This production is performed in Japanese with the English lyrics and dialogue projected as surtitles on a cross piece of the set above the action. While this forces you to keep looking up at the text and then back down at the action, the staging and the storytelling of the text is so clear that there is no difficulty following either the plot itself or the threads of character development. It does, however, make it difficult to fully appreciate the literate accomplishments of the lyrics. If you have the recording it is a good idea to listen to it again just prior to seeing the show just to refresh your memory. If you don’t already own the recording, you are likely to come away from this show wanting to buy one so you can linger over some of the lyrics. The masterful patter song "Please Hello" in which the representatives of the major powers present demands for trade concessions is so full of delightful touches that go by so very fast that a post-show examination will be tempting.

Director Amon Miyamoto’s approach to the play is eye opening. While the original was directed by Harold Prince in a big, splashy version of Japanese Kibuki theater, which uses exaggeration as a key feature, Miyamoto approaches the same play in a format more akin to the Japanese theatrical tradition of Noh which emphasizes detail and focus. Neither Prince nor Miyamoto abandoned the traditions of Broadway musical theater but they approached it from opposite directions. What is doubly fascinating is that the musical was originally greeted skeptically because of doubts over whether three Americans, Sondheim, Prince and book writer John Weidman whose idea the project was to begin with, could possibly portray the American encroachment on Japan through a Japanese view. Now we have a Japanese approach to the work of the Americans on the story of Japan and it all blends marvelously.

A hallmark of the entire Sondheim Celebration has been the quality of the performance of the music from both the orchestras and the singers. This production continues that level of excellence. The eight person orchestra, sitting on platforms in the set rather than in a pit below the stage, deliver Sondheim’s alternately exquisitely delicate and dramatically bombastic music with precision and a marvelous musicality in the reduced orchestrations of Jonathan Tunick. The cast sings all the material – solos, duets, group songs and big chorus numbers – with a clarity of meaning and a purity of sound that is a delight. Their efforts are matched by a fabulous scenic design that places all the action on a platform floating in an on-stage moat or on a ramp coming out of the audience in the Japanese tradition of a hanamichi. Costumes, lights, sound all balance to make this Pacific Overtures a fitting finale to the Sondheim Celebration of 2002.

A Little Night Music is an ensemble piece that places great demands on every member of the company. To work well it must have a cast of almost uniform quality. This production approaches that standard and director Mark Brokaw blends them into a unit quite well. Fluidity is the hallmark of his production. Brokaw was aided by the choreography of John Carrafa and by Derek McLane’s lovely set, especially the grounds of the mansion with its stylized trees establishing that this is a manicured sort of country place with a mansion lit from within. The set changes all seem to flow right along with the story resulting in a show that seems to ebb and flow from point to point and scene to scene.

Randy Graff is delightful as the wife fighting to regain her husband’s affections, and Douglas Sills is marvelously pompous as that husband, a popinjay whose mistress likens to a peacock with a pea for a brain. That mistress is Blair Brown who takes a while to win over the audience but win them she does. Her "Send In The Clowns" is as touching as could be wished. That song will come as a revelation to many who know it only in the semi-folk pop versions that have sold millions as a stand-alone piece. To hear it with its intricate lyrics given meaning by the context of the story is to hear a totally different work of art. She sings it to (and later with) her former lover who is played with a delightful undertone of wry appreciation for irony by John Dossett. Sarah Uriarte Berry and Danny Gurwin bring spirited youthfulness to the collection as does Natscia Diaz as the maid. Her early scenes with Gurwin and Berry are a delight although her "The Miller’s Son" in Act II seems a bit detached from the rest of the play. Barbara Byrne presides over the company just as her character, Madame Arnfeldt, presides over the weekend, with an amused sense of detachment on the surface but an underlying concern born of affection.

At the completion of the Sondheim Celebration’s set of six new productions (only the importation of the Japanese production of Pacific Overtures remains to be unveiled) it is time to assess the contributions of the design team that worked on the entire set. Derek McLane’s scenic designs have ranged from fabulous (Company, Passion) to marvelous (Sweeney Todd) to very good (Sunday in the Park with George) but every last one has included at least one memorable image. Howell Binkley’s lighting designs have been consistently fabulous with both subtle touches such as the warmth of color in these woods, and standout effects like Passion’s shafts of light. If there has been a disappointment it has been Tom Morse’s sound but it has gotten better as the celebration progressed and the final three installments have been more than satisfactory. The highest praise must be reserved for the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra under the general direction of Kay Cameron. To have heard all six of these scores played this well under the batons of such as Jonathan Tunick, Eric Stern, Patrick Vaccariello, Rob Berman, Larry Blank and now Nicholas Archer has been an unmatched joy.

Stephen Sondheim has mastered musical drama and musical comedy and helped invent the genre of the concept musical. With Sweeney Todd he created an opera in the form of a mega-musical. With Passion he created a chamber opera in the modern idiom. It is so far out on the leading edge of musical theater that today, eight years after its lamentably short Broadway run, nothing has touched it for the exquisite progression of story and score. It didn’t achieve wide acceptance principally because the three central characters are people with weaknesses that make them difficult to care about. The original cast wasn’t able to overcome that. This cast does.

Michael Cerveris makes the transition in the officer’s view of love painfully believable. He sings the complex role beautifully and his surrender to the passion of Fosca is much more understandable and human than earlier interpretations. As his beautiful mistress, Rebecca Luker not only brings her crystalline soprano to the role, she endows it with a strength of character that makes the officer’s love for her more than a mere attraction. To her credit, she plays the opening scene clothed in a diaphanous gown rather than doing it nude as originally staged. (It wasn’t clear but Cerveris may have been the nude in the bed.) Judy Kuhn is mesmerizing at times as the sickly cousin. She isn’t ugly. She’s emaciated. This removes the hurdle Cerveris’ character had to leap in other productions.

Lighting designer Howell Binkley makes a major contribution to this production. Derek McLane’s set consists of shutter panels through which Binkley shines a succession of focused lights of multiple hues. Beds rise out of the floor, tables slide in from the side and characters enter through sections in the slats at the back. Through it all, Binkley’s lights concentrate attention at the center of action and set the tone through the use of different brightness and colors. If "exquisite" is the right adjective for Sondheim’s score (and it is), "exquisite" is the right adjective for Binkley’s lighting design.

Each of the musicals in the Sondheim Celebration to date has been marked by a knock-out performance by one of the leads. Christine Baranski in Sweeney Todd, John Barrowman in Company, Melissa Erico in Sunday in the Park with George stood out above even the great work by their impressive co-stars. Add Raúl Esparsa to the list. As the lyricist in the trio that met on that roof top, Esparsa is marvelous from finish to start and his rendition of the clever, funny and emotionally charged patter song "Franklin Shepard, Inc." is the acerbic high spot of the show just as the roof-top anthem "Our Time" is the emotional peak. When is the last time you recall an ovation in the middle of a song?

Esparsa really has five co-stars. Michael Hayden is smoothly likeable as the composer Franklin Shepard. (That is a portrayal that is mandated by the re-written book but somewhat confusing given the remnants of the cad the character was in the original.) Miriam Shor is droll delivering all the wisecracks of the writer in the group. Anastasia Barzee sings beautifully and conveys both the later pain and the early dreams as the wife Shepard leaves behind. Emily Skinner and Adam Heller are rock solid as Shepard’s second wife and her first husband. Members of the excellent chorus fill the smaller roles, each having a moment or two that stands out. Particularly memorable is a bit that could not last more than ten seconds where Amy McWilliams delivers an hysterically off-key "Who wants to live in New York?"

A key criticism of the failed original production was its cheap-looking design with a minimalist set and costumes composed of tee shirts with the character’s roles printed on them. This production does not fall into that trap, although the scenic design is the least sumptuous of the four to date in the Celebration. It is hindered somewhat by the surprisingly dim illumination of the projections. The Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra under the direction of Eric Stern swings nicely and delivers the blast of brass that is the sound of the show. It sounds a bit thin, however, as they use orchestrations Jonathan Tunick created for revisions of the show at houses with smaller orchestras. The Broadway pit had 21 musicians while there are just a dozen playing here. No such criticism can be leveled at the costumes, lighting or Karma Camp’s choreography. They are all bold, bright and marvelously effective at communicating time, place and mood.

The evening opens with the opening words of the Sondheim show in which Patinkin starred on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George. First in darkness, and then gradually in light, he intones "White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge: bring order to the whole. Through design. Composition. Tension. Balance. Light. And harmony." It is a perfect description of what is to come. Patinkin barely moves a non-singing muscle in the first fifteen minutes of the program, standing still in a spotlight wearing an ear-mounted microphone and casual clothes with hands folded before him and concentrating – oh how he can concentrate – on the music and the lyrics.

Even later in the evening, when a carefully choreographed movement is applied to specific lyric here or there, the movement is concentrated. It is a minimalist approach, reducing the visual impact of the show to concentrate attention to the musical elements. As one member of the audience commented after the show "every bit of his energy was in his voice."

The breadth and range of the samples from Sondheim’s list gives added dimension to the evening. It goes from "Hard Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah" by Milton Ager, Jack Yellen, Bob Bigelow and Charles Bates and "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee" by Muir and Gilbert to the output of more famous composers and lyricists including Arlen, Harburg, Mercer, Berlin, Bock, Harnick, Coleman, Leigh, Martin and Blane. The range of styles, the marvelous match of lyric to melody and use of song to tell stories in the work Sondheim admires sets his own work in perspective.

Backed by her long-time music director, Wally Harper on piano and the precise rhythms and sensuous bowing of Jon Burr on bass, Cook mixes and matches between Sondheim’s compositions and items from his list. She rocks the house with "The Trolley Song," gets all the laughs out of "You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun," turns the trio "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" into a delightful single, wrings all the sadness out of "Send in the Clowns" and does exquisite work on both "In Buddy’s Eyes" from Follies and "Ice Cream" from She Loves Me.

After an intermissionless ninety minutes, she returns for an encore that just happens to be the most memorable feature of the evening – or of many evenings for that matter. Prior to that moment, she and Harper and Burr had been amplified through a very well balanced sound system. But after taking her bow, she stood center stage without a microphone and filled the hall with the most glorious, spell binding rendition of Sondheim’s "Anyone Can Whistle" to the softly subtle support of her back up. The audience sensed a special moment and not a cough, rustle or murmur was heard from the nearly 500 people in the room.

Thus far the Sondheim Celebration has given us a marvelous Sweeney Todd with a extraordinary performance by Christine Baranski and an excellent Company featuring a fabulous performance by John Barrowman. Now we get a lovely Sunday in the Park with George with a wonderful performance by Melissa Errico. As the mistress in the first act she is charming, sexy, witty, moving and she sings beautifully. In the second act, as the aging grandmother of the modern George, she is charming, vital, witty, moving and she sings in a frail squeak that is just right for the crucial number "Children and Art." This is her show.

Raul Esparza is much less satisfying in the dual role of the 1886 and the 1985 Georges. Part of this may be a result of Schaeffer’s effort to hold back some of the artistic passion in Act I to better balance with the burnout the modern George suffers in Act II. But it is also due to Esparza’s singing which is less rich, less melodic and more acerbic than the material deserves. The rest of the cast is in fine voice, however, and they all create interesting, very human characters, all of whom were captured in Seurat’s painting which is brought to such glorious life in the process. There’s Donna Migliaccio who gets the most laughs of the evening as the Nurse who ends up with her back to the audience in the painting ("No one even sees my profile!"), Michael L. Forrest who gets the biggest single laugh of the evening as the Boatman, Florence Lacey who makes a memorable character out of the wife of a competing artist and Linda Stephens as an old lady who sings an absolutely beautiful "Beautiful."

Derek McLane and Howell Binkley have come up with the third memorable visual design in three shows. McLane’s set is a radically different approach than the well known original, using easels rather than cut-outs in many instances and framing the entire production in frames made of blank canvases. Binkley uses all those whitish surfaces as his own canvas to splay with glowing light of various hues. Then, after a first act dominated by the costumes of the original production, Anne Kennedy breaks loose with second act designs as fresh and distinctive as McLane and Binkley’s work and it all comes together. Her all-white creations for the modern arts reception scene is filled with witty touches, including a dress for Amy McWilliams as one of the artistic hangers’ on that is nearly as classic as was the one she came up with for her in The Fix. The Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra gives another superb performance although this show, again using the original orchestrations, requires about half as many players. Still, such sold keyboard, horn and harp work should not go unnoticed.

John Barrowman is "Bobby" and this is his show. He sings beautifully, he looks every inch the thirty-five year old eligible bachelor that can attract the attention of every couple on the high end of Manhattan society, and he can carry a song or a scene or a show on his sculptured broad shoulders. A very good cast supports him, including Lynn Redgrave who receives co-star billing. She is acceptable through act one and the first half of act two and then she breaks loose with the big number of the night, "The Ladies Who Lunch." The setting of that scene and song are so strong that they almost unbalance the second act but give the lady credit – she makes perfect sense out of the lyrics, selling the song to the high heavens. That, of course, isn’t the only superb set of lyrics set to a sophisticated musical structure by Sondheim in this show. "The Little Things You Do Together," "You Could Drive A Person Crazy," (I’m Not) "Getting Married Today" and "Another Hundred People" are delights. That last one is delivered with a deliciously deft touch by Alice Ripley in a drop-dead funny 1970s wedding gown designed by Catherine Zuber.

No review of this performance would be complete without mention of Jonathan Tunick and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra. Tunick, who created the original orchestrations for Company and so many other Sondheim musicals, and who was the first recipient in history of the Tony Award for best orchestrations, conducted the twenty six member orchestra. The image of Tunic applauding Ripley from the pit while the audience went wild over "Getting Married Today" was priceless. Once again, the orchestra performed flawlessly.

Also contributing greatly to the feeling that this was a special production of a memorable work was Jodi Moccia's choreography that emphasized the two-by-two-ness of all the partners in Bobby’s life so well that it beautifully set up the moment in "Side by Side by Side" when Robert realizes he’s the only one dancing without a partner. That is a key moment of the show and she makes it work terrifically. Derek McLane came up with a fabulous set design composed of New York Skyscrapers in a disorienting horizontal forced perspective that is just right for the show, and Howell Binkley’s lighting design turned that set and the entire company into a memorable representation of New York circa 1970. Sound mixing problems that so plagued Tom Morse’ sound design last week at Sweeney Todd were largely corrected – the mix was not perfect for Company but it was a vast improvement.

The role of Sweeney Todd is one of the grand parts in American musical theater and here it is tackled with thrilling intensity and unmatched voice by Brian Stokes Mitchell in a performance reminiscent of his work in the last great musical of the twentieth century, Ragtime. He played Coalhouse Walker, another good man driven to insane violence by insufferable injustices. In fact, in Mitchell’s hands, Sweeney can be thought of as an extension of Coalhouse Walker. His costar as the pie shop proprietress who praises her competition for harvesting the neighborhood pets ("popping pussies into pies – wot I calls enterprise") is Christine Baranski giving a funny, touching and above all fabulously sung performance. She may have made her name in drama and comedy but she shows herself a real musical theater star. (Never mind her earlier foray into the realm of the Broadway musical – Nick & Nora which closed after a mere nine performances.)

Putting Sweeney Todd on stage required enormous resources. It appears that every penny spent went to put quality on the stage. This, too, bodes well for the summer as Derek McLane is designing the sets and Howell Binkly the lights for all six shows. Here they create a gray, grimy, scary scaffold of the industrial revolution. The supporting cast is almost embarrassingly good. Kevin Ligon is funny and of full voice as the competing barber, Walter Charles has a fabulous voice and marvelous presence for the part of the justice who dispenses injustice, Mary Beth Peil shifts between different dementias as the Beggar Woman, Hugh Panaro gives a depth born of maturity to the sailor who falls in love and Celia Keenan-Bolger gives the part of the girl he falls for more personality than any I’ve seen play the part. There are no weak voices in the entire gigantic cast and director Christopher Ashley has kept everything on an even keel relying on the strength of the material. Only in one scene does his staging seem awkward and that is the flagellation scene which is, in fact, awkward. That may be part of the reason it was cut from the original. It comes shortly after Ashley's lovely staging of the scene between Panaro’s sailor and Keenan-Bolger’s Joanna which, in his hands, becomes a reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and, therefore, Sondheim’s own Maria and Tony from West Side Story. There is genuine humor in the staging not only where it would be expected ("The Worst Pies In London", "The Contest" – which works very well in a reduced version – and, of course, "A Little Priest") but were it is a revelation as in the multiple murder sequence.

Note that the original orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick were not adapted for a smaller orchestra as seems to be the habit these days. Rather, they are played by an ensemble of unheard-of size in today’s theatrical world. Twenty six musicians of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra play these rich charts with emotional resonance. There was not one obvious wrong note or missed cue in the entire press opening and that is unusual in only the forth performance of such a massive score. But the inadequacies of the sound mixing at the press performance were dreadfully distracting. It is a terrible disservice to the glorious work of all concerned when microphones are turned on half way through sentences, duets are unbalanced by having one singer’s level completely obscure the others and when the carefully crafted choral work of the ensemble is damaged by uneven miking.

June 20, 2002 - closed
Cris Groenendaal on the Millennium Stage
The Broadway and opera star will perform on his off night from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George

June 24, 2002 - closed
Alice Ripley on the Millennium Stage
The Tony Award nominee (Side Show) will perform on her off night from Sondheim’s Company.

Perhaps it was the publicity listing this production as "part of the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim Celebration" that set expectations too high. Perhaps it was the fact that the children involved in all aspects of the production – from cast to design – had been participating in a year-long joint program of their schools and the Kennedy Center or that the show has been mounted in the Kennedy Center’s AFI Theater. Perhaps it was the admission price of $12. Whatever it was, the expectation was for a more polished production than this.

Two different casts alternate over the eight performance run of the play. At the Sunday performance of the first weekend the strongest single performance came from Jamir Foster as the witch. She sang clearly with a strong voice, moved very well and made the transition from ugly crone to beauty very well with the assistance of the work of children from Paul Junior High School who designed her costumes. Tamyra Roundtree of Seaton Elementary School had an infectious bounce in her step as Little Red Riding Hood. Her very red costume was the work of children from Edwin L. Stanton Elementary School.

A design highlight was Rapunzel’s Tower, which cleverly imprisoned the girl with the golden hair in a replica of the Washington Monument designed by children at Stanton Elementary who worked with the Kennedy Center’s Cheryl Foster. Orchestral accompaniment was played through the sound system from a recording provided with the abridgement. While the music sounded fine, the miking and amplifying of the children's voices left much to be desired. Clever costumes included a living golden harp on golden in-line skates which the children came up with while working with the center’s Rosemary Pardee. But director Rick Thompson failed to draw polished performances from many of the children and seemed to have to confine his efforts to blocking and pacing in order to keep the show moving.