[A Little Night Music] is a jeweled music box of a show: lovely to look at, delightful to listen to, and perhaps too exquisite, fragile and muted ever to be quite humanly affecting. It is a victory of technique over texture, and one leaves it in the odd mental state of unbridled admiration and untouched feelings….

Nothing lends the show quite so much strength as Stephen Sondheim's score. It is a beauty, his best yet in an exceedingly distinguished career. The prevailing waltz meter is more suggestive of fin de siècle Vienna than the Scandinavian north, but why carp? In a show almost without choreography, Sondheim's lyrics are nimble-witted dances. Literate, ironic, playful, enviably clever, altogether professional, Stephen Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noël Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons …, a lament that...