New Sondheim: enjoy it while stocks last
Gerald Kaufman is enthralled by the first Sondheim premiere in 14 years. A minor work Road Show may be, but it is still worth much more than anyone else’s musicals
ASondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd, and those anthologies, such as Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together, which started out as such fun but became funerary lamentations for the lack of something novel, exciting and, most of all, unknown.
Yet now, 14 years after Passion, Sondheim’s adaptation of an Italian film about an embarrassingly neurotic love affair, comes Road Show. I saw it a few days ago, shortly after its opening.
True, Road Show is not entirely new. Predecessor incarnations, variously named Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold, have been wandering around the United States for ten years. During this prolonged period of gestation its composer and the librettist John Weidman, who worked with Sondheim on his extraordinary Pacific Overtures and the mini-masterpiece Assassins, have been remodelling it, changing its mood, its storyline and its songs.
Unlike such revered predecessors as Follies and A Little Night Music, Road Show did not have a traditional Broadway opening filled with glitter and razzmatazz. It almost crept into town, in one of the several auditoria, holding a capacity audience of only 300, at the Public Theater, a revered but remote institution in the East Village. I knew that it was a short work, only a hundred minutes, with no interval: but then, so was the unforgettable Assassins.
When I arrived at the theatre, directed by a bus driver who actually knew where it was, I was excited but fearful. Threading my way through a confused mêlée in the lobby — though this is par for the course even on the Great White Way, whose managements treat the patrons (for their very expensive seats) like cattle — I fretted that maybe I ought to have contented myself with the Sondheim I knew and revered, rather than find myself let down and disappointed.
I need not have worried. The sold-out performance was abuzz with anticipation. The sepia stage-set was ingenious, designed by the English director John Doyle, who with many of the master’s productions to his credit (including a Tony for a revival of Company, a new DVD of which is available if you are interested, as I certainly was, at the Virgin Megastore on Union Square) has become a member of the tightly knit Sondheim family.
Doyle is the man who economised by getting singers in the musicals he directed to play their own musical instruments. What he has constructed for the Public Theater looks like an assembly of building-blocks, composed of trunks, crates, chests of drawers, and what resembled, and actually turned out to be, a coffin. It works extremely well.
Road Show is about two brothers, Addison and Wilson Mizner (pronounced Mize-ner), who lived from the 1870s to the 1930s. There were, actually, eight Mizner children, born in California and great-great-nephews and nieces of Sir Joshua Reynolds, but Addison and Wilson, who were born within four years of one another and died within two months of one another, were the pick of the brood, respectively a distinguished architect and a successful playwright, hugely talented both as practitioners of their arts and as ruthless con-men.
Road Show follows the trajectories of their lives from their scams in the Alaska gold rush to their nemesis in the collapse in the 1930s of the property bubble in Florida, where Addison designed not only houses but a whole town called Boca Raton, about which Sondheim has written a rousing number, sung by the entire company of 17, called, perhaps predictably, ‘Boca Raton’.
The score of this show is prolific, with 18 numbers, moving along one upon another to such an extent that Road Show is almost through-composed, like a Richard Strauss opera. The lyrics are, as might be expected, skilled, compact, clever (but not ostentatiously so) and rhymed in a way that only Sondheim could have rhymed them. All of the tunes, played by an admirable little orchestra, are, at the very least, catchy. Some are haunting or plangent. ‘The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened’ is one of the very few uncomplicated love-duets that Sondheim has ever written. It is between two men, Addison, who turns out to be gay, and a very rich young man called Hollis Bessemer, whom Addison adores and eventually exploits and betrays.
For what Road Show is about, in the end, is brotherly love, about two siblings who, however much they fall out and get sick of one another (‘Get Out’, sings Addison; ‘Go’, sings Wilson) cannot do without one another and end up only with one another. The pair are played by the tall, stoutish Alexander Gemignani — son of the noted Broadway conductor Paul Gemignani — as Addison and, as Wilson, Michael Cerveris, small and whippet-like; both with long Sondheim CVs, and it shows.
This is a rich period for new productions of classic musicals on Broadway. They include Gypsy (1959), with Patti LuPone, for which Sondheim, at the age of 29, wrote what may still be his cleverest lyrics; On the Town (1944), part of New York’s comprehensive celebration of the 90th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, and with a dazzling score which Bernstein wrote when aged 26; and Pal Joey (1940).
Pal Joey is a masterpiece — unlike the mess of a film made of it as a vehicle for Frank Sinatra — in its first revival for 30 years, containing (alongside, perhaps, Carousel), the best music Richard Rodgers ever wrote for a show and amazing lyrics by Lorenz Hart which may be his best and are certainly his filthiest (filthier than any other mainstream Broadway lyricist’s, anyway). The show when I saw it was conducted by Alexander Gemignani’s father, Paul, in a neat turning of the circle.
I doubt that Road Show will be revived 60 or 70 years from now, unlike Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music, which certainly will be; it is a minor work in this legendary genius’s canon. But, hell, who cares? Minor Sondheim is worth x times as much as anything else by anybody else. I warn you. It has a limited run, finishing at the end of December. Of course, John Doyle could bring it here.
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