"A Little Night Music" is exquisite to look at; it has a wonderful score; its lyrics are a model of the craft; I saw it twice, liked it better the second time, and find that what it is trying to do is more interesting than what it did, for the show has little life, little musical theatricality and little reason for its own existence. Coming as it does after their adventurous and inspired "Company" and "Follies," the new Stephen Sondheim-Harold Prince musical … is a deep disappointment for me. This enormously talented team, composer-lyricist and producer-director, has been solitarily evolving the Broadway musical theater. Though a show of theirs that does not work is still beyond the talent and imagination of most everyone else who does musicals, it is depressing to find them stepping backwards and the main problem, I think, was a conceit.

The conceit was to create...