On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (29 page)

So, in all,
The Frogs
did not go over and was seldom seen for a while. But Nathan Lane, Dionysos in a piano-accompanied concert version at the Library of Congress in 2000, thought the show would work as a full-scale musical if Sondheim was willing to expand the score with character and plot numbers. The result was “less an expansion,” wrote Jesse Green in the
New York Times
, “than an explosion”: for the piece was wholly reinvented, the music taking on the comic attitudes that had previously been confined to the script. Much else was repurposed. In 405
B.C
., the frogs themselves provide a choral interlude and are not heard from again. In 1974, at Yale, they actively impeded Dionysos’ mission by trying to swamp his boat. In 2004, at Lincoln Center in Nathan Lane’s new version of the script, the frogs (who seek to lure Dionysos into becoming one of them) represent apolitical complacency, and the evening ended with Dionysos exhorting the audience members to keep an eye on their government. Thus, Aristophanes’ consideration of what kind of theatre enlightens its public turned into an example of that kind: it was not realistic (like Euripides), but noble (like Aeschylus).

Here—again, in brief—is what Sondheim added to the largely choral
Frogs
music from thirty years before:

“I Love To Travel”—Dionysos, Xanthias, chorus. A plot number, as the two leads set off to find Herakles. The choral bits were from 1974, but Dionysos and Xanthias’ duet was all new.

“Dress Big”—Bossy Herakles’ character number, with Dionysos’ interjections.

“All Aboard!”—Charon’s solo, evoking the clammy darkness of the underworld.

“Ariadne”—a ballad, Dionysos’ recollection of his late wife.

“Hades”—Pluto’s character number, in an ancient musical-comedy trope: the comic whooping it up with the chorus girls.

“Shaw”—a plot number, as Dionysos introduces the prickly playwright, who arrives complete with entourage. Emphasizing Shaw’s dry wit, the music stops every time he utters one of his patented quips, then starts up again right after. The song also provides a link with Aristophanes’ play, as his Dionysos goes to Hades specifically to bring back Euripides, just as the musical’s Dionysos intends to bring back Shaw. The agon between the writers comes as an unexpected development.

Except for “Ariadne,” these are all comic numbers, even the glowering “All Aboard!.” They go nicely with the choruses left over from Yale, yielding a score that is half-ceremonial and half-character-specific, a sensibly odd blend for a musical based on a play 2,500 years old.

Nathan Lane was obviously going to play Dionysos in his own adaptation of Shevelove’s adaptation, and Xanthias was to have been Chris Kattan. Celebrated for his seven years on
Saturday Night Live
, Kattan maintained a lively trade in craziness, from his characters Gay Hitler to the deranged simian Mr. Peepers. This should have created an inspired moose-and-squirrel teaming with Lane: the one’s traditional top-banana timing and intonation with Kattan’s comedy-club improv style. After a few previews, however, Kattan was replaced by Roger Bart. In an interview with Geraldine Brown for the
Los Angeles Times
, Kattan—who was new to the stage—revealed that he had been told that he “didn’t speak the language of the theater.” But, says Kattan, “There was never a sit-down, let’s-talk-about-it session. It was just over.” Perhaps Kattan was too used to
Saturday Night Live
’s seat-of-the-pants extemporized format to key himself into the lock of Broadway rehearsal etiquette. Still, in the impetuous style of the old comedy musical of the 1920s, Kattan would have been right at home.

The Frogs
, whose revision opened at Lincoln Center on July 22, 2004, is one of the few Sondheim shows to lack a cult. At the same time, it lacks a Sondheim anxiety figure, forced to make life-central decisions or, yes, later regret them. In this show, everybody’s happy, even dour Charon. It’s a light piece in all. It may be that the production number of the frog attacks and the Shaw-Shakespare contest go on for too long. Nevertheless, it’s an ingratiating score by—for once in his post-sixties shows—a merry Sondheim, carefree and accommodating.

Road Show

Parable on two American personalities, the builder and the destroyer.

Suggested by Alva Johnston’s
The Legendary Mizners
.

Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Book: John Weidman.

Seen in three versions. First as
Wise Guys
, 1999.

Original Leads: Nathan Lane, Victor Garber, Michael C. Hall. Director: Sam Mendes.

Second as
Bounce
, 2003.

Original Leads: Richard Kind, Howard McGillin, Gavin Creel. Director: Hal Prince.

Third as
Road Show
, 2008.

Original Leads: Alexander Gemignani, Michael Cerveris, Claybourne Elder. Director: John Doyle.

The journalist Alva Johnston was noted above all for his
New Yorker
profiles, in a series the magazine was famous for under its founding editor, Harold Ross (from 1925 to 1952). At first just a short essay but later expanding to multi-part studies running in consecutive issues, the
New Yorker
profile came in two kinds, one a look at prominent Names of the day, the other less well-known and even occult figures. Like the popular fiction series—Clarence Day’s reminiscences of his youth that became the play
Life With Father
, or John O’Hara’s
Pal Joey
letters—the
New Yorker
profiles were thought a main reason that people subscribed to the magazine, because they were entertaining and, at times, shocking. They were playful as well. Ethel Merman’s profile was called “Little Sure Shot” (after the sobriquet bestowed upon her by Sitting Bull in
Annie Get Your Gun
), Alexander Woollcott’s “Big Nemo” (after Winsor McCay’s comic-strip hero, a young boy haunted by fantastical dreams, known as Little Nemo).

Alva Johnston’s profiles give an idea of the series’ range, from Hollywoodites Darryl Zanuck, Wallace Beery, and the Warner Brothers to Albert Einstein, a fake Russian prince, and the secretary of the New York Society For the Suppression of Vice. Johnston profiled also Wilson Mizner, as “Legend of a Sport,” in 1950, and Mizner’s brother Addison, in “The Palm Beach Architect,” in 1952. The two pieces were then combined into a book,
The Legendary Mizners
(the adjective became
Fabulous
in the English edition, as the Mizners were a strictly American legend), and Sondheim, then twenty-three, saw a musical in this odd pairing of con man (Wilson) and artist (Addison). In Sondheim’s understanding, the pair had a “can’t live with him, can’t live without him but I’d rather” relationship, Wilson a man of great charm who never fails to let you down and Addison a tortured soul who somehow turns into Society’s choice in the styling of mansions in Palm Beach. It’s a foretaste, perhaps, of
Merrily We Roll Along
, if Franklin Shepard were a crook and Charlie his regretfully adoring brother.

The Legendary Mizners
would thus have been Sondheim’s first Broadway musical. But David Merrick had optioned the material: Irving Berlin was writing the songs, to a book by S. N. Behrman, known for social comedy and also Merrick’s book writer on his first Broadway hit, Harold Rome’s musical
Fanny
. However, Merrick’s show never materialized, and Sondheim finally began work on his own Mizner musical in 1994, with John Weidman writing the book. As with Weidman’s
Pacific Overtures
and
Assassins
librettos, the show would turn pages of history; the plan was to create a fun-filled musical comedy with a serious subtext on the nature of American capitalism in the years between the post–Civil War robber barons and the Great Depression: when capitalism worked (for some) and when it failed (for everyone).

Yet the focus was personal, not political. Wilson uses and cheats while Addison creates. Wilson leaps recklessly from the sports world to writing for Broadway and Hollywood; Addison finds something he’s good at—design—and sticks with it. They love each other, they hate each other, they need each other. They feel complete only when together—as if American business only works with a combination of the unscrupulous promoter and the dedicated artist. The movies. Popular music. Fashion.

Let’s get literary about it and quote Goethe’s
Faust
:

Two souls dwell, alas!, in my breast,

And each would break from the other;

One is worldly, snatching at joys of love,

While the other soars, from dust of earth

To thoughts on high.

Or we can consult the popular side and note the parallel—one Sondheim relished—with the comical Bing Crosby-Bob Hope
Road
series in which two frenemies get into mischief in Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, and so on. There was always a girl—the same one, Dorothy Lamour—and a host of cutthroats and hostile officials, but the films were comic above all, and Sondheim’s Mizners were presumably going to take their own road in a similar tone. Yet under the fluff there would be subtextual enlightenment: a show about America.

Somehow, Sondheim and Weidman had trouble getting the elements properly blended, and the show appeared in multiple forms on its way to being finalized. After a few readings, it was first given by the New York Theatre Workshop as
Wise Guys
. Then it went to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre as
Bounce
, thence to New York’s Public Theater, on November 18, 2008, as
Road Show
.

Let us summarize the differences among the three versions:

WISE GUYS: a vaudeville frame gives the two brothers direct access to the audience in the convivial Crosby-Hope manner. Third lead: Paris Singer (a real-life figure, heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune) for the Palm Beach sequence, when the brothers symbolize American entrepreneurism in a mating of gambler and technician.

BOUNCE: a black comedy. Vaudeville frame gone. Third lead: Hollis Bessemer, apparently Addison’s lover, taking over Paris Singer’s role. A leading woman is added, Nellie, played by Michele Pawk—the Dorothy Lamour gig, so to say. Former MGM star Jane Powell appears as Mama Mizner.

ROAD SHOW: similar to
Bounce
, but very compressed, centering on the brothers’ relationship rather than on their symbolic place in American capitalism. Dorothy Lamour dropped. Addison’s romance with Hollis more overt. Played in a single set with the ensemble watching and taking part as needed.

In all,
Road Show
took fourteen years of gestation, including nine years from the first performance to the premiere of the finished work, and the rewriting spun off many new songs that were then replaced by newer ones. The so very public revisions recall
Merrily We Roll Along
’s previews, inadvertently giving the public a message of desperation. In fact,
Wise Guys
through
Bounce
to
Road Show
comprised cutting away the amusing details of American history, from gold rush to Florida land boom (and bust) to reach the show’s core: a bad marriage of two men who would rather die than divorce. Starting as an ironic musical comedy, the material finally asserted itself as a kind of sassy musical play, dour and depressed yet joking around all the same.
Bounce
’s irresistibly catchy title song turned, in
Road Show
, into “Waste” (the same melody, with new lyrics), now a sarcastic requiem for the brothers. Sondheim says that not till “Waste” did the show open with a number that clarifies its view of its two leads: Wilson may be charming but Addison is the good guy. Wilson is the rogue, the user, the creep. That’s how the audience always saw it—and now the show saw it that way, too.

As I’ve said before, Sondheim’s theatre concentrates on the mechanics of making choices, and the emotional physics of repenting those choices. To put it another way: If free will, then
Follies
. Some wrong choices wreck your life; others daunt you for a time.
Road Show
offers a classic case of the latter in a moment we’ve seen in plenty of movies, when the audience knows more than the characters do and sees them as catastrophically self-destructive. It’s meant to be comic, at least in the Crosby-Hope films. In a Sondheim show, it isn’t really comic. It has weight, because this isn’t a silly movie. It’s life.