Review: Sondheim’s ‘The Frogs’ at Rose Theater

Originally staged in a Yale swimming pool in 1974, the musical adaptation of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs,” a comedy of gods and playwrights, is now a limited engagement MasterVoices concert staging at Rose Theater with a company that is in the hundreds.

Hosted by and starring Nathan Lane, who collaborated with Stephen Sondheim for the show’s 2004 Broadway premiere, it tells the story of the Greek god Dionysus (Douglas Sills), and his faithful slave, Xanthias (Kevin Chamberlain), who go to the Underworld in search of George Bernard Shaw.

“The Frogs” is silly yet profound, piled with endless shtick, courtesy of Lane, and, just like Aristophanes’ original, it is set in a troubled war-plagued society that is seemingly bereft of moral and cultural leadership.

The audience is told at the outset that the time is now and the place is ancient Greece. This paradox means allows Lane and the original adapter, Burt Shevelove, to preserve Aristophanes’ structure while making the story relevant to today, including, in “Invocation to the Gods and Instructions to the Audience,” laugh-catching allusions to such contemporary phenomena as mobile phones.  (As if to  illustrate the point, Xanthias then receives a call from his mother and can’t seem to get her off the phone.)

If some of the songs recall the buoyancy of older Broadway shows, it’s important to note that Sondheim had intended to use a song like “Invocation” – which admonishes the audience on how to comport itself in the theater – for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”  This, along with “Dress Big” – a song about how to dress for Hades –  may be the numbers some audience members leave humming.

The rest of the score sounds like post-“Company” Sondheim, introspective and dissonant.  “It’s Only a Beauty” is another standout number.

In the almost two-hour concert (there is no interval), we see Dionysos, the god of drama and wine as well as the bringer of freedom, and Xanthias descending to Hades via the boat piloted by Charon (Chuck Cooper, who displays a mastery of deadpan).

His goal: To return with a great, long-dead dramatist, namely the aforementioned George Bernard Shaw, who will inspire the corrupt contemporary world.

In 405 B.C.E., this trip led to a bake-off between Euripides and Aeschylus.  In the more contemporary version, it pits a polemical Bernard Shaw against a movingly poetic William Shakespeare.

The cast also features Mark Kudisch  (whose many roles include Gaston in ”Beauty and the Beast”), making appropriate use of his trademark villainous he-man persona as Herakles, and Peter Bartlett, who reprises his trademark self-parodying effete persona as Pluto, having played that role in the original 2004 Broadway version.

Of course, there are frogs.  How could there not be?  They embody those who don’t want anything to change.  When Dionysos begins his journey on the river Styx, the frogs pull him out of the boat in an attempt to stop him – and, by their action, try to stop the world from moving forward.

But the frogs are also full of hijinks: their high-leaping dance numbers made me think “Leapin’ lizards,” the catchphrase from the “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip, although, even though they’re often lumped with the lizards and skinks of the world, I did know that frogs are amphibians, not reptiles.

This is a show that Sondheim completists will not want to miss. Directed and conducted by Ted Sperling, the show featured the members of MasterVoices, formerly known as the Collegiate Chorale, a symphonic choir based in New York City founded by Robert Shaw in 1941, along with a company of perhaps 200 more singers dressed in black that rose out of the mezzanine and balcony sections behind the stage (the Rose Theater is normally a theater in the round).

THE DETAILS

The Frogs
Limited Engagement
Rose Theater
Located on the fifth floor of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
Broadway at 60th Street
New York, NY 10019
www.mastervoices.com

(Photo: Accura Media Group