Preview 2004-2005: Gods of the Theatre, Smile on Us
Mentioned for the upcoming national tour of Evita: Kathy Voytko as Eva, Bradley Dean as Che, William Paul Michals as Peron, and Kate Manning as Peron's Mistress.
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Eight summers ago, Nathan Lane was starring on Broadway in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the Stephen Sondheim-Burt Shevelove musical suggested by the plays of Plautus 254-184 B.C., the celebrated ancient Roman writer of stage farces.
This summer, Nathan Lane is starring on Broadway in The Frogs, the Stephen Sondheim-Burt Shevelove musical suggested by a play by Aristophanes 448-380 B.C., the celebrated comic playwright of ancient Greece. Aristophanes' Lysistrata was the basis for the 1961 Broadway musical The Happiest Girl in the World. Written in 405 B.C., The Frogs was, at least in part, an attack on the Athenian government for its handling of the protracted Pelopennesian War against Sparta, the sort of situation that could make a 2004 revival decidedly relevant.
The Shevelove-Sondheim adaptation of The Frogs was first performed by Yale Repertory Theatre in the Yale swimming pool for a run of only eight performances that began on May 20, 1974. Directed by Shevelove, the show starred Larry Blyden as Greek god Dionysos. Blyden had won a Tony for his work in the 1972 Broadway revival of ....Forum.
The Frogs followed Sondheim's wildly fertile period that produced a trio of electrifying musicals, Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, the latter still playing on Broadway during the New Haven run of The Frogs. But The Frogs was, at least for Sondheim, a lark rather than a full-scale new work.
Boasting a company of about 100, including seventy performers, the Yale Frogs included among its singing chorus such Yale Drama School students as Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Chris Durang. The show ran an intermissionless ninety minutes and was about two-thirds dialogue. The score was mostly choral, with the exception of an opening song "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience" for Dionysos and his slave, Xanthias, and a solo for Shakespeare, "Fear No More," Sondheim's setting of a lyric from Cymbeline.
Shevelove's script is set in "the present, ancient Greece." As depicted in the musical, Dionysos journeys to Hades in order to bring Bernard Shaw back to earth, where Shaw could again write plays and thus save mankind. The Frogs culminates in an "agon" or contest between Shaw and another literary resident of Hades, Shakespeare, to determine which is the superior playwright. In Aristophanes' original, the contest was between Aeschylus and Euripedes. Dionysos is the judge, and the contest makes him realize that it's a poet that the world really needs.
A note in the published script of the Shevelove adaptation states that the musical "is intended to be a spectacle, and everything possible should be done to make it so." It also states that The Frogs "was written to be performed in an exhibition pool," although the text suggests alternate lines for productions that don't feature a pool.
While The Frogs has had a number of amateur stagings since Yale, it has never had a professional New York mounting. And by 2000, The Frogs was the only Sondheim score that lacked a recording. It finally got one, courtesy of Nonesuch, in 2000, using the cast of a concert staged earlier that year at the Library of Congress. The recording features Brian Stokes Mitchell, Davis Gaines, and, as Dionysos, Nathan Lane.
As a result of the concert and recording, Lane approached Sondheim with the notion of expanding Shevelove's adaptation, switching the setting from a pool to a stage, and having Sondheim provide six additional songs which, one imagines, might be sung by the principal characters rather than by the chorus. For the new version, the official billing is "freely adapted by Burt Shevelove, even more freely adapted by Nathan Lane." One also imagines that Lane's textual additions might include references to contemporary politics and show business.
Thanks to Lane's interest, Lincoln Center Theater is giving The Frogs a Broadway premiere that few ever expected it to have. The Frogs is Lane's first new Broadway musical since The Producers, and, as with that smash, the director and choreographer is Susan Stroman, staging her first new musical since Lincoln Center Theater's Thou Shalt Not.
That textual note also states that "The Frogs is an exercise in the sublime and the ridiculous. The more sublime and the more ridiculous, the better." As such, The Frogs should be just the thing for a summertime frolic. The chief question posed by the new production, which begins previews tonight and opens officially on July 22, is whether or not a relatively thin work will benefit from expansion. "Saturday Night Live"'s Chris Kattan is Xanthias, and the cast of twenty-eight also features John Byner, Peter Bartlett, Daniel Davis, Burke Moses, and Michael Siberry.
As of now, the production is scheduled to play only through October 9. One assumes it could be extended beyond that date, although Lane and Stroman are scheduled to shoot the film version of The Producers in early 2005.
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