A Little Night Music was presented through special arrangement with Musical Theatre International (MTI). All authorized performance materials were also supplied by MTI. www.MTIShows.com

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The performers in this production are students in the Department of Musical Theatre. The designers for this production are students, faculty, and/or guests of SMTD. Scenery, costumes, properties, sound, and lighting were realized by the students and staff of University Productions, the producing unit of the SMTD. Thank you for supporting our educational mission.

The staff of University Productions who knew and worked with Ray Galasso from 2018 to 2022 would like, with deep sadness,  to dedicate their work on this production to the memory of their friend and former student.

In Appreciation

We wish Nancy Uffner, clinical associate professor of stage management in the Department of Theatre & Drama, a happy retirement after 29 years of outstanding service to SMTD. After starting out as the production stage manager of University Productions and lecturer in the department, Nancy built the stage management program to the point where she shifted over from staff to become a full-time professor, a rare recognition in academia.

Her program has earned a national reputation, with our unique organizational structure that enables her students to develop expertise in dance, musical theatre, theatre, and opera. Professional arts- and corporate-event organizations around the country are filled with “Nancy’s” stage managers. Her efforts were honored this March by the United States Institute of Theatre Technology when she won the Distinguished Achievement Award in Education.

Most importantly for audiences, Nancy has been the “hidden hand” in refining the ten productions produced each season by University Productions. She has spent thousands of hours in technical rehearsals mentoring her stage-management students, and while doing so, she has shaped and refined productions to make sure that the actor cuing is tight, the scene shifts are quick, and order is maintained backstage. She knows how to nudge everyone along to artistic excellence when rehearsal time on stage is reaching its strictly mandated end. A “no” from Nancy is a fearsome word, although I am perhaps the only person who received them regularly. I shall deeply miss her valued colleagueship, good sense, and devotion to the arts. Now time for Nancy to Watch Her Garden Grow.

—Jeffrey Kuras, Executive Director, University Productions

For more than 50 years, Stephen Sondheim (Music and Lyrics) set an unsurpassed standard of brilliance and artistic integrity in the musical theatre. His accolades included an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards (more than any other composer), including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, multiple Drama Desk awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. Sondheim studied at George School, Pennsylvania (1942 to 1946) and at Williams College, Massachusetts (1946 to 1950), where he was a music major. Mr. Sondheim was responsible for dozens of the most important works in modern musical theatre canon, including Follies, Company, Into the Woods, and A Little Night Music. In February 2007, he was a recipient of the 49th Grammy Awards Trustees Award, an award recognizing outstanding contributions to the industry in a non-performing category. He had been patron to the Stephen Sondheim Society since its foundation in 1993. Mr. Sondheim was also on the Council of the Dramatists Guild – the national association of playwrights, composers and lyricists – having served as its president from 1973 to 1981, in which year he founded Young Playwrights Inc. to develop and promote the work of American playwrights aged 18 years and younger. In June 2008, Mr. Sondheim received the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. In total, his works have accumulated more than sixty individual and collaborative Tony Awards. Stephen died suddenly on the morning of November 26, 2021, at the age of 91 at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He will be remembered as the most influential and inspiring musical theatre creator of his generation, whose legacy will resonate long into the 21st century.

—Excerpted from the Stephen Sondheim Society

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Hugh Wheeler (Book) was a novelist, playwright, and screen writer. He wrote more than thirty mystery novels under the pseudonyms Q. Patrick and Patrick Quentin, and four of his novels were transformed into films: Black Widow, Man in the Net, The Green-Eyed Monster, and The Man with Two Wives. For films he wrote the screenplays for Travels with My Aunt, Something for Everyone, A Little Night Music, and Nijinsky. His plays include Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), Look: We’ve Come Through (1961), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1966, adapted from the Shirley Jackson novel). He co-authored with Joseph Stein the book for a new production of the 1919 musical Irene (1973), wrote the books for A Little Night Music (1973), a new production of Candide (1973), Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979, based on a version of the play by Christopher Bond), and Meet Me in St. Louis (adapted from the 1949 MGM musical), contributed additional material for the musical Pacific Overtures (1976), and wrote a new adaptation of the Kurt Weill opera Silverlake, which was directed by Harold Prince at the New York Opera. He received Tony and Drama Desk Awards for A Little Night Music, Candide, and Sweeney Todd. Prior to his death in 1987, Mr. Wheeler was working on two new musicals, Bodo and Fu Manchu, and a new adaptation of The Merry Widow.

—Excerpted from writerstheatre.org

“Isn’t it rich?”

Welcome to our production of Stephen Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler’s enchanting hit musical, A Little Night Music.

The original 1973 production was directed by the legendary Hal Prince, who often referred to this musical as “whipped cream with knives.” His analogy immediately conjured this picture of a multi-layered strawberry shortcake (a personal favorite) covered in copious amounts of airy whipped cream. Prince perfectly captures the rich sweetness of the score and nimbleness of Wheeler’s hilarious musical comedy libretto (and some of Sondheim’s most clever lyrics) while simultaneously addressing the devastating hurt and heartbreak that our characters experience as they navigate love, desire, marriage, infidelity, parenting, regret, mortality, and societal expectations based on class and gender. At first glance, this show might look like a frothy and light dessert set in Sweden at the turn of the 20th century, but there is a dense and rich cake of universal truths and human complexities lying just below that top layer, waiting to be devoured. It is in this duality of “whipped cream” and “knives” that lives the genius and enduring resilience of this show, which has made it a popular title for theatres and opera companies all over the world since 1973.

When it came time to put up our version of A Little Night Music for the Power Center, I realized we had to get in the kitchen and make our own strawberry shortcake, metaphorically speaking. I had everyone put on their creative chef’s hat and get their hands dirty in the test kitchen of the creative process.

It was my job as a director to lead this company of students in the exploration of what makes this cake so delicious in the rehearsal process. We tasted it. We took it apart. We analyzed each ingredient and even experimented with substitutes and additions to the original recipe to make our cake unique. “Should we use fresh strawberries, or frozen ones? Maybe we substitute raspberries for strawberries.” Along the way, we learned from each other. We challenged each other. We gave each other encouragement and inspiration, and we all became better chefs in the process.

Tonight, we have all come together – actors, designers, creatives, technicians, stage managers, crew members, musicians, house staff – to show you what we’ve made, and we hope our cake is a feast for the senses that will leave your heart hungry for more.

“Isn’t it rich?”

Yes, it is.

Bon appetit. Enjoy the show.

~Telly Leung, director

Most musicals orbit around pairs, a first (and sometimes a second) couple. A Little Night Music, however, is built narratively and musically out of triangles. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler adapted Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film, Smiles of a Summer’s Night, into a score composed almost entirely in a waltz-like ¾ time, intensifying the cyclical nature, hesitancy, and dance of the love triangles depicted. The story is set in early 1900 Sweden, where a midnight sun is visible, continuing the motifs of threes, the amount of smiles of an unsetting sun, in dialogue, subtext, and metaphor.

Perhaps even more so in 2024 than it did in 1973, like “Send in the Clowns,” A Little Night Music asks more questions than gives answers. Where can autonomy be found within the confines of a rigid patriarchal society? Can class and identity power dynamics be overcome within relationships? Who do we love and when should we? And perhaps most of all, what stories do we choose to retell and restage? Even after 51 years, the themes of love, time, and regret remain poignant. Sondheim’s haunting score remains enchanting, and despite the wrinkles of age, who could resist remembering this show fondly?

—Ty Amsterdam, Production Dramaturg

By understanding Swedish history better, and taking some inspiration from the film, I could see how the women in this musical reflect real-world truths and aren’t only products of Sondheim and Wheeler’s imaginations. There is empowerment in narratives of women navigating the strictures and structures of their time and place. The women characters go through the process of separating their own sense of love and desire from what others expect them to feel and find freedoms somewhat unique to Swedish society’s upper class.

In addition, queer film theorist Daniel Humphrey argues that Bergman’s progressive cinematic techniques result in a heightened polarization between the masculine and feminine tropes of the characters. I think this can be compared to similar devices the authors of the musical use to tell the story. Even within the narrow framing of a 20th-century sex comedy that doesn’t pass the Bechdel test or explicitly move beyond the subject of heterosexual relationships, there are notable moments where queer and feminist perspectives, philosophical exploration, and questioning of societal expectations on heteronormativity come up, like Petra and Anne’s relationship and discussions about sexuality. In Smiles as in A Little Night Music, it is the female-identifying characters who drive the action of the plot, overcome obstacles, and make the big decisions (Anne is the one who decides to marry Fredrik, for example), while the men are the ones preoccupied with silly trifles.

—Sari Bovitz, Research Dramaturg

The inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s film provided a rich narrative to research – the dynamics of marriage in turn-of-the-century Sweden, the tactical ways women characters resisted the norms of the time, and the significant deviations Wheeler and Sondheim made from the plot and tone of the film. After a first review of what he had composed, Sondheim felt that the songs “were so dark – because I was really writing to Ingmar Bergman rather than to Hugh Wheeler – that we could see it going right off the track,” and “threw out practically all the songs.” The relatively few songs that remain were a direct outgrowth of the film and are all in Act I. But the film’s inspiring story endured.

The most significant deviation, which adds to what Sari discusses, was changing the four-year-old Fredrik (the assumed child of Fredrik and Desirée) into the teenage Fredrika. “The metamorphosis from Fredrik to Fredrika adds a third female link to the generational chain of Madame Armfeldt and Desirée, and her greater age now brings her to the verge of womanhood” (Block 263). Some argue the female characters in A Little Night Music are imprisoned by the whims of the men and that the piece espouses outdated ideologies. I believe, with this alteration, that Sondheim, Wheeler, and director Hal Prince deliberately created more distinct yet collectively connected female voices to call attention to knowledge that could be passed down and to emphasize how wit, experience, and savvy could work within existing oppressive frameworks to claim more freedom, echoing the liberation movement of the early seventies when the musical premiered.

—Karin Waidley, SMTD Resident Dramaturg

1 “From Screen to Stage:  A Little Night Music and Passion,” by Geoffrey Block.

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