A Little Night Music, Porchlight Theatre, at the Theatre Building, and Pacific Overtures, Chicago Shakespeare Theater. With its tender, hummable songs and wry comic tale of sexual intrigue and midlife romance, composer Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince’s A Little Night Music–scripted by Hugh Wheeler, based on Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night–was a 1973 Broadway hit. Rather than repeat themselves with another love story, Sondheim and Prince followed up in 1976 with Pacific Overtures, about the socioeconomic revolution that followed Commodore Perry’s 1853 visit to Japan. Written by Wheeler and John Weidman, Pacific Overtures was a lavish flop that cemented Sondheim’s reputation as uncompromisingly uncommercial. But it’s every bit as witty and, in the right hands, engaging as its predecessor.
