CDs: Nathan Lane Is a God
THE FROGS PS Classics
As you are no doubt aware, Burt Shevelove's one-act, ninety-minute 1974 adaptation of Aristophanes' 405 B.C. satiric comedy The Frogs was written to be performed by the Yale Repertory Theatre at the Yale swimming pool. Boasting a company of 100 and a singing chorus that included Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Chris Durang, the Yale Frogs was meant as something of a lark, with Stephen Sondheim providing only a brief score, and the result scheduled for just eight performances. Like Aristophanes' original, it concerned the journey of Dionysos, the Greek God of drama and wine, to Hades, in order to bring back to earth a poet who could inspire and save mankind. Where Aristophanes concluded with a debate between playwrights Aeschylus and Euripedes, Shevelove substituted a contest between Shaw and Shakespeare.
Sondheim's score ran considerably less than a half-hour, and most of it was given to the chorus. The only pieces written for principal characters were the opening "Invocation and Instructions to the Audience" for Dionysos and his slave, Xanthias, and Shakespeare's "Fear No More," an aria composed to a lyric from Cymbeline.
For decades, The Frogs enjoyed sporadic regional productions but was not considered a full-fledged Sondheim musical and so never entered the list of the composer's regularly performed works. It also lacked a recording, at least until 2000. That year, as part of the celebrations of Sondheim's seventieth birthday, the Library of Congress sponsored a concert version of The Frogs that featured Nathan Lane as Dionysos and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Xanthias. With Davis Gaines singing Shakespeare's number, this version was recorded by Nonesuch. In order to get a full CD out of the piece, Nonesuch found it necessary to pair it with Sondheim's four-song, fifteen-minute vocal score for the television musical Evening Primrose.
Lane, who had long been intrigued by The Frogs, was encouraged by the concert to fashion his own adaptation of Shevelove's adaptation of Aristophanes. Aristophanes' original was at least partly a criticism of the Athenian government for its involvement in the Pelopennesian War against Sparta, and Lane discerned distinct parallels to a current war and this country's involvement in it.
Eliminating the need for a swimming pool, Lane expanded the piece to two acts, adding a good deal of political comment that was more in the spirit of Aristophanes than Shevelove. Lane got his Producers director, Susan Stroman, to stage the result, and they both got Sondheim to write six new musical numbers and to revise several of the old ones. The result was a show that ran thirty to forty minutes longer than the first Frogs and now provided songs for such principal characters as Herakles the warrior and half-brother of Dionysos, underworld God Pluto, boatman Charon, and playwright Shaw.
Of course, it's unlikely that The Frogs would have gotten a Broadway premiere had not Lane written the new adaptation as a vehicle for himself. With Lane playing Dionysos, the Lane-Stroman-Shevelove-Sondheim Frogs was produced last summer by Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont. The reviews weren't great, and while the production had no problem filling seats for its July-to-October limited engagement, the reception didn't warrant an extension. The fall closing of The Frogs allowed Lane to star in the London premiere of The Producers.
This observer felt that expanding The Frogs was not especially advantageous. As the opening number states, the piece doesn't have a lot of plot, and a few additions including a new character, Dionysos's wife, Ariadne couldn't disguise the relative thinness of the narrative. The second-act "agon" between Shaw and Shakespeare slowed things down. Some of the new musical material felt more perfunctory than inspired, present less out of dramatic necessity and more to make the piece into a full-fledged musical. And Stroman's staging, which included bungee jumping and some Cirque du Soleil-style aerial ballet, was not one of her best.
That said, the new Frogs is significant on several levels. It represents the show's Broadway debut and its professional New York premiere. And it features the first new Sondheim songs to reach Broadway since Passion 1994, a situation made more significant by the fact that Bounce is in limbo and no new Sondheim musical project is on the horizon.
PS Classics' recording of the Lincoln Center Theater production, made immediately following the closing, couldn't be better. Although the 2000 Nonesuch recording is still important as a document of the original Frogs, the new set pretty much supplants it. It includes a considerable amount of integral dialogue, which provides one with a good idea of the show as a whole. And it makes as strong a case as possible for a new version that's now likely to get additional stagings.
The catchiest of the new songs is the first one, "I Love to Travel," for Lane and Roger Bart's Xanthias. Also fetching is "Hades," led by Peter Bartlett's Pluto. Then there's Dionysos's tender reminiscence of his late wife, "Ariadne," a song one might like to hear sung in lusher tones than Lane's. The other new songs -"Dress Big" Burke Moses' Herakles, "All Aboard" John Byner's Charon, "Shaw" Daniel Davis-are largely functional. Like the first Frogs recording, this one is ably guided by musical director Paul Gemignani, features the apt orchestrations of Jonathan Tunick, and is produced by Tommy Krasker.
All of the cast members do nicely, even if the performance suffers from the lack of a beautiful solo voice. The best vocalist, Moses, doesn't get to show off his most attractive tones in the unlovely "Dress Big." The attractively illustrated CD libretto serves as a souvenir program for a Broadway musical that never got one. Also included in the booklet is an essay of appreciation by Wendy Wasserstein, who was a second-year student at Yale when The Frogs premiered there and who served as an usher for that original production.
It will be interesting to see whether or not this new Frogs figures in this year's Tony nominations; such categories as musical, score, book, and performances are all possibilities, even if the show's fall demise is a liability. Meanwhile, PS Classics' Broadway cast recording documents a substantially new Sondheim score and what's bound to become the permanent performance version of a Sondheim musical. As such, it may be a must-have.
