About the work
A Little Night Music is a musical by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) with a book by Hugh Wheeler, premiered on Broadway in 1973. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman's film Smiles of a Summer Night, the score is written almost entirely in triple metre—an artful homage to the waltz and to operetta.
Plot
In turn-of-the-century Sweden, several couples become entangled in an elegant carousel of love. The lawyer Fredrik, newly married to the still-virginal young Anne, encounters his former lover, the celebrated actress Désirée. She in turn is conducting an affair with the jealous Count Carl-Magnus. At a country estate in the light of a summer night, over a single weekend and guided by the wry observation of the aged Madame Armfeldt, all the relationships realign until each finds their fitting partner.
Cultural significance
A Little Night Music contains in Send in the Clowns one of Sondheim's most famous songs and one of the few genuine pop hits of his career, recorded by Frank Sinatra, Judy Collins, and others. The work won the Tony Award for Best Musical and is regarded as Sondheim's most accessible and melodically seductive piece. Its sophisticated blend of operetta charm, bittersweet irony, and artful form made it a landmark of ambitious musical theatre.