Marking both the return of Angela Lansbury to musicals and the beginning of what one hopes will be a lengthy Broadway career for film star Catherine Zeta-Jones, the revival of A Little Night Music has been imported from London (as most major musical revivals seem to be) with a distinctly odd air. Based on Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Smiles of a Summer Night, Stephen Sondheim's Night Music is a melancholy look at lust between a group of the wealthy and bored at a country estate at the turn of the 20th century, an oxymoron that Trevor Nunn’s production can’t quite reconcile.

But if some of the cast members seem to have been beamed in from different shows (Leigh Ann Larkin, as maid Petra, delivers the killer 11 o’clock number “The Miller’s Son” as if she were auditioning to play Ado Annie in Oklahoma! She wouldn’t have won the part), Zeta-Jones and Alexander Hanson, as actress Desirée Armfeldt and her married former lover Fredrik, positively glow every time they’re on stage. Much as been made of Zeta-Jones’ “earthier” take on Desirée, but no one seems to have noticed that her rasping delivery and comic timing owes a great deal to Joanna Lumley’s Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous. Which is not to say that the approach doesn’t work—far from it. Turning Desirée into a woman who wants, sometimes selfishly, to laugh and have a good time separates her from the rest of the miserable characters, all of whom are tormented by thoughts of sin or misbegotten love.

As Fredrik, Hanson brings a witty, mature warmth to the Broadway stage that has been kissing from it for quite some time. His scenes with Zeta-Jones are marvels of chemistry and bantering wit; his scenes with Ramona Mallory, as Fredrik’s virginal wife Anne, barely register. This may be due to Mallory’s tendency to giggle her lines rather than declaim them. The result is rather like watching Taylor Swift take the Broadway stage. Erin Davie and Aaron Lazar aren’t very memorable as dueling couple Charlotte and Carl-Magnus, though Davie does a magnificent job with Sondheim’s acidic “Every Day a Little Death.”

You will surely have heard by now that Angela Lansbury is giving a splendid performance as Desirée’s aged mother. Chalk the critical ballyhoos up to genuflecting before a legendary theatrical performer, because if Lansbury were a horse, she’d have been sent to the glue factory long ago. Her marvelous turn in Blithe Spirit earlier this year was the result of having her lines fed to her via an earpiece; no such earpiece is used here, which is all too obvious. Fluttering breathlessly over the lines she’s unsure of and coming down firmly on those she is, Lansbury has some lovely elegiac moments that are quickly forgotten in the face of her inability to remember the lyrics to her one song. Legend shouldn’t be enough to ensure employment; Lansbury is doing herself and her own storied past a major disservice by appearing nightly before an audience as something quite a bit less than a total professional.

Open run. Walter Kerr Theater, 219 W. 48th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; times vary, $52-$137.