Jay Records is taking listeners back in time and into the recording studio with new footage of the entire recording session of its 1990 studio cast album of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music. The theatrical label has synchronized the complete, final album audio with footage of the studio sessions, featuring performers Maria Friedman, Siân Phillips, Eric Flynn, and more. Watch above.
The album, which recently received a comprehensive re-mastering from Jay, features arrangements and conducting by John Owen Edwards, and is largely based on a production that played Chichester Festival in 1989 before transferring to London's West End the same year.
West End and Broadway favorite Friedman, a three-time Olivier winner, stars as Petra, with Phillips as Desiree and Flynn as Frederick, alongside Janis Kelly as Anne, Bonaventura Bottone as Henrik, Megan Kelly as Frederika, Elisabeth Welch as Madame Armfeldt, Jason Howard as Carl-Magnus, and Susan Hampshire as Charlotte. The quintet of Liebeslieders comprises Michael Bulman, Susan Flannery, Dinah Harris, Martin Nelson, and Hilary Western.
Based on the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, A Little Night Music premiered on Broadway in 1973, originally produced and directed by Harold Prince. It won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (for Wheeler), and Best Original Score (for Sondheim). The work was revived on Broadway in 2009 in a production starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury, and Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch later in the run. The 1989 West End production, directed by Ian Judge, was the work's first London revival, though it has since returned in a 1995 production at the National starring Judi Dench (with Phillips taking on Madame Armfeldt) and in 2008 at Menier Chocolate Factory, the production that transferred to Broadway the following year.
Glynis Johns in the original Broadway production of A Little Night Music
