exciting Bway News - New cast Fro A Little Night Music!

[edjames]

It's official and tickets are on sale now...Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch will join the cast of A Little Night Music on July 13.

 

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/139901-Night-Music-Will-Soar-Longer-Peters-and-Stritch-to-Join-Broadway-Cast

 

ED

[+ sf westcoaster]

Apparently Peters and Stritch have signed-on for a relatively short run. The ticket agency indicates that the cast will change on November 7th.

[JackTwist]

Sign me up for November! Love both of these talented ladies. They should be a great enhancement to this show. Thanks for passing along the good news.

[+ sf westcoaster]

Jack, A point of clarification - Peters and Stritch step into the roles in July. The ticket site says a new cast in November, which I am interpreting to mean that Peters and Strich are only doing it from July to early November.

[NYTomcat]

Still after Landsbury who else could follow, Strich and Peters will be a great replacement. Kudo's to the producers

[skynyc]

Sign me up!

 

I have seen it twice with AL and CZJ...and will certainly see it again with the new ladies.

Very interested to see Stritch's interpretation of Liaisons...and how she'll pull off Mme. Armfeld in a white shirt and black tights.

[Guest alanm]

I have seen it twice with AL and CZJ...and will certainly see it again with the new ladies.

Very interested to see Stritch's interpretation of Liaisons...and how she'll pull off Mme. Armfeld in a white shirt and black tights.

 

Thank to You Tube here's Elaine Stritch's first vocal performance as Madame Armfeld's "Liaisons" as a replacement in "A Little Night Music" on Broadway for Angela Lansbury. She still has some work to do. What do people think? And remember this her first attempt at the song in front of an audience.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yqU11Y1kiQ

[Guest alanm]

Here is Bernadette Peters singing "Send in the Clowns." This audit is also from July 13, the first performance in the Sondheim musical "A Little Night Music" on Broadway for both Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07tfJny2sZs

[skynyc]

Hi Gentlemen...

I've had a crazy summer, but am back. I did have the opportunity to see the new version of Little Night Music last Saturday afternoon. It was a sweltering day here in NY, and I decided to let the Schuberts pay for the air conditioning. Both broadwaybox.com and playbill.com had offers for LNM for $79 and I walked up to the box office with the offer in hand at 7:00 on Friday night. Was given spectacular house seats...7th row center. This was my third time seeing the show, but my first with the new leading ladies.

 

Bernadette Peters was grand. She controls the stage in a very different way than Catherine Zeta-Jones did, and while they are both stars, the difference between Broadway Star and Movie Star were quite different. She got laughs on lines, got laughs with her trademark pouts, and flounces and vocal games. She worked marvelously as Desiree, and while the chemistry with Alexander Hansen hasn't fully developed, you could see that it would. Her interpretation of Send in the Clowns was nuanced and powerful, and shows that even though the song was written for Glynis Johns who wasn't a stellar singer, if you let a "singer" sing it, it works beautifully. With Ms. Peters, it worked beautifully.

 

Elaine Stritch. Hmmm. Be positive here skynyc. She is pretty miscast. It's hard to imagine her as this Desiree's mother. It is also hard to imagine her living the life that the character incessantly boasts about. I have always imagined that Mme. Armfeldt would be more Gigi than Mrs. Warren, and Stritch's portrayal strays more to Lorna in Victor Victoria than Mrs. Warren. She is having a terrible time with her lines...pausing or repeating almost every spoken line. And the pacing of Liaisons has be slowed to allow her to remember it, and now it is about a twelve minute song. The delays in line delivery has added about 15 minutes to the show. I recall it was about 2:45 before, and last week the lights came up at 5:02, thus 3:02.

 

All in all, I am happy to have seen these women do the show...but when I have friends coming in next weekend to see a classic show, we're going to South Pacific.

 

Have a nice summer!

[Guest alanm]

 

Elaine Stritch. Hmmm. Be positive here skynyc. She is pretty miscast. It's hard to imagine her as this Desiree's mother. It is also hard to imagine her living the life that the character incessantly boasts about. I have always imagined that Mme. Armfeldt would be more Gigi than Mrs. Warren, and Stritch's portrayal strays more to Lorna in Victor Victoria than Mrs. Warren. She is having a terrible time with her lines...pausing or repeating almost every spoken line. And the pacing of Liaisons has be slowed to allow her to remember it, and now it is about a twelve minute song. The delays in line delivery has added about 15 minutes to the show. I recall it was about 2:45 before, and last week the lights came up at 5:02, thus 3:02.

 

Did we see the same musical? I saw "A Little Night Music" last Thursday night. I agree with all the wonderful things you wrote about Bernadette Peters. She is superb. But, I thought Elaine Stritch was just as good, better even than Angela Lansbury. Stritch did not mess up any of her lines at the performance I saw.

More important, she brought authority and verve to the character that was really thrilling. It is true that Stritch has been missing line (according to internet posts).

But, on Thursday night, the audience would not let Peters and Stritch leave the stage at curtain calls. I will be very interesting to read what others have to say, since I differ so strongly with skynyc.

[skynyc]

Alanm

I am so glad to hear your comments, because I was so disappointed. I love Stritch, but of course lately have only seen her doing "her". I haven't seen her in a book role since Parthy in Show Boat. And here, I didn't get a sense of of much characterization, or anything. I am guessing she was just tired. On your recommendation, I may go again...perhaps on a Tuesday when she's had a day to rest.

[Guest alanm]

It is certainly true that Elaine Stritch did not have her role down in the first week or two of performances. According to reports on the internet, she has been much, much better lately. Stritch performed two Sondheim songs at the White House (and forgot the word to one of them) on Monday, July 19. So last week must have been particularly stressful for her, and may partly explain the very different performances we saw at the end of the week.

 

I agree that the show is now too long, because Lansbury spoke and sang more quickly than Stritch. For the first time, I wanted someone to cut "The Miller's Son," which is sung just before 11 PM. But, you can not cut that song because of its importance to the story. Please give the musical, and Stritch specifically, another chance. More important, thanks for being so open minded about this

[edjames]

Saw the show last night. It was...BRILLIANT!

 

The Peters/Stritch interpretation of the characters were far superior to Zeta-Jones/Lansbury. It was like watching a totally new show. It had life and fun. The music is still terrific and the remaining intact cast also quite good. The audience screamed and yelled their appreciation for these two Broadway legends. I will be going to see it again! Nuf said!

 

ED

[+ Cash4Trash]

I saw it again last night (Friday, July 30) and it is 300% better than it was. Peters and Stritch are very good but more importantly the "young wife" has grown into the role and is no longer annoying and Hendrik is much improved as well. The entire cast seems to be having a lot more fun.

[edjames]

And the reviewers agree that Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch give the show the puch that it sorely needed.

These reviews will make their limited run a hot ticket.

 

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/send_in_the_substitutes_UyJILYURqUn7QMH2irKjAK

 

http://theater.nytimes.com/pages/theater/index.html

 

ED

[Guest alanm]

Let's hope the good review of "A Little Night Music" are reflected at the box office. The musical opened on Sunday night, so the reviews are not a factor in last week' ticket sales. But, the news is not good. Last week ALNM (at an average of $65.63 per ticket) had the third lowest average ticket price of any show on Broadway. There are two possible explanations: people want to see movie stars (Zeta Jones), rather than Broadway stars (Peters), or, as usual, there is a limited audience for Sondheim -- even for one of his best musical. Even the original cast version of "Gypsy" ran less than two years on Broadway. Would it have run even that long with a lesser star -- someone other than Ethel Merman?

 

 

http://broadwayworld.com/grosses.cfm

[+ Cash4Trash]

Plus there's a 3rd reason for last weeks lower boxoffice numbers - Friday, Saturday and Sunday all had a good

number of seats held for the press so that the new stars could be reviewed. I was there on a pass and the person

who took me kept pointing out all the other press freebies in the house.

[BgMstr4u]

I saw Night Music this week and enjoyed it. I use an only moderately enthusiastic verb because I am not wild about Sondheim's work. To me, his songs seem convoluted, structureless and only occasionally melodic, so he saves the melody-based song (as opposed to his rambling-chromatics songs) for the end, like "Bring In The Clowns".

 

That said, I liked ALNM a lot. Bernadette Peters IS Broadway. (Well, there's Lupone in Gypsy, who is ALSO Broadway - a performance that put Mama Rose in the same league as Medea.) I would pay to watch Peters read a phone book. Stritch is one of those performers who, no matter what the particular characteristics of the part they are playing, can't help but be themselves. Like Bogart or Tom Cruise in the movies, or Harvey Fierstein on stage. Part of the fun of an actor like that is to see how s/he nuances the self to fit the character, and I thought Stritch did it pretty well, though there wasn't a thimblefull of difference in this performance from her one-woman show of a few years back. So I love Stritch.

 

As to the economics.... I got a half-price ticket at TKTS for a mezzanine right section middle aisle seat, not bad. There were empty seats up where I was (a Wednesday night). I don't know if that is "normal", but the show is certainly not selling out every night. But it was a similar situation Friday night for West Side Story -- lots of decent half-priced seats and plenty unsold.