ART ISN’T EASY

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 poster, London

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.

Road Show CD

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 poster, NYC

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.

Bounce poster, Chicago

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.

Bounce CD

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.

Unsung Irving Berlin CD

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.

Willie (David Bedella) and Addie Mizner (Michael Jibson)

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.

Hollis (Jon Robyns) and Addie

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).

Tossing hundred dollar bills

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.

John Doyle

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.

Menier Chocolate Factory: the small stage is in the bowels

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.

Perfect fare for a caption competition

A HAIR DO and a SHAVE

Up in town recently, I took the opportunity to catch up with some movies and shows. A friend rather unexpectedly proposed that we see Hairspray in its stage musical manifestation and with a certain becoming reluctance I agreed to escort her, despite the show’s cast being led by two of my least favourite performers, Michael Ball and Mel Smith.

It all turned out a little differently from expected. First, my friend got poorly and cried off, allowing me to buy a reduced price day seat in the front row, a vantage point she certainly would not have tolerated. I got to the theatre at 9.30am and found only four queueing ahead of me but within ten minutes there must have been 30 behind me. I had the distinct impression that everyone within earshot was seeing the show for the tenth time.

Second, Mr Smith has already left the cast, even though it only opened four months ago. I think playing a few weeks just for the reviews is poor stuff. His place as Wilbur Turnblad has been taken by Ian Talbot, a perfectly unexceptionable pro of the old school. Third, Mr Ball gives the performance of his life. His abiding sin, vanity, is not appropriate to the role of Edna Turnblad, the heroine’s mother, which, since John Waters’ original non-musical movie of 1988, has always been played by a man (the late drag artiste Divine originally; Harvey Fierstein and a succession of others including George Wendt of Cheers fame in the Broadway musical; John Travolta in the movie of this second version of the material). Ball wears plentiful padding for the role but the arm flab and the multiple chins are entirely his own. He’ll need to take himself in hand when the run is over. Not much room for vanity there.

It would be a rare curmudgeon who was not charmed by this confection. I suspect that, had you been in a position to glance my way at pretty much any point during the proceedings, you would have caught me with a silly grin on my face. It is wholly good-natured and energetic and the musical score, utterly unmemorable, serves its purpose and offends none. The company is a good mix of handy types and they still play it as if it is the gypsy matinee in the first week of previews.

Mel Smith apart, every lead has won an award. Leanne Jones, the proudly tubby juvenile, Tracy, picked up the Olivier and a brief 6.00 O'Clock News profile a day or two after she won my heart. The yummy boy who, against the cliché, falls for her is Ben James-Ellis who, before he was obliged by Equity to assume the James part of his name, was the sole contestant in last year’s Any Dream Will Do to display any sex appeal (as my regular reader will recall).

The only number that disappointed me was Edna and Wilbur’s sentimental affirmation of their marriage, ‘Timeless to Me’, a perfectly decent little song but the occasion of a deal of ad-libbing and corpsing, led by Michael Ball. The audience falls on this kind of low-grade stuff with hysterical delight – I thought the two women behind me were going to have seizures – believing (I suppose) that it is real and uncontrolled rather than rehearsed and calculated. Think about it: is it likely that this song would suddenly make the performers break up just tonight when they’ve been singing it for four months? Wake up do. I sensed that I was the only person in the audience who didn’t buy this, just as I felt sure I was the only one who recognised John Waters as the voice on the on-stage radio (a little hommage, perhaps, to Mel Brooks and his momentary run-on during the early performances of The Producers on Broadway). But all in all this was a fine, old-fashioned Grand Night Out and the Shaftesbury, premature funeral parlour to more musicals than all the other West End houses put together, must be delighted to play host to one of its rare hits.

A considerably more substantial and significant musical is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and I steeled myself to see Tim Burton’s movie version, hopeful that Sondheim’s evident satisfaction with it and Burton’s proven track record of taking Grand Guignol seriously would militate against the indignities that so often befall musical plays when they go kicking and screaming before the cameras. The first thing to say is that a miraculous amount of the score is in place, rather more than is customary in filmed musicals. This was a nice surprise: the promotion has slyly downplayed that Sweeney Todd is a musical at all (it’s promoted purely as a Johnny Depp vehicle) and a couple of reviews I read suggested that some musical violence might have been done.

Not a bit of it. The movie looks sensational, like a mix of daguerreotype and animated Victorian woodcut, all silver and sepia with the blood picked out and a pair of sequences in bright colours, one a romanticised memory, the other a no less rosy projection. The acting is first rate. Depp can do no wrong in my book and his handling of the songs is masterly. His voice is nothing special but he completely understands the dynamic of sung drama and the way to handle a lyric, giving him the ability to act a singing role comparable to, for instance, Rosalind Russell in the movie of Gypsy. Depp’s gift for varieties of British accent is well known and for this one he has clearly listened to Paul Whitehouse and other brands of London speech.

Helena Bonham Carter’s career has clambered up to a much higher plane since she fell in with Burton and, while every Mrs Lovett I have seen on the stage (seven or eight now) was better cast and better able to find the level of the character’s comedy, she keeps pace with Depp. The only number that defeats the pair of them is ‘A Little Priest’. Neither has the requisite sense of comedy or feel for burlesque to convey the rollicking satire of this brilliant conceit and Burton stages it in a dismayingly literal fashion.

Alan Rickman is suitably malevolent as the cruel judge on whom Todd seeks his revenge, Timothy Spall runs through his familiar bag of tricks as the beadle, Sacha Baron Cohen is triumphant as the charlatan Pirelli and young Edward Sanders (a born Artful Dodger) has prodigious aplomb and musicality as Tobias. The juve leads are on the pallid side: Jamie Campbell Bower sings well as Anthony but looks disturbingly like a twelve year-old girl; Jayne Wisener’s Joanna has already fallen out of my memory but the character is anyway a cipher, for all that she is the subject of one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever written.

Keeping up the blood level, I also saw There Will Be Blood. Now that’s a movie. It’s a rural Citizen Kane and Daniel Day-Lewis is clearly channelling Welles as well as, for the surface detail, John Huston. His performance is nothing short of a miracle. It’s in the interstices, the throw-away moments, the quietness of what he does that, paradoxically perhaps, the genius of the work is most apparent. All of it is palpably lived by Day-Lewis. You never see the mechanics of it or catch him acting and yet it’s huge and authentically Victorian – gracious and courtly and watchful as well as brutal and hubristic and animal. He makes you care about this man even while you fear what he will do. This is one of the great monstres sacrés of cinema and one of the five or six greatest feats of screen acting you will ever see.

What I wasn’t prepared for is that, while the story undoubtedly and inevitably turns bloody, the blood it promises is much more in the sense of kin. This is very much a saga of family, of father and son, of brother and brother though, as is apparent from the outset, these kinships are all false. Indeed, my own reading of the identical twins Paul and Eli is that they are to be seen not as two people but as manifestations of a single split personality; the review in Sight & Sound declares that “the film ultimately refutes” this possibility but I don’t agree. As the saying goes, we never see them together.

I also caught Juno, a wholly fresh and seductive tale of a 16 year-old’s dramas. I was reminded of Jon Stewart’s funny line at the Oscars: “great movies this year but they’re so grim. Thank God for teenage pregnancy”. Diablo Cody’s screenplay richly deserved its awards – this was very much a movie whose success was founded on a sparky script – and Ellen Page’s preternaturally self-possessed Juno was absolutely riveting to watch, enough to make the young Lauren Bacall look like Margaret O’Brien.

I wanted to see No Country for Old Men, being a big fan of, on the one hand, Cormac McCarthy’s novels and, on the other, the Coen Brothers’ movies, but couldn’t fit it in. My host at the house where I was staying, who is in his 70s, said he couldn’t understand most of the dialogue and referred to it as No Country for Deaf Men. With him and his wife, I did see The Kite Runner at their local independent movie house but this was the least of my viewings. Its plot resembles that of Atonement which, for all that I know many detest it, is a far more achieved and honest movie and doesn’t conclude that the answer to the world’s problems is to come and live in the US of A, after a preposterous resolution of a kidnap in Afghanistan suggesting that anybody can be Rambo and get away with it. By and large, local movie-makers do a much more convincing job than western ones who visit and expect to get it in one, even if they are working (as in this case) from a native story.

Elsewhere in the theatre, I went to a matinee of The Sea at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. This is the most accessible of Edward Bond’s works and the first to reach the West End: it’s amusing that it should surface in this most conservative of houses and play an audience of grey heads all, it must be said, listening intently and largely appreciatively. It helps to have someone as accomplished as Eileen Atkins leading the cast. I have also seen Judi Dench as Mrs Rafi and Coral Browne who was its first player – as they say these days, she “created” the role – but I think Dame Eileen is the best. She understands at what level this is a comedy (I’ve never thought that comedy, for all her reputation for fun and larks, is Dame Judi’s forte) but never loses sight of the political underpinnings. David Haig began a bit broadly for my taste as her protagonist, the well-named Hatch, but he settled to it and handled the descent into madness with great skill. Jonathan Kent has become a fine director with a gift for clarity and self-effacement and for blending a company of talents who look unlikely to cohere.

I saw two plays in what we used to call fringe theatres, largely because I have a four-handed play in the market now and venues of this size and kind are the most likely to look upon my work kindly. Neither play was remotely world-shaking and one was simply awful so I shall get depressed if my effort is not thought worthy to be mounted in such company.