Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove's adaption of Aristophanes' The Frogs premiered in 1974 featuring students of the Yale Drama School in a university swimming pool. After appearing in a concert of the rarely performed Sondheim score in 2000, Nathan Lane approached the composer/lyricist with the idea of further adapting Mr. Shevelove's adaptation into a full-length work, switching the setting from a swimming pool to the Beaumont stage. In The Frogs, the Greek god Dionysos (played by Lane), troubled by the world's ills, embarks on a perilous and frog-infested journey to Hades with his slave Xanthias, to bring back an extraordinary writer who, by providing words of wit and wisdom, will help save mankind from destruction.