Theater Review By Ron Fassler . . . .
One of the true oddities in the long and versatile career of Stephen Sondheim, The Frogs is like no other show in the canon. In 1974, he created a few songs at the request of his good friend, the playwright and director Burt Shevelove, with whom he’d collaborated on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Shevelove was prepping an adaptation of Aristophanes’s 405 B.C. play, The Frogs, for Yale University It’s the tale of Dionysos, the God of wine and drama, who undertakes a trip to the underworld to bring back a dead playwright like Aeschylus or Euripides in order to bring order to the chaotic world above. Students then in attendance at its prestigious School of Drama—including Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang—were recruited for the Chorus, and it was all staged in the Yale gymnasium’s indoor swimming pool. Is any of this catching your interest yet?
Sad to report, then, that it was not a success. Among a myriad of problems, one big issue had to do with the acoustics being so bad in the pool area that Sondheim summed it up by saying, “it was like trying to do a show in the men’s urinal.” Though it only yielded a few songs, none of them were recorded until a one-night-only live event in 1983 at the Whitney Museum called, “A Stephen Sondheim Evening.” That was when we got to hear its opening number, “Invocation and Instructions to the Audience,” and a haunting melody set to the tune of “Fear No More the Heat of the Sun,” a Shakespearean song written for his Cymbeline. It took until 2001 for a recording of all its songs to appear; and in 2004, Nathan Lane took it upon himself to do his own adaptation of what Shevelove first began, and he recruited Sondheim to write some additional songs to strengthen its narrative. The result was a 2004 staging at Lincoln Center, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman and starring Lane himself as Dionysos. It ran 94 performances, produced a new cast recording, then quietly disappeared.
That is until last night, twenty years later when, catty-corner from Lincoln Center at Rose Hall in the Barclay’s Center at Columbus Circle, it opened for a mighty run of three performances. As part of the series titled “MasterVoices,” this was a truncated concert conceived and implemented by Ted Sperling, its artistic head, who both conducted and directed the evening. Nathan Lane was on hand to narrate things, opening by stating, “Good evening. I’m Nathan Lane. And this is all my fault.” What followed were top-notch actors all gathered in service to the Great God Sondheim, backed by a chorus of 120 and an 18-piece orchestra. The sold-out crowd seemed to luxuriate in the richness of the music and laugh at the trials and tribulations by way of Greek mythology through the lens of two such funny men as Shevelove and Lane.
And speaking of funny men, its two lead characters were cast with two of Broadway’s most excellent practitioners, Douglas Sills and Kevin Chamberlin. Instilling his Dionysos with enough pomposity to give Kelsey Grammar’s Frasier a run for his money, Sills’s rich voice and faultless diction paints a portrait of erudition and willful ignorance. As his slave Xanthias, Kevin Chamberlin, as always, put his unique brand of comedy to excellent advantage. Perpetually worried, hyper-alert and woefully ignorant, combined with facial expressions that play to the top row of the balcony without sacrificing the truth, the Gods of the theater indeed shined upon him. No less effective were brief and welcome cameos from Jordan Danica’s William Shakespeare and Dylan Baker’s George Bernard Shaw. As the cutting Irish playwright, Baker gets one of the best lines in the play when he forlornly states, “The longer I’m dead, the more I see I am never wrong about anything.” And Marc Kudisch provides a hilarious solo as Herakles, preening in his “Dress Big” number, with more posturing and posing than a runway model. And in a reprise of his performance in the 2004 production, Peter Bartlett is on hand once again portraying an effete and ridiculous Pluto, the Roman god of the dead and ruler of Hades. It’s worth the price of admission just for his line reading on “Get out of town!”
Considering Sondheim began work on this in 1974—fresh off his triumphs of Company (1970), Follies (1971) and A Little Night Music (1973)—this was the first hint that he was about to begin taking some serious turns with his melodies. It marked the beginning of an adventurous and experimental style that overwhelmed his score to Passion (1994), continued with Road Show (2008), and culminated in his posthumous Here We Are, currently playing in Hudson Yards at The Shed. Lyrically, The Frogs has Sondheim’s usual high standards to offer:
HERAKLES
You gotta look messy,
Not saucy,
Less dressy,
More bossy,
Be mussy,
Not glossy.
Dionysos smoothes out a wrinkle.
Too fussy.
Dionysos tilts his head forward rakishly.
Too Fosse.
And kudos to Nathan Lane who has come up with some winning one-liners, like calling Viagra “the God of perseverance” and subtle exchanges like this one:
DIONYSOS
Did you always want to be a slave?
XANTHIAS
Strangely, no.
The Frogs will never be a perennial, and it remains more a curiosity than anything else. But for Sondheim aficionados, this Master Voices concert was a marvelous way to get acquainted with a part of his repertoire that may always be the red-headed stepchild, yet is no less an accomplishment than anything else to which he put his name. Though mainly an intellectual exercise, highbrow mixed with lowbrow, it felt as welcome as an old friend you never really knew and finally get the chance to become better acquainted with. I don’t think I was alone among the 1,300 in attendance who felt the same way.
The Frogs. Presented by MasterVoices, played three performances (November 3-4) at Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center (Broadway at West 60th Street). www.mastervoices.org
Photos: Erin Baiano
Cover photo: Dylan Baker as George Bernard Shaw with dancers
