A Little Night Music, Palace Theatre

Can it really be 40 years since Sondheim’s waltzy, nostalgia-flecked, fancy first intoxicated our senses with its promise of indiscretion and insatiable desire? But that’s the thing, isn’t it – every Sondheim piece feels brand new on re-acquaintance and it’s only as you wonder at the unique tinta each of these shows and marvel afresh at their ingenuity that so much of what we hear to day feels regressive and Sondheim seems to move forward even as he is standing still in time.

With Night Music it’s the quintet of observers – the “Night Chorus” (its cue taken from Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzer) – that first transport us to another time and place where the seductive power of triple-time is voiced with elegance and élan. It is all-pervasive, that lilting, perfumed, music (and in this the genius of Jonathan Tunick – why no credit in the programme? – is key) wafts our foolish and fallible characters through their dances of desire until finally they see the error of their ways. Madame Armfeldt (Anne Reid – mistress of the throw-away put-down) is at the centre of this decadent universe quietly manipulating from the side lines whilst reflecting on what has passed but more importantly what might have been. Amidst all her “Liaisons” could it be that the love of her life slipped through her fingers?

Of course, the other miracle of A Little Night Music is the way that Hugh Wheeler’s book so seamlessly melds with Sondheim’s lyrics. They are so cut from the same cloth that you never feel even so much as a moment of disconnect. But they require verbal dexterity of a very high order and given the pressures of “getting it right” for one performance only this distinguished cast pulled off quite a feat. Of course, stitches were dropped – a couple of dries, one missed sound cue (amazing given the numbers on stage) and the issue of poor put-upon Henrik. It isn’t Fra Fee’s fault that some of his music is frankly unsingable. Sondheim once as good as admitted to me that in retrospect he might have benefited from studying the science of voices more thoroughly.

But let’s hear it for the talented and enterprising Alex Parker who brought this whole thing together and fielded the kind of band (28 pieces) that now seems like a distant memory of musical theatre from days of yore. Miking apart, just hearing real strings in this score was immediately transformative and the Straussian bickering of the woodwinds and trumpets (golly Tunick is a master), to say nothing of the crafty Der Rosenkavalier horn call tucked into the close of the thrilling act one finale “A Weekend in the Country”, kept the ears primed and busy. That one set piece is surely the most brilliant instance of musical storytelling ever devised by the master.

I really think Janie Dee was born to play Desiree (there’s even the little Glynis Johns husk in the voice). It’s her radiance as a stage animal, the way she moves, the way she colours and inflects the text, the thought behind everything. But most of all her theatricality. I much enjoyed Anna O’Byrne’s Anne Egerman, too – very accomplished on more than one level (and my goodness she got her voice around “Soon” with real skill) and on the flipside of that coin there was Laura Pitt-Pulford’s sexily earthy Petra who may have swallowed some text in “The Miller’s Son” but more than compensated with her lustiness.

But for me it was the incomparable duo of Jamie Parker and Joanna Riding as the insufferable Count Malcolm and his acid-tongued wife Charlotte that upped the dynamic of the whole event. Is there no limit to Parker’s vocal and physical transformations? And Riding’s timing – icy and lethal – but capable of such poignancy in “Every Day a Little Death” – whose middle section is as ravishing as any collection of notes Sondheim ever gave us.

I am glad Parker was rewarded with a packed Palace Theatre. Some of us want to celebrate the best of the best in musical theatre. And there’s plenty more where this came from.