My overall impression
SONDHEIM. Let your inner musical theatre kid scream a little with excitement. Now “Marry Me A Little” is certainly not the penultimate Sondheim show. In fact, the show is mainly comprised of songs that were cut from other musicals like “Company”, “Follies”, “A Little Night Music”, “Saturday Night”, “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum” and “Anyone Can Whistle”. That is not to say that these songs are bad. Not at all. This is quite the jukebox of some brilliant, gorgeous music. With that out of the way, let’s dig into this particular fringe rendition of “Marry Me A Little”. This show can be extremely hard to make sense of considering that there is no dialogue. With strong directing choices from Janet Miller, the actors are able to quite effectively able to show us this bittersweet tale of a couple and the problem of an unclear plot is alleviated. The two actors, David Laffey & Jessie Withers are absolutely fantastic. Withers has a top-notch voice and says so much with her facial expressions. “Can That Boy Foxtrot”, is delivered quite seductively and was honestly the only time I’ve seen that song make any sense. Huge props for that. The real standout for me was Laffey. He has this trumpet-like brilliance in the timbre of his voice that just fills the entire Lillian Theatre. “Uptown, Downtown” was definitely the crowd-pleaser. He absolutely killed the number and the lighting was pretty darn fantastic to boot. If you are a Sondheim fan and/or if you want to a really clean, classic piece of musical theatre… this should go on your fringe list.
