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In photo above: Addison Mizner (top) and his brother, Wilson
The One Sondheim Failure
Looking Back on Road Show
By Myron Meisel
Stephen Sondheim’s potentially final musical, and his first new one since Passion (1995), has proven to be not so much a “lost” musical as one that was never found. Under four different titles and many more drafts and incarnations, this pocket intermission-less 90-minute version apparently as final as it going to get, had its West Coast premiere for a one night performance this past Sunday (June 14).
For this performance under the auspices of the Musical Theatre Guild, a highly professional company of polished veterans functions through the strictures of an Actors InEquity (sic) Concert Staged Reading Code that limits pre-production to 25 hours: essentially a day or so of musical rehearsal and a long weekend culminating in a show still on-book, but with a keen conveyance of the heart of the piece, committed with verve and polish despite the minimalist production values.
Based (loosely) on the lives of the once legendary Mizner brothers, Wilson and Addison, turn of the 20th century celebrities, and their fraternal squabbles over levels and degrees of predatory promotion, the material was first unveiled as a vaudeville-styled Wise Guys at a workshop run in New York in 1999 with Nathan Lane and Victor Garber in the leads, directed by Sam Mendes. Retooled as Bounce (with a lead female character introduced), it surfaced in 2003 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and then at the Kennedy Center in Washington, to a most mixed reception, but a cast album was released as a 2CD set. In 2008, slimmed to a single act and losing the heterosexual love interest, this new version, Road Show, opened off-Broadway with John Doyle as director-designer (and recent Tony winner Michael Cerveris as Wilson), won an Obie for its score and lyrics, and was again recorded as a cast album, which I have not heard.
Richard Kind and Howard McGillin in the Goodman Theatre Production
While the Mizners might well have inspired a host of distinct musicals, it appears that, along their merry way, Sondheim and Weidman (Pacific Overtures, Assassins) have contrived to write all of them in turn. As the action careens from Gold Rush Alaska to the high society of Broadway and New York sports, to the development of Palm Beach for high society clientele and the real estate speculative frenzy attending the conjuring of the future Boca Raton, the authors set the two brothers at odds over nuances of scruples over manipulative hustling. One is essentially a sociopathic conman, and the other, ostensibly more redeemable by indulging in a pretense to high-minded principle. Repeated, immense success inevitably devolves into disaster, precipitated by a foundational lack of character.
MTG has had a splendid track record with obscure Sondheim: they made their bones as a substantial company with the first local presentation of Passion in 1999, and later did a crackerjack job with his resuscitated first (unproduced) Broadway show, 1955’s Saturday Night. Director Richard Israel, with no time at all to solve the material’s intractable difficulties, ploughed headlong into inventive staging stratagems that rely almost entirely on the persuasive musical abilities of his cast and orchestra.
Because, to be blunt, while Road Show may be both a problem child and a mixed bag, the inescapable takeaway is that it is a failure – by my lights, Sondheim’s only one. Dramatically it doesn’t develop, it slogs through extended patches of limited inspiration, and its theme of the interpenetration of the American Dream and its ineluctably accompanying personal and economic exploitation is often purveyed in simplistic, or worse, incoherent terms. It seems that in taking so many relentless stabs at assaying a musical about failure, the creators found the ultimate way available to them to express it was to pursue it fruitlessly themselves.
That said, recalling that the week before Road Show included attendance at both Matilda (Ahmanson) and Waterfall (Pasadena Playhouse) affords some useful perspective. In contrast to these comparatively benign shows, Road Show indisputably comprises a major event. From the first bars, the music invokes a lifetime of the sound of Sondheim, and it is not merely a comfortable, but an exalted place to be. No, except for a love song, “The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened,” originally written for Wilson and his fictional wife though now most piquantly repurposed for Addision and his equally concocted male love interest, none of the numbers is likely to vie as a standard. Especially in the first third, many of the lyrics might well have been harshly critiqued by Sondheim’s mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, as lazily rhymed. Sondheim’s penchant for pastiche remains discernible, though apparently largely jettisoned in the development and cutting process.
Even so, Sondheim still remains perhaps the greatest master of sung exposition in American musical theater. There’s too much exposition here, but it falls splendidly to the voice. The ensemble harmonic writing may not be on the level of Sweeney Todd (the best chorus composing in the canon), yet this company and band make everything sound terrific, supple and intricate and as recognizable in its way as Copland or Bernstein or Weill (Jonathan Tunick’s able orchestrations are always a boon). While the characterizations may be sketchy and somewhat confounding in their dialogue, they are as heartily conveyed through song as in opera. For all its shortcomings, Road Show is indisputably the work of a major artist, and even at his least, attention must be paid, and in return such attention duly rewarded.
Will Collyer, Michael G. Hawkins and Craig McEldowney in the Musical Theatre Guild rendition (Photo by Alan Westom)
Still, with the performers so steeped in the idiom as to tender conviction at every point, even when the material falters, while this may not be an ideal Road Show (an unreasonable expectation when no such animal exists), it’s copiously full of pleasures and coups of orchestrated ensembles that could be dismissed as imitation Sondheim were this not ineluctably the real article. It never stoops to self-parody, its ambitions might be on the exhausted side, but as the show insists, even as it falls short of realizing it, there can be substantial compensatory nobility in failure.
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by Jerome Weidman.
Director: Richard Israel. Musical director: Julie Lamoureux. Lighting design: Brandon Baruch. Costume Design: A. Jeffrey Schoenberg & AJS Costumes.
Cast: Will Collyer, Craig McEldowney, Zachary Ford, Eileen Barnett, Michael G. Hawkins and ensemble.
Presented by Musical Theatre Guild and Stephanie and Alan Weston at the Ann and Jerry Moss Theater at The Herb Alpert Educational Village at New Roads School, Santa Monica
