Opera North and Leeds Playhouse's production of A Little Night Music returns next month

A co-production between Leeds Playhouse and Opera North, A Little Night Music returns next month. Nick Ahad reports.
Dame Josephine Barstow in A Little Night Music.Dame Josephine Barstow in A Little Night Music.
Dame Josephine Barstow in A Little Night Music.

This sounds completely ridiculous, I know, but earlier this year when watching the Lin-Manuel Miranda directed Tik Tik…Boom! I was a little in awe of seeing Stephen Sondheim on screen.

I know, I know, it sounds weird and yes, I know that it wasn’t actually Sondheim but Bradley Whitford performing an uncanny take on the gargantuan composer, but it just seemed bizarre to see someone whose life and career spanned not just American, but world theatre, being depicted on a screen.

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Perhaps it was because I watched it at home on Netflix that the screen just felt impertinently small to constrain such a colossal figure as Sondheim.

The cast of A Little Night Music.The cast of A Little Night Music.
The cast of A Little Night Music.

There was something of the legend about Sondheim, a name that conjures someone who didn’t just represent theatre, but shaped it through the last century.

Yorkshire audiences will have the opportunity to bask in the genius – a word that gets bandied around and which is entirely appropriate here – of Sondheim when A Little Night Music comes back to the Leeds Playhouse stage next month in a co-production with Opera North.

It is great news that the production is coming to the Playhouse – it’s had a bit of a journey to the stage, to put it euphemistically. Due to be first staged in May 2020, the pandemic put paid to the production. It came back in June of last year, but the truth is, while the production was well received and reviewed, audiences were still nervous about venturing back into theatres.

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Judging by audiences I’ve been in theatres with recently, there is far more confidence about us all coming together once again, which is why I imagine this time around A Little Night Music will get the audience it deserves.

Helen Avora in A Little Night MusicHelen Avora in A Little Night Music
Helen Avora in A Little Night Music

James Brining is at the helm of the production once again which brings together two Leeds institutions to create something greater than the sum of its parts, and given just how great the two parts are individually, that is a mouth-watering prospect.

Speaking of a production to make the mouth water, there are a number of other big draws here alongside the talents of Brining and the Opera North chorus. It is also an opportunity for Yorkshire audiences to see one of the world’s leading singing-actresses, Yorkshire-born Dame Josephine Barstow and a chance to hear sung live one of Sondheim’s most enduring, heartbreaking works of art, Send in the Clowns.

Musical theatre’s To Be or Not To Be, it is a song that requires an actor to make seriously bold choices and the woman who gets the honour of asking ‘Isn’t it rich?’ is Sandra Piques Eddy.

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“Sondheim has given us a gift in the musical expression and in the lyrics of the song. They are shining and heartbreaking, so complex and so intense. I think if I sing the song a hundred times, it’s going to be slightly different each time and will feel different each time,” she says.

Sandra Piques Eddy in Opera North's production Trouble in TahitiSandra Piques Eddy in Opera North's production Trouble in Tahiti
Sandra Piques Eddy in Opera North's production Trouble in Tahiti

“Each time you sing it, you find more colours in the song.”

The American is flying to the UK for rehearsals and the performance, the opportunity to work on Sondheim in this space enough to pull her thousands of miles across the ocean.

She was also with the production when it was finally staged last year and has definitely not had enough of it yet.

“When you’re in rehearsal you see the same scenes over and over again and each time I watch a scene I just think ‘that is so gorgeous’. There’s something very special about presenting this show in the theatre.”

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An unusual piece, A Little Night Music was inspired by a 1955 Ingmar Bergman film, Smiles of a Summer Night. It first arrived on Broadway in 1973, with West End productions soon following and a Hal Prince film in 1977.

It tells the story of Fredrik Egerman, a successful middle-aged lawyer who has recently married a naive 18-year-old Anne. Egerman’s son Henrik has fallen in love with his new stepmother. When the newlyweds visit the theatre, Fredrik is reunited with old flame Desiree Armfeldt, played by Sandra Piques Eddy.

When Desiree asks her mother, Madam Armfeldt, to host a party for the Egermans at her lavish country estate, the characters all set off for a weekend in the country, each with their own hopes, fears and schemes

for love.

With each character having their moment in the spotlight, it is a glorious opportunity for Sondheim to flex his lyrical storytelling muscles.

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There is also a quintet who act as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action and in this production acting as gods of the mortals, agents of the story influencing the action.

“Audiences will adore this production,” says Piques Eddy.

“The story features so many different age groups, but I think audiences can relate to each one of the characters, everyone

has a reason that they are vulnerable.”

And if the prospect of all of this – Send in the Clowns, Dame Josephine, the Opera North chorus and James Brining, artistic director of the Leeds Playhouse at the helm of it all, isn’t enough to whet the appetite, Piques Eddy says there is something even more special waiting for audiences.

“I think the show, very subtly, gives you the meaning of life,” she says.

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“It is there, it’s in there. In act two you start to see the little things that have been planted earlier and you think ‘well that’s it, that’s what it’s all about’.

“It feels light-hearted and gentle and then it suddenly socks you in the gut.

“It really is absolutely glorious.”

A Little Night Music, Leeds Playhouse, July 1 to 16. Tickets leedsplayhouse.org.uk