Manatee Players takes on Sondheim’s ‘A Little Night Music’

Rick Kerby loves Stephen Sondheim musicals, and he stages one just about every season for Manatee Players.

It’s taken him a long time to get around to staging “A Little Night Music.”

“I’ve been afraid of it, to tell you the truth,” said Kerby, Manatee Players’ producing artistic director. “It’s a gigantic show. That’s why community theaters so seldom do it. It’s done more often by opera companies, actually.”

“Night Music” is next up for Manatee Players. It opens Thursday in Stone Hall at the Manatee Performing Arts Center.

Those fears aside, Kerby said he’s confident that his company is ready to take on the show’s challenges.

“I think we have the talent to pull it off right now, and we have the designers,” he said. “It just felt right.”

It’s not just the extravagant design demands that make the show so difficult, Kerby said. Sondheim is known for writing challenging music and “A Little Night Music” is one of his most challenging, especially for singers.

“The range of the music goes from the top to the bottom of a singer’s range,” he said. “And it’s very rhythmically complex.”

The music is as far from pop songs as Sondheim gets, but paradoxically it spawned the Sondheim song that became his biggest hit, “Send in the Clowns.”

Besides that song, “Night Music” is perhaps best known for Sondheim’s musical experience of setting every bit of music in 3/4 time, or some variation of it. But audience members who aren’t paying attention to such things might not even notice that. Some of the songs feel as though there in a more-familiar 4/4 time.

“He plays some math tricks,” said Sarah Cassidy, a Manatee Players regular who plays Countess Charlotte Malcolm in this production.

Cassidy said “Night Music” is a show she’s always wanted to do, partly because of the complexity of the music and partly because of the story.

“It’s a soap opera,” she said. “I compare it to ‘Downton Abbey.’ ”

Despite its melodramatic roots, the show (based on the Ingmar Bergman film “Smiles of a Summer Night”) is considered a comedy, though an intellectual one. People with strong vocabularies may pick up on some of the headier jokes that other people might miss, she said.

Even a synopsis of the story quickly becomes complicated, but it involves overlapping love triangles and missed romantic opportunities.

“Night Music” premiered on Broadway in 1973 and won the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical. The book was written by Hugh Wheeler, whose other well-known musical is the 1989 stage version of “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

Despite the daunting challenges of “A Little Night Music” that caused Kerby to delay staging it for so many years, he said he made the right call by picking the 2017-18 season to stage it.

“I’m very happy,” he said. “Very, very happy.”

Details: Oct. 26-Nov. 12, Stone Hall at the Manatee Performing Arts Center, 502 Third Ave. W., Bradenton. 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. $27-$37. 941-748-5875, manateeperformingartscenter.com.

This story was originally published October 25, 2017 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Manatee Players takes on Sondheim’s ‘A Little Night Music’."