So says Michael Riedel, and Playbill.com has also picked it up...

FROM ANGELA TO ZETA
ZETA-JONES IN 'NIGHT MUSIC,' SO LANSBURY STAYS IN CAST

by Michael Riedel

Last updated: 12:23 am
August 21, 2009
Posted: 12:22 am
August 21, 2009

SEND in the stars!

Just a week ago, Trevor Nunn's revival of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" was on the verge of falling apart.

The great Angela Lansbury had agreed to play Madame Armfeldt, provided the producers lined up another star to play her daughter, Desiree.

An old showbiz shrewdie, Lansbury didn't want to shoulder a multimillion-dollar Broadway revival by herself.

The producers were sweating a Labor Day deadline, but now it appears they've got their second headliner: Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar as Velma Kelly in the film "Chicago," recently moved here from Los Angeles with her husband, Michael Douglas, to do a show. She'd accepted an offer, sources say, to star in "Women on the Verge," based on the Pedro Almodovar film, but the producers decided she'd have to audition, and, annoyed, she passed.

Sondheim called Zeta-Jones and persuaded her to do "Night Music" instead. It will open at the Walter Kerr in mid-December.

It's a good part for her. Desiree, an aging stage actress, dominates the show without having to sing or dance all that much. In fact, she has only one real song, but it's the take-home tune "Send in the Clowns."

Her performance will be judged in large part on whether she makes that familiar song sound fresh.

Lansbury will be confined to a wheelchair in the production, so there will be no fabulously loopy dancing of the type she did this year in "Blithe Spirit."

But she's got a killer song as well -- the witty and haunting "Liaisons."

(Die-hard Lansbury fans noticed that her Madame Arcati bore more than a fleeting resemblance to her hilarious Salome Otterbourne in the 1978 movie "Death on the Nile." When I asked her about that recently, she said, "You're damn right it does!")

Nunn's production of "A Little Night Music" is spare and intimate. It opened last year to strong reviews at the Menier Chocolate Factory (the hottest little theater in London right now) and recently transferred to the Garrick in the West End.

Michael Billington, in the Guardian, called it "an evening of refined enchantment."

The Telegraph's Charles Spencer, who zinged the show when it played the Chocolate Factory, did an about-face last month and now says the show is "undoubtedly piquant, poignant and wise."

I thought the revival, while very pretty, moved a bit sluggishly. At nearly three hours, it was "A Long Night Music."

But Nunn has promised to speed it up for New York. The producers should hold him to that promise -- Nunn generally lengthens shows when they come to New York. (Remember "Rock 'n' Roll"?)

Based on Ingmar Bergman's movie "Smiles of a Summer Night," "A Little Night Music" follows the sexual entanglements of a group of bourgeois Scandinavians one summer evening in the country.

Sondheim famously described the show as "whipped cream with knives."

To this day, it remains his only musical that turned a profit the first time around on Broadway.

Now the hunt is on for an actor to play Zeta-Jones' love interest, the lawyer Frederik Egerman (Len Cariou in the original).

E-mail me your suggestions, and I'll pass them along to the producers.

michael.riedel@nypost.com

I think Riedel is wrong about "LNM" being the only Sondheim musical to turn a profit. I'm almost positive the original production of "Forum" made money and thought "Company" did as well...

Lansbury as Mme. Armfeldt is no surprise. She's said on numerous occasions this is a role she wanted to tackle before the end of her career, so when the revival was announced for Bway it seemed inevitable.

Zeta-Jones deserves the benefit of the movie-star-goes-legit doubt. As she proved in "Chicago" she's the musical theater real deal--though the role of Desiree Armfeldt is one of the few leading ladies in the canon that doesn't necessarily require such chops. Nevertheless I can see her in the role, and am looking forward to this production.

This sounds very good! I hope that its successful! There are so many questions we will be pondering til this comes out and even more after it comes out. Could Angela Lansbury win another Tony? Can Catherine Zeta-Jones get nominated? I think this has potential to be really great!

IT'S OFFICIAL!!!!!!!

http://www.broadwayworld.com/a...ory_to_Star_20090922

It has always been a dream of mine to see Angela Lansbury onstage before she passes away, and I am hoping I can save up enough money to go see her in this show, which is one of my favorite musicals.