[In the following review, Davis praises the New York City Opera's performance of A Little Night Music, yet criticizes Sondheim's music and lyrics as clumsy and unpolished.]

Perhaps one day in the not too distant future, the New York City Opera will feel confident enough to launch its midsummer season with a bold flourish. Long before Christopher Keene took command of the company, over a year ago, conventional wisdom dictated that sweltering urbanites and operagoing tourists would tolerate nothing more exotic than Carmen before Labor Day, and that comfy policy continues. At least the pop-opera repertory chosen from stock for the opening week this year—The Marriage of Figaro, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Madama Butterfly—seemed more thoughtfully considered and carefully prepared than in some summers past.

In this context, the new production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music looked very much like a visitor making a guest appearance, and in a way it was. Not that Sondheim has no business in the opera house—his cerebral operettas were probably always destined to find a more congenial home there than in the commercial theater that spawned them. Besides, whether one responds to these pieces or not, the music is bound to sound more attractive when sung by real voices than by those irritating adenoidal whiners usually heard on Broadway these days. Still, the City Opera edition was so heavily staffed by musical-comedy specialists imported for the occasion that it could hardly be said to represent a typical company effort.

Sondheim enthusiasts are unlikely to complain, especially since the City Opera production has such a smartly polished and sophisticated veneer—worlds removed from most of the company's previous dreary forays into light musicals. Michael Anania's mobile backdrops and quick-change stage furnishings may be modest compared with the ingenious intricacies of Boris Aronson's famed Broadway originals, but they artfully conjure up a Sweden of long ago and the romantic midnight-sun atmosphere that haunts Smiles of a Summer Night, the magical Ingmar’ Bergman film that inspired the show. Scott Ellis's fluid direction is also uncommonly graceful—the cast quite literally seems to waltz through the entire evening, keeping perfect time to the score's perpetual three-four beat.

One could quibble about a performance here and there, the show's central couple in particular: Sally Ann Howes seems rather plain as the worldly Desirée, and George Lee Andrews never finds the tart streak of self-awareness that prevents Fredrik Egerman from degenerating into a total fool. At least Regina Resnik's whiskey contralto and low-key comic delivery almost rescue Madame Armfeldt, the cut-rate variation on Lady Bracknell that Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler created out of Bergman's fascinating sibyl. Maureen Moore successfully suggests the troubled vulnerability behind Countess Charlotte's acid tongue, Susan Terry finds some of the down-to-earth honesty that makes Petra, the maid, such a wonderful character in the film, and the other principals blend in smoothly.

In the end, though, I will never understand how anyone who savors the warmth and wit of the Bergman original, its elegant Mozartean perspectives on class society and human behavior, can possibly respond to the icy brilliance, clickety-clack rhymes, and Erector-set waltz tunes of A Little Night Music. Those who do, though, should be pleased with the City Opera production, which takes the piece at face value and does well by it.