A Little Night Music Study Guide

Sacramento Theatre Company Study Guide The A Little Night Music Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim Book by Hugh Wheeler Study Guide Materials Compiled by Anna Miles 1 Sacramento Theatre Company Mission Statement The Sacramento Theatre Company (STC) strives to be the leader in integrating professional theatre with theatre arts education. STC produces engaging professional theatre, provides exceptional theatre training, and uses theatre as a tool for educational engagement. Our History The theatre was originally formed as the Sacramento Civic Repertory Theatre in 1942, an ad hoc troupe formed to entertain locally-stationed troops during World War II. On October 18, 1949, the Sacramento Civic Repertory Theatre acquired a space of its own with the opening of the Eaglet Theatre, named in honor of the Eagle, a Gold Rush-era theatre built largely of canvas that had stood on the city’s riverfront in the 1850s. The Eaglet Theatre eventually became the Main Stage of the not- for-profit Sacramento Theatre Company, which evolved from a community theatre to professional theatre company in the 1980s. Now producing shows in three performance spaces, it is the oldest theatre company in Sacramento. After five decades of use, the Main Stage was renovated as part of the H Street Theatre Complex Project. Features now include an expanded and modernized lobby and a Cabaret Stage for special performances. The facility also added expanded dressing rooms, laundry capabilities, and other equipment allowing the transformation of these performance spaces, used nine months of the year by STC, into backstage and administration places for three months each summer to be used by California Musical Theatre for Music Circus. Sacramento Theatre Company can accommodate 292 patrons in the proscenium-style auditorium of its Main Stage, while the Pollock Stage offers a more intimate experience with only 87 seats in a black box-style theatre. Both provide good acoustics and sight-lines. This professional, Equity theatre presents seven professional productions per season with a reputation for excellent stage adaptations of classic literature. Three annual productions in the Cabaret Stage, which seats 100, round out the experience with high-quality Broadway musical revues. The Young Professionals Conservatory, a training program for young theatre artists, was founded in 2003. The program, as well as the entire STC School of the Arts, is directed by Michele Hillen-Noufer. For further information about the Sacramento Theatre Company please visit us online: http://www.sactheatre.org 2 A Little Night Music Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Book by Hugh Wheeler Sacramento Theatre Company Production Study Guide Contents: Information on the Play About Stephen Sondheim* 4 About Hugh Wheeler 6 Synopsis 7 Characters 9 Scholarly Articles on the Play Editor's Notes: A Little Night Music 10 An Intro to Meta-Theatricality 11 The Role of Farce in A Little Night Music 12 Moliere's Obsession* 14 Interactive Materials Study Guide Questions: Engage With the Play 15 California State Standards 17 Theatre Etiquette 22 Additional Resources 23 *published with permission from the Utah Shakespeare Festival (bard.org) Study Guide Materials Compiled by Anna Miles 3 About Stephen Sondheim* (music and lyrics, A Little Night Music) Stephen Sondheim began his Broadway career as a lyricist. He provided words for Leonard Bernstein’s music in West Side Story and for Jule Styne’s Gypsy. His first Broadway music was written for a straight play, Arthur Laurent’s Invitation to a March in 1960. His first complete Broadway score was for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1962. Of course, he wrote the lyrics too, as he was to do throughout his career, joining the somewhat rarefied company of the theatre’s twentieth century composer/lyricists: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Noel Coward, and Frank Loesser. His plays’ subject matter has ranged from fairy tales to discreet Victorian cannibalism; his settings have roamed from Japan and Sweden to Paris and London to New York and Hollywood. Along the way, he has collected most of the awards that the theatre has to offer, including five Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize shared with James Lapine. Some of his most popular shows have been Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along(1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1986), and Assassins (1990). He also composed the film scores for Stavisky (1974) and Reds (1981), wrote songs for the motion pictures The Seven Percent Solution (1976) and Dick Tracy (1990), and co-authored the film The Last of Sheila (1973). 4 An excerpt from "The Playwrights: Into the Woods" by Don Leavitt for the Utah Shakespeare Festival* Sondheim’s career was a pursuit that began at the young age of eleven. Born in New York in 1930, Sondheim was the only child of a successful dress maker and his designer wife. His father left the family when Sondheim was ten, and his mother moved them to Pennsylvania, where he became good friends with the son of Oscar Hammerstein. Looking back, Sondheim has said that Hammerstein became a mentor and surrogate father; if Hammerstein had been a geologist, “I probably would have been a geologist,” Sondheim said (Mick Brown, “Still Cutting It at 80: Stephen Sondheim Interview [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/8022755/Still-cutting-it-at-80- Stephen-Sondheim-interview.html]). Sondheim wrote his first play at fifteen, a musical about life at a Quaker boarding school. He studied theatre at Williams College in Massachusetts and went on to study composition with composer Milton Babbitt. While working briefly as a television scriptwriter, he composed the musical Saturday Night, which was not produced but did attract the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who hired Sondheim to write the lyrics for West Side Story in 1957; he wrote the lyrics for Gypsy (1959) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) before suffering his first major failure with Anyone Can Whistle (1964). In 1970, Sondheim wrote Company, and has said it was the first musical in which he “began to hear my own voice loud and clear” (Brown). Though he has not always been a critical favorite, Sondheim has nevertheless won more awards for theatre than most people know even exist. His catalog of awards includes Grammies, Tonys and Obies; Drama Desk awards and several Laurence Olivier awards. Telegraph reporter Mick Brown writes, “He is, by universal acknowledgement, the man who revolutionised American musical theatre, and the last survivor of a form that is all but extinct, swept away in the deluge of ‘jukebox musicals’, overblown crowd pleasers and ‘theme-park’ spectacles that now dominate the Broadway stage” (Brown). Sondheim appreciates the sentiment but recognizes that his time may have passed. He has produced only one new play in the last nineteen years, and at age eighty-three, wonders if there is a place for him in modern theater. In the Telegraph interview, Sondheim says, “I don’t know that there is an audience now for the kind of shows I would want to write. The fact is if I had something I really wanted to write, I would write it. But I don’t. I don’t have to prove anything to myself. I don’t have to prove anything to the world. I’m venerable now.” *published with permission from the Utah Shakespeare Festival (bard.org) 5 About Hugh Wheeler (book, A Little Night Music) Hugh Wheeler, born in 1912, was a British writer of novels, screenplays, librettos, and poetry. In 1934, Wheeler moved to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1942. Wheeler remained in the US until his death on July 26, 1987. Wheeler wrote many mystery novels and short stories under the pen names Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge, and in 1963 he was given an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his collection titled The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow, published two years prior. A Little Night Music was his first collaboration with Stephen Sondheim in 1973, but they worked together again to write Sweeney Todd in 1979. Wheeler won Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards for both books, as well as for the book of the 1974 musical Candide. Wheeler is also considered a co-writer of the screenplay for Cabaret, though he is only credited on the film as a "research consultant." 6 Synopsis: A Little Night Music In Sweden, sometime during the turn of the century: the Quintet slowly emerges, where they will take their place as a musical chorus, their voices weaving in and out of the story throughout both acts. Their vocal overture gives way to Madame Armfeldt, pushed in her wheelchair by her servant Frid and sitting with her granddaughter, Fredrika, as she teaches the young girl how to watch for the night to "smile." The night smiles three times, Madame Armfeldt tells Fredrika: "The first...at the young, who know nothing. The second, at the fools who know too little..and the third at the old who know too much." We are transported to the grand room of the Egerman estate, where we meet Fredrik, a middle-aged lawyer, Anne, his 18-year-old wife, Henrik, Fredrik's 20-year-old son from a previous marriage, and Petra, the Egerman's feisty young maid. Though Anne has been married to Fredrik for 11 months, the marriage still has not been consummated, as Anne is terrified to do so. Meanwhile, on a small-town tour, Desiree Armfeldt (famous actress and Fredrika's mother) arrives to perform near Fredrik and Anne's home.

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