What Do You Think Of The 1990 Lincoln Center Production of A Little Night Music? — Page 3

Scott Ellis and/or Susan Stroman's stagings are/were so much more exciting than Trevor Nunn's. I remember a moment in Weekend in the Country where the servants merely cross behind the assembled leads carrying baggage and trunks. Somehow it was thrilling.

Maureen Moore is wonderful because she copies Diana Rigg's line readings from the film almost verbatim. And Diana Rigg is not only the only good thing in the film..she's the best Charlotte ever.

The Mark Brokaw Kennedy Center production was lovely, as was Blair Brown. And Randy Graff was the second best Charlotte ever.

I did not see Patricia Elliott's Charlotte but I grew up with her on the cast album and loved her. I know she won the Tony. And acknowledging all this...I'm still confident in saying Diana Rigg is the greatest Charlotte ever.

My problem with Danielle Ferland wasn't that her accent was too American... but it was with her speaking voice. What I didn't like about it is hard to describe, but I thought that her face was very expressive but her voice wasn't. She did do a good job of playing younger than she was, though.

Diana Riggs was a lovely Charlotte. Maureen Moore did have several very similar line deliveries, but her "Every Day A Little Death" was very different, and my favorite lines of hers were those that were NOT in the movie. (As well as the one about being 'thigh to thigh,' which was delivered differently).

---

I saw Patricia Elliot five times in Night Music and worked with her subsequently at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, where she played the Katherine Cornell role in a magnificent production of S.N. Behrman's No Time for Comedy, directed by the late Gerald Gutierrez.

I adore Diana Rigg in the awful movie, but Patricia Elliot inhabited the part of Charlotte in a way that Diana Rigg did not.

Patricia Elliot had that otherworldly quality that only some actors possess. It makes the character seem to play THEM, rather than the actor playing the character.

You could actually SEE her thinking, see her experience pain and pleasure.

Her "Every Day a Little Death" was like seeing into the soul of a woman who had accepted that she would have to live with regret.

---

I don't think anyone will beat Sara Ramirez's "The Millers Son" for me, but I LOVE this video of the show.

---

The 1990 production was part of the New York City Opera season, so it didn't have a "run" as a free-standing musical theater production would.

Just finished watching this production for the first time...and I loved every second of it. The staging is far superior to the current production...and of course, the full orchestra sounds fantastic.