Entertainment

Love and tears, dimly lit

There’s a wonderful actress in “A Little Night Music.” Accustomed to the lime light, this grande dame hides her bittersweet awareness of the encroaching years under an unflappable authority. She may be looking back on her youth, but this professional seducer can still wrap men — and pretty much everybody — around her little finger.

Desirée Armfeldt is the theater star at the center of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1973 show, which laces together amorous permutations across generations and social classes at the turn of the last century.

Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Desirée in the revival that opened last night, but it’s not her I’m talking about — it’s Angela Lansbury.

As Madame Armfeldt (Desirée’s mother), Lansbury’s even better — if a tad too broadly comic — than in “Blithe Spirit,” and it’s a treat to hear her sing on Broadway for the first time since a short-lived “Mame” in 1983. Her “Liaisons” is a marvel of resourceful, inventive interpretation, lyric manglings be damned.

But Madame Armfeldt is merely a supporting character. The star here is Zeta-Jones. She’s radiant, yet doesn’t shed much light on Desirée.

Zeta-Jones is one of the few movie stars these days with golden-age Hollywood charisma. She’s not a technical actress but a suggestive, slightly vulgar sensualist, like Ava Gardner.

This is perfect for Desirée, who traffics in desire, but the character has more than one side. When she lets down her guard on the heartbreaking “Send in the Clowns,” the fracture is unexpected here: Until then, we had no idea there were cracks under Zeta-Jones’ breezy demeanor.

But then Trevor Nunn’s murky-looking production (did he and lighting designer Hartley T A Kemp take the “night” in the title literally?) isn’t particularly subtle or graceful.

Lacking both nuance and energy, it struggles to match the sophistication and gamesmanship of Sondheim’s score, which evokes the effervescence of love, the abject pain it can cause, and the melancholy of its aftermath — sometimes all in the same song.

A few of the actors do find grace notes. As Fredrik Egerman, a lawyer who wants Desirée even though he’s married to an 18-year-old, Alexander Hanson (from the production’s original London cast) gains in confidence and depth as he goes along.

Ramona Mallory plays Fredrik’s child bride with petulant impetuousness, and joins Erin Davie (Countess Charlotte Malcolm) for a vibrant rendering of the ode to resigned disillusion that is “Every Day a Little Death.” It really makes you long for the show that could have been.

elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com