And in The Miller's Son Every Day a Little Death and of course Send in the Clowns

And in "The Miller's Son", "Every Day a Little Death" and, of course, "Send in the Clowns", it has three songs which are the equal of anything in Sondheim's output. Which is to say, the equal (at least) of any theatre-music going.Franco Zeffirelli's production of Tosca has been going for more than 30 years at Covent Garden, re-staged by John Cox but with the same designs; and in that time it has been a sort of hotel de passe for celebrated divas - starting with Callas (whose ghost still haunts the sets) and including Bumbry, Caballe and Behrens. But as an essay in the interaction of time, love and human frailty it raises the stakes of musical theatre beyond the compass of any other composer I know writing today. Night Music isn't flawless: I'm never really convinced by the usefulness of the liebeslieder chorus or the sudden escalation of activity in the denouement.

Sian Phillips is a chilly Madame Armfeldt but delivers her set-piece song "Liasons" with the right degree of faded spice. And Judi Dench plays Desiree like it was one of the great character roles of modern theatre - as maybe it is - with an endearing shabby grandeur and incredible finesse.Above all, these are performances that celebrate the sheer refinement of a piece that makes its points through eloquence rather than body-blows. Patricia Hodge is a joy as Charlotte, the wife who poignantly accommodates her husband's infidelities: a text-book illustration of how Sondheim's genius flowers in the subdued compromises of real life rather than the exuberant triumphs of fiction. But one of the fascinating things about Night Music is that for all its pull toward swirling ensemble numbers, the substance of the piece decants into solo songs that address the audience face on. Everything ultimately hangs on individual performances - which, at the National, are class acts even if they come with no more voice than absolutely necessary.

Worse still, it gets veiled behind a gauze tube that descends like a capacious condom from the fly: a nice reminder of the risks of promiscuity (Night Music is an elevated sex-romp after all) but otherwise redundant.So, not many points for presentation. Apart from its adroit mobility, the set is sterile, with a crossword-clue approach to telling you that you're in fin de siecle Sweden. At the National the only thing that dances with an ounce of virtuosity is the stage, which sweeps one scene into another with a sleek display of hi-tech transformation (a revolve that spirals up and down) but doesn't give much sense of time or place or atmosphere. What you get is a soft spectacle that spreads itself thin across too big and too open a space (the proscenium-less Olivier) where the action and a lot of indifferent choreography look lost. The choreography is critical - because Night Music is largely a dance score and an exercise in triple time, indebted to the dark nostalgia of Ravel's La Valse which Sondheim must have absorbed intravenously as he was writing.

In Sean Mathias's new production at the National (see also theatre review, page 14), they don't - even though Mathias has made concessions to sharpness like reviving Charlotte's abrasive "My Husband the Pig", dropped at the rehearsal stage of the original Broadway showing. But as Sondheim and his collaborator Hal Prince were fond of saying in the 1970s when it first appeared, Night Music was meant to be whipped- cream with knives; and the problem it has posed ever since is how to make the knives cut. And like Rosenkavalier, Night Music is Mozartian, decked out in irony and waltz tunes but dramatically indebted to Cosi and Figaro. It tells a story of mismatched relationships put to the test, found wanting, and re-ordered on a (maybe) better footing in a garden on a summer's night Pure 18th- century Pure Viennese Pure whipped-cream.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S A Little Night Music is his Rosenkavalier: a piece of purposeful regression that takes time out from the contemporary American soul-scraping of its predecessors, Company and Follies, and waltzes back to the period niceties of country-house romantic comedy. China has never won, either - though we can't think of a name - nor the Netherlands (Harry Mulisch, Cees Noteboom), nor Brazil, whose Autran Dourado and Jorge Amado must be possibles. Africa is under-represented (maybe Chinua Achebe, maybe Doris Lessing), so is the Arab world (maybe the poet Adonis), so is Australia (maybe Les Murray) Milan Kundera remains uncrowned. So do RK Narayan and Salman Rushdie - the Swedish Academy has been bravely undiplomatic before, and India has not had a winner for 80 years. Then there's the Gaelic world, also without a Laureate: Scotland's Sorley Maclean is much admired, while both the Welsh and English Arts Councils are supporting RS Thomas...