Nunn Night Music Confirms Menier Opening, 21 Nov

As previously tipped (See The Goss, 30 Apr 2008), the Menier Chocolate Factory has at last confirmed that its now-traditional Christmas revival of a Broadway musical classic this year will be the long-rumoured new production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, directed by Trevor Nunn, which will run from 21 November 2008 to 8 March 2009.

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.

Casting and further creative details have not yet been announced for the Menier, though it’s expected that the new production will be designed by David Farley, who won a hat trick of awards for the Chocolate Factory’s biggest hit to date: Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George which, after spending Christmas 2005 at the 150-seat Southwark venue, transferred to the West End, won five Oliviers and transferred for a Broadway run earlier this year.

A Little Night Music will be Trevor Nunn’s first return to the London stage since his critically derided musical adaptation of Gone With the Wind, which premiered in April at the West End’s New London Theatre and closed in June after just 79 performances (See News, 31 May 2008). Earlier in the year, he directed Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, after the Swedish director’s 1973 film of the same name, in Coventry, while his many other acclaimed credits included, most recently, Ian McKellen’s King Lear, The Seagull, Porgy and Bess and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

– by Terri Paddock