A Little Night Music is also, in Nunn's production, a period drama with lush costumes and sets. It's based on Ingmar Bergman's 1955 film, Smiles of a Summer Night, which itself was based on an 18th-century Marivaux play. It is a chocolate-boxy assortment, including a country house, a nest of gentlefolk, champagne, adulteries, heartbreak and summer night reconciliations, aiming without much success to be as magical as Mozart's Marriage of Figaro or Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Musically, it leaves me almost entirely cold but there is something extremely touching about the central drama between two elderly people, both still very attractive, who rediscover each other despite many summer evening obstacles. This is beautifully achieved by Alexander Hanson and Hannah Waddingham (who has only one song). Maureen Lipman is wonderful, apart from her singing voice (which she overcomes with great panache), as an autocratic grande dame with great aphoristic lines.

The most striking thing about both productions is that the singing is so bad. That is astonishing, given that London is flooded with talent of every kind and there must be excellent sopranos on every street corner. Yet one of the lead characters in Night Music has a voice that, from the first metallic shriek, is positively nasty to hear and the best one can say of the rest is that one or two of them have voices that are quite pleasant. There was not a single particularly good singer in Spring Awakening. And the music itself in both seems to me very third-rate.