An acquaintance of mine mentioned that he recently got an email from someone in the cast of a musical revival he had directed. The show had settled into its run, and the director had moved on to other projects, so he was nonplussed to read what the actor wrote: "Hey, you should come back and see the show. You'd hardly recognize it. Ha-ha, just kidding."
The truth is that the absence of a director can sometimes result in a show deteriorating as the run proceeds. On the other hand, if the talents of the person in question are so ill suited to the material that his or her guidance of the actors can more accurately be described as misguidance, a company can blossom when the director is no longer around to act as overseer. It's not so much "When the cat's away, the mice will play," it's more, When the ill-equipped captain is away, the crew can sometimes rely on their own skills and superior instincts to run the ship better than ever.
I've witnessed this latter scenario play out a few times in my theatergoing experience, but never to such an extent as is the case with the current Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler masterpiece, A Little Night Music. As I'm sure you've heard, the production now stars Bernadette Peters as Desiree Armfeldt and Elaine Stritch as her mother, these honored stage vets having succeeded the estimable Catherine Zeta-Jones and the legendary Angela Lansbury in their roles.
Without a doubt, Stritch and Peters are largely responsible for having revivified this production. Even though both women are somewhat miscast, Stritch much more so than Peters, they bring to Night Music a salutary abundance of talent and energy. But I think the main reason why the show is SO much better now than when it opened is that the continuing performers have gradually thrown off the epically wrong-headed direction they received from Trevor Nunn. (It has been reported that both Peters and Stritch rehearsed with Nunn in private, but my guess is that they either ignored his input or he just let them do what they wanted, realizing they know much more about American musical theater than he does.)
A vast improvement in three of the featured performances is strong evidence that a movement away from Nunn's (mis)direction is the main reason for this show's rebirth. Ramona Mallory's Anne Egerman, initially so fluttery and tic-laden as to suggest someone undergoing electroshock therapy, is now much less of a cartoon and much more a real person. As the maid, Petra, Leigh Ann Larkin is far funnier and sexier than before, and she has dropped the inexplicable Irish accent she had been using for the character. (Did she adopt that weird, distracting accent at Nunn's urging? Who knows. Anyway, it's gone, thank heaven.)
As for Erin Davie in the plum role of Countess Charlotte Malcolm: I had heard and read that, during early previews, Davie was missing nearly all the laughs in the sure-fire dialogue that Hugh Wheeler wrote for this brilliantly observed character. By the time of my first visit to the show, shortly after opening, she was nailing about 75 percent of the laughs. When I returned last week, she missed only one -- "Unhappily, without a time bomb in your Lilly-of-the-Valley bouquet" -- and that wasn't her fault. (The audience failed to respond because Mallory didn't clearly enunciate the lead-in line, "I was a flower girl at your wedding!")
Make no mistake, this Night Music still has some big problems: much of the lighting is sepulchral, the puny orchestra is embarrassingly inadequate for Sondheim's glorious score, and the pacing of the dialogue remains so slow that the show with intermission runs a full three hours, rather than the usual two and a half. But somehow, what once was a generally dispiriting production leavened by a few strong performances has become a very satisfying if still flawed staging of a masterwork.
