I’ve traveled a long way with Road Show, the new Stephen Sondheim musical that opened at The Public Theater last night. As every self-respecting theater lover knows, Road Show is the pet project that Sondheim has been nurturing for over 50 years. It has undergone at least four major revisions in just the last 10. But the show has always revolved around Wilson and Addison Mizner, peripatetic brothers who became infamous for their Florida land scams during the 1920s.
The real-life Addison and Wilson were just two of eight siblings but Sondheim and his frequent book writer John Weidman get rid of the other six and focus on Addison, a sometime businessman and self-taught architect, and Wilson, who, among other things, was a professional gambler and prize fight manager, a writer for Broadway and Hollywood, and an opium addict and con man. For Sondheim, it seems, they symbolize the flip sides of the entrepreneurial spirit that defined America in the 20th century.
I’d never head of the Mizners but on the surface they seemed no less worthy of a musical than the presidential assassins who tell another part of the American story in Sondheim’s Assassins. And that show's perverseness had appealed to me. So I took my first trip with the Mizner brothers in 1999 by going down to the East Village to see a New York Theatre Workshop production of their story directed by Sam Mendes and starring Nathan Lane as Addison and Victor Garber as Wilson.
Back then the show was called Wise Guys. And even its supporting cast—which included Brooks Ashmanskas, Kevin Chamberlin, and Christopher Fitzgerald—betrayed its Broadway ambitions. But those were quickly thwarted by an appropriately tepid response from just about everyone who saw it. I recall running into a friend in the theater party business who gave me the thumbs down as we all filed dejectedly out of the theater. But something good did come out of that production: Lane and Garber later became a romantic couple.
And Sondheim held on to his love for the show. A new version, helmed by his frequent collaborator Hal Prince and with Richard Kind as Addison and Howard McGillin as Wilson, surfaced at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2003 and then made its way to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where I and my always-indulgent husband K went to see it.
For a time, the show had been renamed Gold!. But by the time K and I saw it, the title was Bounce, after a new song that Sondheim had written and that opened the show. And that wasn’t the only change. Michelle Pawk had joined the cast in the newly conceived role of Nellie, a love interest for Wilson. Bounce was better than Wise Guys but the word-of-mouth still wasn’t buoyant enough. [Click here to read an exhaustively chronicled history of the show assembled by a devoted fan.]
Now, director John Doyle, whose revivals of Sweeney Todd and Company were so praised, has taken control. The show is called Road Show. Pawk is gone and so is her character. “The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened,” the gorgeous ballad that Nellie and Wilson sang to one another is now a duet for Addison and his male lover.
The production is darker and more stylized than the earlier versions. Instead of Prince’s fully staged interpretation, which included big song-and-dance numbers, we get one of those chamber musicals in which Doyle specializes. The brightly colored costumes and multiple sets of the Prince version have been replaced by an antique brown palate used for both the costumes, designed by Ann Hould-Ward, and the set, a heap of discarded furniture that Doyle designed himself.
The cast members, most of whom play multiple roles, are all visible in the wings before the show starts. And once on stage, they’re directed to perform all kinds of superfluous stage business. In case you don’t get that the Mizners are obsessed with money, everyone throws around what amounts to a virtual blizzard of dollar bills. Much of it lands in the front rows of the audience and my theatergoing buddy Bill got whacked on the leg by a bundle during the early preview performance we attended. He took it home as a souvenir but it seems as though so many folks were pocketing the fake bills that Esther of Gratuitous Violins told us the ushers at the performance she saw last week asked people to give them back at the end of the show.
Because so few people know who the Mizners were a lot of Road
Show’s dialog and lyrics are devoted to expository stuff (we may not have known all of the main characters in Assassins but at least we knew the guys they were trying to kill). And since the show has been paired down from over two hours to 100 intermissionless minutes there isn’t much time for character development. So we don't really get to know the brothers as much as we’d like and we don't really care for them as much as we should. That we do at all is a tribute to the remarkable performances that Alexander Gemingnani and Michael Cerveris give as Addison and Wilson. They are hands down the best of the three pairs I’ve seen.
But not even their bravura work has won over the critics, most of whom have spent their reviews lamenting that the first new Sondheim work in 14 years and possibly the last (the maestro is 78) is so unsatisfying. Of course, this isn't the first Sondheim show to disappoint the critics when it first opened. Genius that he is, he tends to be so far ahead of the rest of us that it takes time for us to catch up and appreciate what he’s created. What may be different this time, though, is that we’ve already had 10 years to get in step with Road Show.
Is it me or is it the economy?
When I sat down this past weekend to start my September ritual of figuring out which new shows I most want to see, the pickings seemed paltrier than they did last year. In fact, four big musicals—revivals of Brigadoon, Godspell and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf , plus the kind-of-new Harry Connick Jr. show, Nice Work if You Can Get It, drawn from the Gershwin songbook—dropped out before the new season even started. The producers of the first three admitted that they couldn’t dig up enough money to bring their shows in.
And that isn’t the only sign that times are tough. When the national mood is down, people—producers included—become less adventurous. New plays queued up to get on the boards last fall but there is only one (To Be Or Not to Be, an adaptation of a 1942 Jack Benny movie) opening on Broadway between now and the end of the year. And only four new musicals. Still, there are some promising shows to see both on Broadway and off. And as I read through the various Fall Previews in the papers, magazines and online, I could feel the buzz of anticipation that always rushes through me at the beginning of a new year of theatergoing.
So below is a list of a few of the shows that most intrigue me—not the ones I should see, or the ones that everyone else wants to see but just the ones that for one idiosyncratic reason or another grab me and that you may not have heard as much about.
FARRAGUT NORTH You’d think that Barak Obama and Sarah Palin would provide enough political drama (and comedy) for me during this election season but I’m intrigued by the Atlantic Theater Company’s new onstage drama about a young hot shot press secretary who gets caught up in a sex scandal during a presidential primary race. It’s written by a former aide to Howard Dean and stars John Gallagher Jr. who won a Tony for his portrayal of Moritz in Spring Awakening. Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater on West 20th Street is a little off the beaten track but I’ve usually found the journey there to be worthwhile. Previews for this show start on Oct. 22 and the run is scheduled to end on Nov. 29, by which time, of course, we’ll know who the real next President will be.
HOME The Signature Theatre Company is devoting its entire season to plays originally produced by the Negro Ensemble Company but Samm-Art Williams’ funny and wise bildungsroman about a North Carolina farm boy holds a special place in my heart because one of my friends was working for the company at the time of the original production and I remember the excitement and the sense of optimism about the future of black theater everyone there felt when the show became an unexpected hit and moved to Broadway. If the revival is anywhere near as good as the first production in the series, The First Breeze of Summer, then there may be cause for hope again. Previews begin at the Peter Norton Space on Nov. 11 and the show is scheduled to run through Jan. 4.
THE LANGUAGE OF TREES I’ve never heard of this show’s playwright Steven Levenson. And that’s precisely why I want to see his play. It’s part of the Roundabout Underground, the company’s new series that showcases the works of young playwrights at the 60-seat Black Box Theatre located in the basement of the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street. Last year's terrific debut offering Speech & Debate told the stories of a trio of high school misfits. Levenson’s play takes on the gnarlier subject of the nation’s involvement in the Mideast through the story of a family whose husband and father is an American translator stationed in that war zone. Previews begin Oct. 4 and the run is scheduled through Dec. 14. And all tickets are just $20.
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS Frank Langella, who has won two Tonys in the last five years, can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned. If he decided to read footnotes from the Congressional Quarterly, I’d be there and I'd be prepared to be riveted. The fact that he’s going to star in a stage revival of one of my favorite historical movies—about Thomas More’s fateful refusal to break with the Catholic Church in support of Henry VIII’s decision to divorce his first wife and marry Ann Boleyn—is an extra treat. The Roundabout Theatre Company has scheduled a limited run at the American Airlines Theatre from Sept. 12 through Dec. 7.
PRAYER FOR MY ENEMY The war in Iraq isn’t the first subject that would come to mind when thinking about a new project for the sensational team that put together The Light in the Piazza at Lincoln Center three years ago. But playwright Craig Lucas, director Bartlett Sher and their Tony-winning leading lady Victoria Clark are back together again with a new play at Playwrights Horizon about how the war affects a young soldier and his family. Jonathan Groff, the other breakout star from Spring Awakening, plays the young man. Previews begin Nov. 14 for a run that is scheduled to close on Dec. 21.
ROAD SHOW O.K. So who doesn’t want to see the new Stephen Sondheim musical. But I’ve already put in my dues for this one. I saw this play about two brothers seeking their version of the American dream from the Alaska gold rush at the turn of the last century to the Florida real estate boom in the 1920s back in 1999 at the New York Theatre Workshop when it was called Wise Guys. Even with Nathan Lane and Victor Garber as the leads, it didn’t work. Then my husband K and I went down to the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2003 to see it when it was called Bounce and Richard Kind and Howard McGillin took over the parts. The show, while substantially rewritten, wasn’t much better. Now the latest version has a new name, new leads (Michael Cerveris and Alexander Gemignani) a rejiggered script and director John Doyle at the helm. Previews start at the Public Theater on Oct. 28 and the run is scheduled through Dec. 28. My buddy Bill and I already have our tickets.
ROMANTIC POETRY The provocative drama Doubt won John Patrick Shanley a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize three years ago but it was the delightfully whimsical movie “Moonstruck” that first introduced him to a wide public back in 1987. So I’m eager to see Shanley’s return to romantic comedy. This work, about a newlywed whose former husbands disapprove of her new mate, is a musical and Shanley, who’s done both the book and the lyrics, has hooked up with Henry Krieger who wrote the music for Dreamgirls and Side Show. The Manhattan Theater Club is presenting Romantic Poetry at its Stage I theater in City Center from Sept. 30 thru Dec. 14.
SHOGUN MACBETH One of the most visceral and sensual experiences I ever had in a movie theater was watching Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran,” the master Japanese filmmaker’s interpretation of the Lear story. It swept me away. I know that the Pan Asian Repertory Theater won’t be able to produce the cinematic sumptuousness of the movie but its production of the Macbeth story, set in the Japanese feudal period, does plan to juxtapose the classical Japanese theater techniques of Noh and Kyogen alongside Shakespeare's Elizabethan language. It’s scheduled for a very limited run at the Julia Miles Theater from Nov. 4 through Dec. 7.
I’ve traveled a long way with Road Show, the new Stephen Sondheim musical that opened at The Public Theater last night. As every self-respecting theater lover knows, Road Show is the pet project that Sondheim has been nurturing for over 50 years. It has undergone at least four major revisions in just the last 10. But the show has always revolved around Wilson and Addison Mizner, peripatetic brothers who became infamous for their Florida land scams during the 1920s. 
Show’s dialog and lyrics are devoted to expository stuff (we may not have known all of the main characters in Assassins but at least we knew the guys they were trying to kill). And since the show has been paired down from over two hours to 100 intermissionless minutes there isn’t much time for character development. So we don't really get to know the brothers as much as we’d like and we don't really care for them as much as we should. That we do at all is a tribute to the remarkable performances that Alexander Gemingnani and Michael Cerveris give as Addison and Wilson. They are hands down the best of the three pairs I’ve seen. 
