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Catherine Zeta-Jones

Oscar-winning Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones has made her Broadway debut in a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music.

It has been 20 years since her last proper theater gig. At that time, her song-and-dance skills had earned her chorus and ingénue roles in London. “I used to be the kid, the baby in the cast,” she says wistfully.

Movie stardom cut short Zeta-Jones’ stage career, though her gifts were put to use in a few one-off performances and, more memorably, her Oscar-winning turn as Velma Kelly in the 2002 film version of Chicago.

Now, at 40, she is making her Broadway debut as another, albeit less sinister woman of experience, in a new production of the Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler musical A Little Night Music.

In the revival, which opens Sunday at the Walter Kerr Theatre, Zeta-Jones is cast as Desiree Armfeldt, a veteran actress who is reunited with an old lover, now married to a much younger woman. The role was originally played in 1973 by Glynis Johns, then months away from her 50th birthday, and was portrayed in 1995 by a 60-year-old Judi Dench.

But director Trevor Nunn envisioned a Desiree who was, if not a child, more youthfully sensuous — more in keeping with the character as she was presented in the 1955 Ingmar Bergman film, Smiles of a Summer Night, which inspired Music. Nunn, who helmed Music on London’s West End last summer — this is the first time the show is being revived on Broadway — approached Zeta-Jones, along with Sondheim.

“I was honored, of course,” she says. “But we never talked about being glamorous or sexy, just what was going on in Desiree’s life.” She points out that the musical is set at the turn of the last century: “At that point, a woman in her 40s was considered over the hill. And if you were a show person, the parts were decreasing.”

If Zeta-Jones brings a freshness to the role, it offers less of a showcase for some of the talents that allowed her to razzle-dazzle audiences as Velma. “There’s no high-kicking for me here,” she notes, and relatively little singing. Desiree is frequently played by actresses with lesser voices, even though she covers Sondheim’s most famous song: the aching ballad Send in the Clowns.

“I pretty much spoke (Clowns) in rehearsals,” Zeta-Jones says. “You can’t compete with all the great voices that have sung it” outside the show, in various recordings. More to the point, in the context of Music, “it isn’t a song you should belt. It’s more of an acting piece.”

Time Out New York theater critic Adam Feldman notes that while star casting is more crucial in plays than in blockbuster musicals, “a Sondheim musical is more like a play, and in that regard it might benefit from a marquee name or two.” (Angela Lansbury also appears in this Music, as Desiree’s mother.) And “while people may be surprised that (Zeta-Jones) doesn’t kick up her heels like she did in Chicago, they’ll get to see one of the most beautiful and elegant musicals of all time.”

Zeta-Jones agrees. The mother of two — she and husband Michael Douglas have a son, Dylan, 9, and daughter, Carys, 6 — was offered musical projects after Chicago, “but I wanted it to be the right thing. This show has so many elements — you have farcical comedy and poignancy and the added genius of the music.”

You won’t likely have to wait two decades to see her on stage again. “I want to do a straight play next,” she says, and to create a new role in a play or musical. “And one of my biggest dreams is to do a one-woman show, with dancing and singing. I just have to figure out the concept.”

Catherine Zeta-Jones @ Broadway opening after party for “A Little Night Music”

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