With “Saturday Night,” the Arlington Players racks up another coup in presenting the area premiere of a musical by Stephen Sondheim, generally considered the most important composer/lyricist in the modern American musical stage.
"Saturday Night" may be more interesting for its pedigree than its material, but it is a light and at-times-lively comedy with bright and at times lovely tunes. The production is a solid one, with an energetic cast, a nicely designed set for the large stage at the Thomas Jefferson Community Theatre, and a 13-piece orchestra in the pit under the direction of Gary C. Mead.
The musical dates to 1953 when producer Lemuel Ayers asked a 23-year-old Sondheim to write songs for a play titled "Front Porch in Flatbush" by brothers Julius and Phillip Epstein. Sondheim worked with Julius to convert the comedy about the pre-1929 Wall Street boom into a musical with both comedy and romantic plotlines.
It was an age when the American musical theater was in a sort of doldrums. The shakeup created by the successes of "Carousel," "South Pacific," "Oklahoma!" and "The King and I" had been absorbed, but the future developments that would hit the musical theater in the second half of the twentieth century were yet to come.
This was before "West Side Story's" revolutionary approaches to serious storytelling, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum's" triumphant re-establishment of pure comedy in musicals or "Gypsy's" success at turning biography into psychological study.
These weren't the only landmark musicals that precede "Saturday Night" but they all have one thing in common: lyrics by Sondheim. For this reason if for no other, that makes this production of "Saturday Night" something that local musical theater lovers of won’t want to miss.
Starting with the full overture (something missing from so many modern musicals) it is clear that this will be an evening of bright and rhythmic music that made 1950s Broadway the source of so many hit parade standards in the pre-Elvis, pre-Beatles era. Sondheim opens the show with a dazzling display of contrapuntal writing, but soon is on to songs you would expect on the radio and television of the day. Indeed, one song, "A Moment With You" is most memorably presented by a crooner through an on-stage radio.
David Carney and Emily Barber Capece are the central couple in the play. He's a Brooklyn kid with dreams of cornering the market on anything in order to finance a life style of "Class”: he only has two suits but both are from Brooks, and he drinks from a tumbler instead of a glass. He's an immature dreamer who will tell any story or do anything to live his dream, even sell a car he doesn't own in order to get the funds to invest.
She's also a dreamer but with a more rational, more mature streak that keeps her from crossing over the line toward disaster. Neither Carney nor Capece make much more out of the fairly stolid characters, and there isn't much chemistry between them. But they do move the story on with dispatch.
Of course, being lovers in a 1950s musical, the couple find that fate intervenes at the last minute, warding off the consequences of their actions. But along the way there are over a dozen examples of how Sondheim, even in his early 20s, could match a tricky lyric with a suitable melody. Indeed, while the lyrics show some of the wit and wordplay that would become his trademark, the score may surprise because the melodies are so well structured for the then-fashionable popular market.
"Saturday Night" was not produced when it was written because producer Ayers died and the funding for the project fell through. It wasn't rescued from the storage trunks to which its script and score had been consigned until a few years ago when it finally received its premieres. It had a successful limited run Off-Broadway in 2000 for which Sondheim received a Drama Desk Award for best lyrics. Now local audiences get to see and hear just what it is all about.