It was in the 1990s when Mark Lamos, then the artistic director of Hartford Stage, realized he didn't need to keep his gay profile low and his longtime partner out of his professional social life. Invited to a dinner by a board member who encouraged him to bring along whomever he wished, he thought it best not to take now-husband Jerry Jones. "I got to the dinner, and the other guests were Stephen Sondheim and his boyfriend," Lamos said. "When I got home, I said to Jerry, 'That's the last time I'm keeping you under wraps.'"
That quote is actually from 15 years ago, part of an interview I did with the noted director shortly before Lamos' graphically gay, and to some infamously so, production of Marlowe's Edward II opened at ACT. Now it is Stephen Sondheim who is bringing Lamos back to ACT to direct A Little Night Music, in which characters' passions are entirely of heterosexual alignment. But that doesn't mean Lamos isn't finding ways to give the musical's sexuality a boost.
The musical, for example, features a quintet of lieder singers who serve as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action. Usually played staidly by mature performers, Lamos is taking a different route with the quintet. "I decided to make them very much younger, and to do quite a lot of physical activity between themselves," he said in a recent phone interview. "It's a piece about sex and memory, and in our memories we are always younger. When you look at those wonderful lyrics the quintet sings, it's all about 'Do you remember this?' and 'Do you remember that?' And how shabby it was, because when you're having a secret affair you're doing it in some awful place so nobody finds you. So I wanted to de-romanticize those things, and also have them be sexier and kind of erotic."
Lamos previously directed A Little Night Music at Baltimore's Center Stage in 2008 in a well-received production. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman's 1955 movie Smiles of a Summer Night, the musical opened on Broadway in 1973 with a score by Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler. The setting is Sweden around 1900, and at its center is a rekindling romance between a successful lawyer and a prominent actress who had had an affair together years before. But there are layers of complications, which only start with the lawyer's still virginal new wife and the actress' blustery lover. The show's signature song, "Send in the Clowns," is all about mistimed opportunities.
Carey Perloff, ACT's artistic director, had long had A Little Night Music on her wish list, and invited Lamos to direct a production that would be underwritten by and presented at two other regional theaters. When both those theaters pulled out, Lamos figured the project was dead. "Someone called me and said, 'I see you're doing Night Music,' and I said, 'I don't think so.' And he said, 'Well, your name is on a poster.' So I called Carey and asked, 'What's up?' She said, 'We're doing it! It's just too wonderful to pass up.'"
Despite the lack of financial help from the other theaters, Lamos called the budget "quite generous" and enough to present "a beautiful production with gorgeous costumes and a set that is quite large and does unusual things." The cast features a collection of Broadway veterans, including Patrick Cassidy as lawyer Fredrik Egerman, Karen Ziemba as actress Desiree Armfeldt, Emily Skinner as the wife of Desiree's lover, and Dana Ivey as Desiree's mother, who romantically manipulates all the characters by inviting them to spend a weekend together at her country estate.
Lamos was a young actor appearing on Broadway in the musical Cyrano when he saw the original production of A Little Night Music. "It was such a change of pace for Broadway and for Stephen Sondheim," Lamos said. "It broke open the way people thought of Sondheim, that he could go from those smart, sarcastic, dark pieces like Company and Follies into this pretty heavenly meditation on love and sex and memory and sadness."
But Lamos also remembers having trouble understanding all the lyrics, a critical matter in a Sondheim musical. Improvements in sound enhancement have alleviated some of those concerns, he said, adding that "clarity has been a big issue for us right from the start of rehearsals."
In Finishing the Hat, one of his annotated compendiums of lyrics, Sondheim writes that original director Harold Prince has subsequently spoken dismissively of A Little Night Music. Sondheim writes, "I think Hal's lack of enthusiasm stems from two things: First, the show wasn't daringly different enough, as Company and Follies had been, and second, A Little Night Music was a writer's piece rather than a director's."
That doesn't sound like good news for a director. Lamos laughed. "Oh, I think it is, because it's so literate, and you can't paint with a different set of brushes because the lyrics are so intricate that if the audiences get lost the show starts to seep away, so a lot of it is pointing up the correct focus of the piece." Those lyrics are all set to variations on waltz combinations. "It's very much its own thing, and if you tinker with it too much you run a terrible risk."
Lamos will miss the opening night of A Little Night Music at the Geary Theatre, needing to head back to Connecticut, where he is artistic director of Westport Country Playhouse. When he directed Edward II at ACT in 2000, he had recently left Hartford Stage after 18 years as artistic director. He wanted the freedom of a freelance director who didn't need to worry about how his choices rebounded on him as the theater's leader. "I don't think I could have done a production there as out there as this," he said in 2000 of Hartford Stage and his ACT staging of Edward II .
But he had been wearying of traveling after 14 years as a freelancer, and he also missed time at home with his husband, when a surprise call switched his life to a new track. Paul Newman was scheduled to direct Of Mice and Men at Westport Country Playhouse, where his wife Joanne Woodward was co-artistic director. With Newman ailing, Lamos got a call asking him to be on standby, confidentially, should Newman not be able to proceed. That is what happened, and Lamos began rehearsals two weeks before Newman died.
"The next day, the head of the board asked me if I would be interested in being artistic director. I liked working there, and I had been missing having a dialogue with a constant audience instead of just flying from flower to flower. I was increasingly getting tired of being away from my husband." Together for 35 years now, it's been a long time since Lamos has felt the need to keep Jones "under wraps."
A Little Night Music will run May 20-June 14 at the Geary Theater. Tickets are $20-$170. There will be an OUT with ACT performance and reception on June 3. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.