Isn’t it rich:  Porthouse’s wonderful ‘A Little Night Music’ 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

Of all the music in “A Little Night Music” – Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s melancholy ode to discovering love, reviving love and outliving love – “Send in the Clowns” is the show’s signature number.  And, thanks to numerous cover versions by popular artists, it is its most recognizable.  

Sondheim wrote the song in 1973 specifically for actress Glynis John, who originated and won a Tony for the featured role of Desirée Armfeldt, the worldly Scandinavian seductress who is now a flirtatious middle-aged actress barnstorming across Europe during the turn-of-the-last-century. 

The song is sung in the second act, after Desirée comes to the painful realization that the man she is with means nothing to her and the dream of reuniting with her now-married former lover, Fredrik Egerman, is just a delusion.

Dame Judi Dench starred as Desirée in the musical’s 1995 London revival and, based largely on what Variety called a “brilliant, wrenching” performance of “Send in the Clowns,” won the Olivier award for Best Actress.

With Bernadette Peters in the lead role during the show’s Broadway revival in 2009, The New York Times noted that “Send in the Clowns” was sung “with an emotional transparency and musical delicacy that turns this celebrated song into an occasion of transporting artistry [and] an indelible moment in the history of musical theater.”

Yes, that’s the baggage that comes with this character-defining, show-stopping, highly anticipated musical number in a show that Sondheim fans claim is filled with them.  

In this dazzling Porthouse production, Terri Kent’s Desirée is strangely reserved and her “Send in the Clowns,” though beautifully supported by five string instruments (special kudos to Dan Peters on cello) under Jonathan Swoboda’s superb direction, is neither transportive nor memorable. 

But most else is.

For more of this review, go to:  http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/