Das Lächeln einer Sommernacht

The summer night smiles three times: once for the young who still know nothing, a second time for the fools who know too little and a third time for the old who know too much. The experienced Madame Armfeldt betrays this secret to her granddaughter Fredrika. And the latter immediately has an opportunity to find out about the mysterious smile in her immediate surroundings: Fredrika’s mother, the actress Désirée Armfeldt, wants to revive her former relationship with the attorney Fredrik Egerman. The latter is by now recently married with the very young Anne, for whom also Henrik cultivates amorous feelings, Fredrik’s son from his first marriage. Désirée, meanwhile, consoles herself with the rough-hewn count Carl-Magnus Malcolm whose wife Charlotte is trying to put an end to this affair. At Madame Armfeldt’s country estate all of these love-struck people finally meet, and the amorous merry-go-round gets going for real. Will Fredrika notice the smile of the summer night in all this commotion?

While still collaborating in »West Side Story«,the director and producer Harold Prince and the composer and songwriter Stephen Sondheim had dealt with the question of whether it was possible to write a musical completely in three-quarter’s time. In Ingmar Bergman’s film »Smiles of a Summer Night« they years later discovered the ideal material for this project. And the experiment was successful! Embedded in the corseted form of waltz rhythm and with a little bit of spice from Shakespeare, Chekhov and Strindberg, Sondheim and his book author Hugh Wheeler finally succeeded in creating a melancholy-fascinating chamber musical out of the poetic romantic merry-go-round dated to turn-of-the-century Sweden which premiered on Broadway in New York on 25 February 1973 and subsequently took all the world’s stages by storm, being recorded on film with Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Rigg and out of which grew perhaps the greatest hit that Stephen Sondheim ever wrote: »Send in the Clowns«.

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