Shaw Festival finale: Sondheim in Sweden, farewell to NOTL

Saturday morning, Sept, 13, 2008

What a day yesterday was! It may have started with missing a golf game, but it got better and better.

I said I was excited and trepidatious about "A Little Night Music" -- that was because I love it so. You don't think of musicals when you think of the Shaw, and I didn't know how it would be to see "Night Music" in the super intimate Court House Theatre. On the other hand, it's not a dancing show -- it rewards nuanced acting, and it is right in the company's accustomed period.

So I needn't have worried: the Shaw pretty much nails it. Some of the individual performances aren't world class, but most are very good, and the musical showed itself to be as wonderful as ever. Both good acting and nuance benefit from that intimacy. The staging makes very clever use of the liebeslieder quintet as combination narrators and stage managers, with something of the officious attitude of Puck from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The postcard-sized stage even seemed to expand through the use of stylized trees on rollers, continually reshaping the space.

"Night Music" is actually based on Ingmar Bergman's one movie comedy, "Smiles of a Summer Night," which itself owes a debt to Shakespeare. Much of my love of the musical goes back to the movie, which is so tart-sweet romantic and wry. And Sondheim's score is a triumph of varied three-quarter time rhythms, all based on the waltz and other period dances. What a treat.

We followed that with another, when I and a portion of the group set off to Peller Estates, one of the big vineyards just outside town, for a sumptuous dinner. We didn't take full advantage of the vintages -- after all, there was another play ahead at night -- but we sure enjoyed the food.

Then back to Githa Sowerby's "The Stepmother" (1924), one of the Shaw's rediscoveries, a text staged briefly in London when new and apparently never since, anywhere. It's a dour tale of a governess married for her money and then abused financially and emotionally by her husband, all the while she is standing by her two step-daughters, protecting them against the shortcomings of their father. In other words, this is a very different stepmother from the wicked witches of folklore and "Cinderella."

Written and set, as the Shaw's typically useful and informative program points out, in the melancholy aftermath of World War I, the play is most obviously about the subservience of women to their husbands, from whom they then had very little protection legally and even less emotionally. I can't say it's an undiscovered masterpiece, not when measured against Chekhov or Shaw, but it certainly fit into this season's informal Shaw dramatic seminar on money and gender, marriage and social class.

For me, the day ended at Butler's Sports Bar, the company's other, rougher hangout, outside the town's tourist center, to listen to Nicole Underhay's group, The Done Me Wrongs. It's an eclectic five- or six-piece (depending) country-western-folk-art ensemble, with an artful fiddle providing an extra dimension. A boisterous evening ended with some of the company dancing with happy abandon.

Now, it's early Saturday morning. We'll be getting on our bus at 9:30, stopping at Greaves to pick up the boxes of jams and condiments group members have bought, and heading back to Pittsburgh via the duty free shop at the border, where we'll stock up on other comestibles.

I started today with a very early walk down Queen Street, soft in the early mist, with the only company being trash collectors, occasional early shopkeepers and the workers who perpetually water the elaborate flower beds and hanging flower baskets that make NOTL such an Eden. The one shop that was open early was Taylor's, where I stocked up on a variety of muffins and sweets, including Chelsea buns, empire biscuits and English egg custard tarts -- all of them a pretty fair visual, flavorful and anglophilic representation of NOTL itself.

Those calories will fade in time. But the intellectual images of the plays will continue to stir and bubble. And I'll never get that insidious Sondheim score out of my head, not until another one equally insidious comes along.