Adept Ensemble Creates ‘Night Music’

A midlife crisis is rather an unsettling thing--but a hilarious one nonetheless when it befalls the reunited ex-lovers at the heart of Interact Theatre Company’s spirited revival of “A Little Night Music.”

Stephen Sondheim’s luminous songs and Hugh Wheeler’s book are rarely graced with the caliber of talent assembled under John Rubinstein’s ambitious staging of this notoriously difficult piece, a musical adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman film comedy “Smiles of a Summer Night.”

“Night Music” is a work that demands sophistication--not in the socially elitist sense, but in terms of its emotional complexity. Appreciating the show’s biting truths about romantic and sexual foibles requires the kind of maturity that comes only with life experience.

Happily, that worldliness permeates the large Interact ensemble, which proves impressively adept with the layered subtleties of the songs (all waltzes, the form mirroring the romantic theme). Particularly successful are the most intricate numbers--”Now, Later, Soon” and “A Weekend in the Country”--which employ Sondheim’s dizzying technique of multiple characters simultaneously singing different but thematically and metrically overlapping lyrics.

Rubinstein’s compelling stage presence is a major asset in the lead role of Fredrik, the middle-aged lawyer who’s married 18-year-old Anne (picture-perfect Linnea Dakin) in foolish pursuit of his lost youth. When Anne’s stubbornly unrelinquished virginity drives him to seek out his old flame, touring stage actress Desiree (Marilyn McIntyre), their reunion aches with bittersweet adult understanding. A supreme comic delight is the strutting peacocks duet between Fredrik and Desiree’s conceited military paramour (Matthew Ashford, in a superb turn).

Nevertheless, as the show’s director, star and musical director, Rubinstein has spread himself very thin here. Some opportunities for Fredrik to register the life lessons he’s dealt along the way could have been better realized under a separate director’s hand.

In a handsome production, despite obvious budget limitations, the staging suffers from a few odd choices--most notably, the use of a synthesizer for a score set in turn-of-the-20th century Sweden.

McIntyre delights in the breezy panache with which she spins her stratagems and juggles her lovers, but there are also unseized openings for her to register pangs that show the chinks in Desiree’s armor. At times she struggles needlessly to hit notes outside her range (“Send in the Clowns” can safely be partially talked through)--a compulsion that seems to run in the family, as it also hampers Annie Abbott’s wistful rendition of Desiree’s mother’s scandalous reminiscences. Both these performers score bigger points as actors than as singers--they should play to their strengths.

Fine supporting performances in both capacities include Leslie Hicks as the soldier’s poignantly neglected wife, Chris D. Thomas as Fredrik’s spiritually tormented son and Jane Lanier as the uninhibited maid who supplies a welcome counterpoint to the others’ sexual hypocrisies.

* “A Little Night Music,” Interact Theatre Company, 5215 Bakman Ave., North Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends July 1. $25. (818) 773-7862. Running time: 3 hours, 5 minutes.