TT: Home team strikes out

In the Greater New York section of this morning’s Wall Street Journal, I re-review the Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, in which Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters have replaced Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sad to say, the production is as disappointing now as it was when it opened last year. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Broadway feeds off Hollywood like a thirsty vampire. It was the presence of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury in the first Broadway revival of “A Little Night Music,” not the production’s dubious artistic merits, that kept it running for six months. Now that they’ve moved on, the producers have decided to take a very big chance and replace them not with a second pair of certified screen stars but with Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters, two deservedly beloved Broadway performers whose names are not generally known to the public at large (though Ms. Peters teetered on the edge of full-scale celebrity in the ’70s and ’80s and Ms. Stritch’s guest appearances on “30 Rock” have made her a somewhat more familiar face). Will they be able to keep the show open for another six months? I doubt it–and not just because they lack the name recognition necessary to galvanize the tourist trade. Much as I esteem both women, neither one of them is well cast….
Ms. Stritch’s cackling spunky-grandma demeanor is infinitely removed from the haughty disillusion of the worldly-wise Madame Armfeldt…
Ms. Peters, who was last seen on Broadway six years ago in Sam Mendes’ revival of “Gypsy,” is even more closely identified with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim than Ms. Stritch, having previously created starring roles in “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Into the Woods.” I don’t blame her in the least for wanting to try her hand at playing Desirée Armfeldt, the aging actress who longs to put the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue behind her and settle down with a more-or-less suitable man. It’s one of the richest and most emotionally complex female roles in a Sondheim musical, and Ms. Peters, who looks half her age, brings it to persuasive life in the heart-wrenching scene in which she sings “Send in the Clowns” to Alexander Hanson. Elsewhere, though, her mile-wide performance is too coarse for comfort…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.