Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones (her Broadway debut!) and Alexander Hanson take a bow.

At the current revival of A Little Night Music, directed by Trevor Nunn, I imagine that even the front row felt far away from the stage.  A come-tragedy of manners taking place in turn-of-the-last-century Scandinavia, the musical depicts a world in which people are acutely divorced from their surroundings, and only exist in their neurotic perceptions of themselves.  Every interpersonal relationship is horrifyingly complex, and characters agonize and rhapsodize over minutia, completely oblivious to the furious inner-monologue taking place in the mind of whoever’s beside them.  It’s a little bit like real life, actually.

Stephen Sondheim’s vehicle is practically flawless, each character rendered with compassion and comprehension, each hurtling blindly toward a satisfyingly inevitable fate.  Sondheim has said that the only excuse for a character to begin to sing is that they are so full of emotion that they cannot help it, and he upholds this theory here.  Compared to his other works, there is comparatively little music (excuse me) as the characters are all, in the words of one of them, “frivolous, narcissistic cynics.”  So what is there for a frivolous, narcissistic cynic to feel so full of emotion about that he or she simply must sing?  Love, of course.  And also sex.

The musical opens in the living room and bedroom of middle aged Fredrik, his stubbornly virginal child bride, and his son, about her age, who has pledged himself to the seminary.  All three live lives of leisure and comfort, and yet all three are positively bursting with lust and anxiety, brilliantly depicted by their trio, or, rather, the juxtaposition of their three solos, revealing their frustrations with themselves and their lovers.

Events are set into motion when a famous actress, Desiree (Catherine Zeta-Jones), comes to town, and is revealed to have been Fredrik’s lover many years before.  Fredrik visits her in her dressing room, and is relieved to enjoy once more the company of a fellow adult, someone who shares his disillusions with life, but also has the maturity to temper them with humor.  Within minutes, Desiree has taken off her robe and exposed herself to him (though not to us, much to the disappointment of Zeta-Jones enthusiasts.)  “Behold,” she proclaims grandly, “the page that has been written on.”  Fredrick does more than merely behold it, and the mad carousel of liaisons begins to whirl.

A major theme of A Little Night Music is the affect of aging on love.  Angela Lansbury, mugging with great flair as the grande dame who raised Desiree, provides commentary on all of the dalliances and desperation around her, sorting the fools from the merely young.  The ensemble sings verses from a song about two former lovers’ recollections like a ghostly Greek chorus every time two people finish the game of romantic roulette and couple off.

The performances were all so uniformly terrific that there hardly seems any point in commenting on them.  Director Trevor Nunn seems to have found some rare breed of super people, all of them in possession of terrific comedic and dramatic chops, astonishing vocal control, and centerfold good looks.

A Little Night Music is a delightful, moving show, and a refreshing one too.  Now that Broadway is full of the innovative and cheerfully pop-scored, isn’t it nice to sit down in a theater and pop open a bottle of vintage nostalgia?