Last weekend, on a brief visit to London, I caught a preview of Road Show. This is the latest and very likely the last of the musical plays with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the pre-eminent practitioner in the field for the past half century. It was his only show that I had never seen, not having been able to get to the public workshop in New York in 1999 or the world premiere production in Chicago in 2003 (followed by a brief Kennedy Center run) or the unveiling of the show in its present form at the Public Theater in New York three years ago. All of his earlier masterpieces I have seen – most of them several times – in New York, London and English provincial productions and I know them backwards.
Road Show is Sondheim’s difficult child. It has been rewritten, reshaped and rescored as often as Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, if by fewer hands; its legend seems as elusive as that of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Allegro. Unlike those two shows, it has also had a series of name-changes. In Sondheim’s original conception, it was Strike It Rich! When first knocked into shape and workshopped, it was called Wise Guys. For a while, a decade ago, it was known as Gold! named after what, for the duration, has been one of the score’s most characteristic numbers. In Chicago, it was presented as Bounce and, under that title, was first recorded on CD. It was for the Public Theater production that it became Road Show which, though in many ways its least satisfactory title, is surely what it will now remain.
And after all that, how is it? Well, it should be acknowledged frankly at the outset that it is second-rank Sondheim. It sits in the canon with the works that pre-date Follies (1971) and post-date Into the Woods (1987). By any other artist’s standards, this is rich company. But the eight shows created at Sondheim’s peak – with the pardonable exception of The Frogs (1974) – are musicals of such sublimity, of an ambition, profundity, innovative grace and emotional daring that could not be imagined before they were wrought, that it is idle to expect Sondheim to have the wind and limb to approach such heights again.
The nearest kin in his previous work to Road Show is Assassins of 1991, the second Sondheim show to have John Weidman on the book (Road Show is the third). Both scores – sometimes subtly, sometimes directly – evoke traditional American song and you find yourself surprised not to have a banjo turn up in the new show as it does in the old. Each score carries a whiff of burlesque and an undertone of satirical commentary.
Road Show draws on the five real-life Mizner brothers, four of whom, at the dawn of the twentieth century, went a progress separately and together in search of the American dream. Weidman and Sondheim only treat of the youngest two, Wilson and Addison who, they would have us accept, stand as handy exemplars of the contradictions at the heart of the American character. Given this emblematic quality, neither Willie nor Addie could exactly be claimed as fully rounded or complex characters, certainly not when compared with Phyllis, Ben, Sally and Buddy in Follies, Desirée and Fredrik in A Little Night Music, Kayama and Manjiro in Pacific Overtures (despite the conventions of Kabuki), Sweeney and Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Franklin, Charley, Mary and Gussie in Merrily We Roll Along and George and Dot in Sunday in the Park with George, not to mention Fosca and Giorgio in the later Passion.
With one exception, the other figures in Road Show are ciphers. That exception is a character who did not appear until the Bounce stage of the show’s evolution: Hollis Bessemer, a young, disaffected heir who longs to act as a patron of the arts. The basis for the character is the developer of Palm Beach, Paris Singer, but whether Singer became the lover of Addie Mizner as well as the business partner (as Hollis does) I cannot discover. I suspect he didn’t, hence the change of name. Paris Singer was a lover of – and fathered a child by – the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. The real Addie, however, does appear to have been discreetly homosexual.
One way in which Road Show scores over the Bounce stage of the show’s evolution is that the lilting ballad ‘The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened’, first written for Willie Mizner and a woman character no longer in the dramatis personæ, is now performed by Addie and Hollis, thereby becoming Sondheim’s first gay love song. It is almost certainly the score’s highlight and a tune that remains deep in the brain.
Explicit homosexuality would certainly not have been permitted to inform a mooted Mizner musical of many decades earlier. Intriguingly enough, Irving Berlin, who knew the Mizners personally, tried several times to fashion a musical about them, his own first title for which was Wise Guy. Other titles the unfinished show went by were The Mizner Story, Sentimental Guy and – this one only about Addison – Palm Beach. I have just discovered that there is a CD entitled Unsung Irving Berlin containing several of the numbers that Berlin wrote for this show that never made it to the stage. Sadly the CD is not available as a download from Dress Circle, iTunes or Amazon, otherwise I could have incorporated further detail into this posting. I shall have to order it as a CD, pricey though it is.
But back to Road Show. I don’t much care for the number that Mama Mizner sings about Willie, ‘Isn’t He Something!’, though I know many others rate it highly. One rather fetching song, the lyric of which has necessarily been comprehensively reworked, is the title number from when the show was called Bounce. Rather shockingly, the original lyric contained the kind of misrhyme that Sondheim so scorns in his fascinating book Finishing the Hat: “bounce” with both “counts” and “accounts”. ‘Waste’, the new version, avoids such solecism but is less effective in setting the agenda for what follows, drawing in too many of the plot’s succeeding strands for the first-time listener to grasp.
At the other end of the score, before a reprise of ‘Waste’ wraps it up, there is a “big finish” number, ‘Get Out! Go’, that doesn’t hold a candle to comparable songs from earlier Sondheim scores: ‘Next’ in Pacific Overtures, say, or (emotionally anyway) the finale of Passion or, supremely, Sunday in the Park’s overwhelming, transporting ‘Sunday’, Sondheim’s greatest choral achievement.
Road Show also has its inspirational, anthemic declaration, ‘It’s in Your Hands Now’, framed as Papa Mizner’s vale to his boys, and pretty routine it is too. Compare and contrast the ecstatic ‘Our Time’ in Merrily We Roll Along and even the cod varsity song ‘The Hills of Tomorrow’ from the same show.
I dare say it seems grudging and mean-spirited to carp at Road Show for not being Follies or Pacific Overtures, as it would to grumble that Pericles is not King Lear. On the other hand, I’d far rather see Road Show a second, third, fourth and fifth time than Phantom of the Opera or Spiderman the once (and I’ve no plans to see either the once). I think that, at heart, the story of the Mizner brothers just does not urgently lend itself to musicalisation in the way that Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and Ettore Scola’s Passione d’Amore did (as respectively A Little Night Music and Passion).
The characters, such as they are, struggle to be sympathetic for the audience. Such success as the brothers make of their lives seems a little arbitrary. Willie at least is clearly a champion blagger and we can believe that promotion comes naturally to him. Addie’s unsuspected talent for architecture is harder to fathom. For him, I guess, art is easy. It’s not a convincing notion from Sondheim of all people. That the Mizners’ successes bring them fleeting fulfilment is of course the (pretty thin) point. On the way to making that point, the plotting is too discursive to suit simple, emblematic staging. Perhaps that is why Berlin could never crack the subject and why Weidman and Sondheim have struggled with it for so long.
Director John Doyle has terrific form in Sondheim, including in this show (he staged the Public Theater version). In particular, his wonderfully inventive revivals of Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park took those shows to new heights of achievement. For instance, veteran Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince (who directed Bounce in Chicago) worked wonders with the premiere production of Sweeney but Sondheim has revealed that he always meant it to be a chamber piece and so Doyle’s version must have thrilled him as it did us.
Road Show nearly defeats him, I feel. The sequence covering Addie’s travels goes for very little, the (somewhat middle-aged) supporting cast’s neutral costumes no more evocative than the unimaginative lighting and routine movement. Maybe some kind of atmos track would have helped. The convention of tossing hundred dollar bills into the air pays diminishing returns too.
There’s a lot to be said for chamber production, inevitably if we are to see big-canvas work in these straitened times. The Menier Chocolate Factory, whose laudable policy ensures that nothing is too ambitious for its small space, has mounted many musicals that London would otherwise have been denied. One of which Road Show put me in mind was Richard Maltby Jr & David Shire's Take Flight for which John Weidman also wrote the book. Given my own level of disappointment with Road Show, I tried to re-imagine it on a big stage with bottomless funding. A little spectacle might help it a lot. But I still don’t think it would work because I believe that the flaw is in the very subject matter. Notwithstanding, given such resources, Stephen Sondheim would for sure want to do another major rewrite and perhaps find yet another title. I’d be tempted to offer Busted Flush.
2 comments:
One need only glance at the gasps of Road Show appraisers to find that highly valued items were bought for pennies on the dollar. After all, they make their living from such arbitrage opportunities where buying low and selling high is not only an art but a religion, much as in the world of stocks and bonds. The most valuable commodity is one for free, or nearly free, regardless of any professional aspiration or obligation as appraisers/auctioneers. Why would anyone wonder why their was corruption in those markets with such an obvious incentive to misappropriate, steal, or embezzle?
John Doyle did not direct Sunday in the Park with George, however, it was produced by the Menier Theatre.
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