Word: fredrik
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Aside from Woo, the cast suffers from a lack of guidance from director Kenneth Sanek. The worst victims--and offenders--are Terry Knickerbocker as Fredrik Egerman and Denice Villa Peter as his virginal young wife Anne. Knickerbocker has a rich, mellow speaking voice, but little conception of how to use it. His singing, while pleasant, is much too weak for the role, and his characterization of Egerman, a stuffy middle-aged lawyer, is too low-keyed. Since in any production Egerman is likely to be overshadowed by the glamorous figure of his mistress Desiree, underplaying the role invites disaster. Knickerbocker...
...fair, the nadir of the show. After this, despite the efforts of the orchestra, A Little Night Music has moments of muted sparkle which, sadly, remind us of what a good production might have been like. There are, for example, the performances of Robert Suttton as Henrik Egerman, Fredrik's tormented son, whose passion for the ministry cloaks his passion for his stepmother, and of Caroline Jones, who is genuinely sympathetic as the Countess Charlotte Malcolm. If Charlotte's husband Carl Magnus (Nick Littlefield) is somewhat wooden, his stiffness is forgivable on two counts: first, he is, after...
...Summer's Night, in a class with Sondheim's score. But, in the end, the chief culprit is again Sanek's weak direction, which fails either to paint the frustrations of mismatched love or to create the mood of enchantment which resolves them. In the first case, we hear Fredrik singing while Anne mumbles to herself by her dressing table; in the second, a misplaced candelabra obscures faces confronting one another over Madame Armfeldt's dining table. Only the magical twinkling of the harp in the second scene finally distinguishes between...
...POINT, near the end, Fredrik tells Desiree that he should never have come to her mother's countryside retreat "to flirt with rescue" when he had no intention of being saved. Whatever its intentions, this production's own flirtation with rescue ends up less successful than stuffy old Fredrik's. On second thought, even the summer night might not have been kind...
During the last of many curtain calls last weekend, I watched Sam Levine bend down to kiss Eva Le Gallienne's hand. As he did, she leaned forward and lightly kissed his forehead--a gesture which seemed inadvertently to sum up all the grace and charm of Burry Fredrik and Sally Sear's production of The Royal Family. At the bottom of the first page of the Playbill it says, "The Kennedy Center--Xerox Corporation American Bicentennial Production." I still don't know what that means, but if it means that we have 1976 to thank for bringing this show...