"A Little Night Music" is one of Stephen Sondheim's best works. It was written during his particularly fertile period of the 1970s where brilliant pieces, such as "Company," "Follies," "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd", kept pouring out via innovative productions directed by Hal Prince.

It is also a piece where Mr. Sondheim took several risks. First, he used a film as source material, Ingmar Bergman's sly sex comedy, "Smiles of a Summer Night," a light truffle that the famed director made in the midst of producing a series of heavy and richly symbolic works. Second, he had the audacity to borrow his title from Mozart's Serenade No. 13 for Strings in G Major (otherwise known as "Eine kleine Nachtmusik") as if to suggest that he was going to use the opportunity to create a comic opera in the style of Mozart (interestingly, Mr. Bergman was doing something similar at that time - imposing his delightful cinematic vision on

A Little Night Music.

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Mozart's "The Magic Flute"). Third, Mr. Sondheim, a renowned lover of creating and solving puzzles, set himself the task of composing an entire work in variations on waltz time. Waltzes are wonderful, but an entire evening of them can quickly become boring. Finally, "A Little Night Music" has a cast of principal singers only - there is a Greek chorus of five singers who set up and comment on the action, but each has a character name, and each should have a distinct personality.

Thus, "A Little Night Music" is deceptively simple on the surface but devilishly difficult to pull off. The Lyric Opera San Diego's current production, running through next weekend at the Birch North Park Theatre, gets the surface part quite well but falls short on the devilish part. To be fair, the company is hampered by the limitations of the venue where it performs.

Set in Sweden during the portion of the summer when night never really falls, "A Little Night Music" tells the story of past, present and would-be lovers who long to settle into domestic bliss (loneliness and longing are recurring themes in Mr. Sondheim's work). Fredrik Egerman (Scott Gregory) has married Anne (Caroline Nelms), an 18-year-old who is the same age as Fredrik's son, the sexually repressed Henrik (Robert Bolden). But Anne is a nervous bride, and the marriage has gone unconsummated. In frustration, Fredrik visits his former mistress, the actress and free spirit Désirée Armfeldt. He arrives as word comes that Ms. Armfeldt's current liaison, Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm (Raymond Ayers) is about to arrive. Quick thinking saves Fredrik from being challenged to a duel. The count, however, informs his wife, Charlotte (Shirley Giltner), of the incident, and she realizes that Fredrik is married to her chum from school. A visit from Charlotte reveals Ann's concern that she won't be able to satisfy her older and more experienced husband. Désirée contrives to get Fredrik to herself by inviting him to visit her mother's (Kandis Chappell) country estate. Naturally, the whole Egerman household must come along. Getting wind of the visit, Count Malcolm decides to crash the party. The result is a sexual roundelay where Fredrik realizes that he might have a daughter (Fredrika, portrayed by Larissa Garcia), Henrik and Ann realize that there is more than a "parental" connection between them, and even Petra (Laura Bueno), the Egerman's maid, gets into the act. The night "smiles" three times, as Madame Armfeldt had predicted - on the young, the fools, and the old.

The Lyric's production gets quite a bit right. J. Sherwood Montgomery's staging is mostly fluid and full of interesting acting details. Mr. Montgomery's set suggests the Swedish setting while providing minimal but effective means to change locales. Stephen Terry's lighting is basic but effective. Pam Stompoly-Ericson's costumes and makeup look lovely but do tend to blur into the backdrop in the scenes where the entire company is on stage. There is a full 24-piece orchestra, conducted by Leon Natker, that plays Jonathan Tunick's original orchestrations, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

The performers all work to put their characters across, but they are hampered by the theatre's acoustics. The tuning in the Birch seems to work best with lower range women and men, and it is those voices that carry into what's not all that big a hall. And, the theatre is tuned for singing, rather than speech, so it is particularly difficult to hear spoken dialogue, even when performers are facing the audience. It seems as though the orchestra is in the same room as the audience, but the cast is in a different, distant, room. One might be tempted to write off some of the speech problems to singers who are not trained as actors, but Ms. Chappell is a veteran of the stage, and even her lines could be heard at times and were blurred at other times. The acoustic difficulties are a real liability with this particular piece because the lyrics and the lines are extremely important (and the Lyric is not providing supertitles). The weak link in most Sondheim shows is the book, but this one (by Hugh Wheeler, who also provided the book for "Sweeney Todd") makes equal contribution as the lyrics to the enjoyment of the story.

The acoustics also throw off the balances among the five-voice Greek chorus (Jordan Miller, Lisa Elliott, Fran Hartshorn, Bryan Balderman, and Shelly Hart Brenenman). Individually, it depended on what else was going on or where the singer was standing as to whether that person could be heard. When the score called for the group to sing individual lines at the same time, however, all went to mush.

The cast has either operatic or musical comedy backgrounds and that mattered, too, in terms of whether and how well they could be heard. The opera singers fared best.

Despite the problems, the leads all gave well-considered performances. Mr. Gregory made for a very likable Fredrik, and Mr. Ayers lived up to his advance billing as someone who is going places, both as a singer and as an actor. Ms. Chappell was both sly and regal as the worldly wise grande dame, though Ms. Giltner gave her a run for the money as an equally worldly wise countess. As Désiré, Ms. Huber was luminous, and her take on "Send in the Clowns," probably the most popular song in the Sondheim canon, was entirely fresh.

The Lyric has been focusing its effort on raising enough money to stay alive as a company, and Mr. Montgomery announced before the performance that their recent efforts had been successful. The company provides excellent opportunities for young artists and local singers to be heard and is deserving of support, but I wish that they could get enough ahead to plan to fix the acoustics in their hall.

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