It's an evening in the company of Sondheim where lyrics are luscious and there's a waltz in the air. ACT has mounted a lilting rendering of A Little Night Music, and even amid some miscues, the pleasures of Sondheim's score and Hugh Wheeler's book come clearly into focus.
The 1973 musical was definitely a stylistic change of pace for Sondheim and his directorial collaborator Harold Prince, whose previous shows were the urbane Company and the nostalgically brittle Follies. Those shows were both contemporary pieces set in Manhattan, and while A Little Night Music takes us back to Sweden of the early 1900s, regrets over roads not taken remain an integral part of the story about webs of old and new love affairs becoming intertwined.
Wheeler took his inspiration from Ingmar Bergman's 1956 movie Smiles of a Summer Night, and the setting gave Sondheim the opportunity to write one of his most tuneful scores and some of his most exquisite lyrics. The challenge remains, however, no matter how advanced sound enhancement has become or how much diction has been practiced, to grasp the full extent of Sondheim's rapid-fire wordplay on certain songs. It's often his own fault, and to reread the lyrics of a song such as "A Weekend in the Country" right after seeing the show can be a revelation even to those who know the musical. (Sondheim fanatics are excluded.)
But most of what needs to come through does come through in director Martin Lamos' production, even if it opens on an ill-advised note. The five lieder singers who start the show with a song about hazy romantic memories first appear in various states of undress as they sexually rub up against each other. It's an inelegantly wrong choice, and their returns to the stage often involve more off-kilter costuming.
And despite a couple of casting miscalculations, mostly we do get to see A Little Night Music in a professional, beguiling, and spacious production on the Geary stage. At the heart of the story is the reawakening passion between a small-town lawyer and a celebrated actress whose career has diminished to tours of smaller cities. The widowed Fredrik Eggerman has married the comely 18-year-old Anne, who is decidedly not wise beyond her years. Fredrik is in a sexual holding pattern as Anne holds onto her virginity nearly a year into their marriage, and when old-flame Desiree Armfeldt comes through town with her theater company, it isn't long before Fredrik and Desiree have consummated their reunion.
But the timing is wrong for a resumption of romance, as "Send in the Clowns" declares with poignant precision. Fredrik has a new wife and a seminarian son who secretly lusts for his new stepmother. Desiree is currently attached to a hotheaded dragoon who himself has a bitterly jealous wife at home. But there is an angel in the wings, Desiree's mother, a crusty former courtesan who now lives the life of an aristocrat. She sets up a weekend at her country home where the romantic rivals are forced into clinking champagne glasses together.
Most of the principal players rise to the needs of the material, with Patrick Cassidy starchily stalwart as Fredrik, Laurie Veldheer finding the right notes for his flighty wife Anne, and Justin Scott Herman comically repressing his sexual urges as Fredrik's son. But while Karen Ziemba, a distinguished Broadway veteran, can sing, act, and dance admirably as Desiree, her presence simply is not one that projects glamor. Brigid O'Brien is brightly straightforward as Desiree's young but wise daughter. Emily Skinner offers a brash portrayal of the dragoon's wife (and Desiree's lover), but Paolo Montalban falls short as the swaggering military man. Marissa McGowan, as a lusty servant, nearly stops the show with her paean to passion in "The Miller's Son."
The production's most welcome moments are whenever Dana Ivey's Madam Armfeldt is on stage. Her arch remonstrations are perfectly delivered, and contain some of Wheeler's wittiest writing. You might even think that Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey is moonlighting in Sweden.
A Little Night Music will run at the Geary Theater through June 21. Tickets are $20-$140. Call (415) 749-2228 or go to act-sf.org.