Word: waltzed
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Nothing lends the show quite so much strength as Stephen Sondheim's score. It is a beauty, his best yet in an exceedingly distinguished career. The prevailing waltz meter is more suggestive of fin de siècle Vienna than the Scandinavian north, but why carp? In a show almost without choreography, Sondheim's lyrics are nimble-wilted dances. Literate, ironic, playful, enviably clever, altogether professional, Stephen Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons (Gingold), a lament that courtesans...
After the losses of Follies, however, investors were wary, and even Prince had difficulty in raising money for A Little Night Music, an anachronistic, waltz-based show in an age of blaring rock, a civilized comedy of manners in an age of free-form extravaganzas. "They thought either that I was on a downward curve," says Prince, "or that I was into some kind of avantgarde, esoteric theater- and that Night Music would be my undoing...
...this album would be absolutely impossible. The title song and "Jugband Song" show off Bromberg's sense of humor both in performing and writing. Some Irish fiddle tunes and "Sugar in the Gourd" give him a chance to display his guitar and mandolin-playing talents. His "Tennessee Waltz" is as kind to the old standard as any singer's rendition could be, and his version of "Mr. Bojangles"--half-singing, half-storytelling--is the first genuinely moving version of this ballad I've heard since Jerry Jeff Walker's original. There are probably some guitarists who play as well...
...Waltz begins with a singing narration stating that we are about to glimpse Johann Sr., "founder of the house of Strauss." Lyricists Robert Craig Wright and George Forrest make great capital of this rhyme, employing it later when Johann Jr. is toiling over his operetta and the narrator boasts in his brazen tenor: "In 43 days/ Inside this house/ Johann Strauss/ Composed Die Fledermaus...
Junior (Horst Buchholz) is a callow youth whose mother (Yvonne Mitchell) is fiercely ambitious for him. She indignantly accosts her estranged husband (Nigel Patrick) one evening while he is conducting ("Johann, I must talk to you"), and despite his protestations ("What-in the middle of a waltz?") demands he pay more attention to Junior who blanches in the background. When Papa proves uncooperative, Mother arranges her son's debut herself. "How quickly can you get together an orchestra?" she asks Junior, who assembles 15 pieces in a trice and becomes the toast of Vienna almost as fast...