating business!