Chocolate Factory Revives Night Music for Xmas???

The Menier Chocolate Factory’s now-traditional Christmas revival of a Broadway musical classic is tipped to be Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. The Chocolate Factory’s biggest hit to date was its revival of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George which, after spending Christmas 2005 at the tiny Southwark venue, transferred to the West End, won five Oliviers and, this February, opened at Broadway’s Studio 54.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 Swedish film and written largely in waltz time, A Little Night Music concerns the tangled romantic lives of several couples in Sweden at the turn of the 20th century. The score includes the Grammy Award-winning ballad “Send in the Clowns”.

A Little Night Music premiered on Broadway in 1973, ahead of its 1975 West End premiere at the Adelphi Theatre. There have been two major revivals since: at the West End’s Piccadilly Theatre in 1989 and at the National Theatre in 1995. The cast for the latter included Patricia Hodge, Sian Phillips, Joanna Riding and Judi Dench, who won a Best Actress in a Musical Olivier for her performance.

Trevor Nunn is signed up to direct at the Menier, the first new production since the outing at the National, where Nunn served as artistic director from 1997 to 2003. Coincidentally, if all comes to pass, Nunn could have two Bergman-based pieces running on London stages simultaneously (or within a few months of each other at least). His Coventry production of Scenes from a Marriage, after Bergman’s 1973 film of the same name, is aiming for a West End transfer (See Today’s Other Goss).