It’s an excellent time to be a Sondheim fan in New York. On Broadway, you’ve bought main revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along, each with A-list casts. Off-Broadway, the grasp’s closing musical is getting a posthumous world premiere with Here We Are at The Shed. And uptown a couple of blocks at Jazz at Lincoln Center, we’re about to get a live performance of The Frogs courtesy of Nathan Lane and choral ensemble MasterVoices, set for November 3 and 4.
Even essentially the most passionate Sondheim fan could possibly be forgiven for not understanding The Frogs. Tony Award-winning Broadway legend Nathan Lane, who penned the revised version of the piece that MasterVoices is presenting, calls it “a rare bird indeed.” Lane’s model performed a short Broadway run in 2004, however the work’s origins make it one among Sondheim’s extra curious titles. Originally co-written by Sondheim and his A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum co-book author Burt Shevelove, the work debuted in 1974. At that point, on Broadway, Sondheim had simply opened Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, the start of a string of musicals that may redefine the artwork kind all through the last decade.
The Frogs, however, was a student-produced musical at Yale, carried out of their swimming pool and starring the swim crew. Oh, and in addition then-Yale Drama college students like Meryl Streep, Christopher Durang, and Sigourney Weaver. Two-time Tony winner Michael Yeargan, then additionally a Yale pupil, designed the set. Shevelove, a Yale alum, had been invited again to re-stage his personal pupil manufacturing of the Aristophanes’ The Frogs, an historical Greek comedy that premiered in 405 B.C. Shevelove determined to up the ante and get his pal Steve Sondheim to pen some songs.
When you go to Yale, it is ostensibly regular for a Tony winner and family identify to jot down your pupil musical?
Lane turned fascinated with the work when he found a duplicate of the script on the old Drama Book Shop shortly after transferring to New York City within the early ‘70s. “Being a fan of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I thought this was going to be A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Parthenon,” remembers Lane, speaking to us over the phone while working on the concert adaptation for MasterVoices’ upcoming performances. “It turned out to be a very different animal altogether.”
Lane calls the Artistophanes play “the Greek version of Saturday Night Live in tunics.” The plot follows the god Dionysus and his servant Xanthias as they journey to Hades to carry again then-recently deceased playwright Euripides to save lots of the artwork type of the theatrical tragedy. Once there, a debate emerges between Euripedes and fellow deceased playwright Aeschylus over who’s the higher tragedian. In the top, the latter wins on account of his capacity to assist save town of Athens, then in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, along with his work.
If that’s all Greek to you, it might probably kind of boiled all the way down to: Art issues, as does taking an energetic half within the continued evolution of society. But with jokes!
Shevelove’s model retained the spirit of Aristophanes however anachronistically modernized issues a bit, along with his Dionysus in search of to carry again George Bernard Shaw and finally coming home with William Shakespeare. When Lane discovered it, its rating of eight or so songs was unrecorded, which little question added to its mystique. As it seems, they had been each bit as distinctive as you’d need an unheard Sondheim rating to be.
Ted Sperling
Nina Westervelt
“The Frogs has wonderful, complex writing for the chorus, maybe the most complex choral writing in any of the Sondheim pieces,” says Ted Sperling, the Tony-winning musician who’s directing and main MasterVoices’ concert events from the rostrum. “And he actually wrote the choral arrangements himself, which is not always the case.”
Sperling is correct. The authentic rating, most of which is written for a Greek refrain slightly than individual characters, sounds as if Sondheim had determined to grow to be a considerably avant-garde choral composer. His better-known work isn’t with out choral moments, however they’re not Sondheim’s hallmark. What choral writing is in his main scores by no means actually approaches the extent of contrapuntal complexity in The Frogs. Sperling is aware of that firsthand, having been on the music crew for the unique manufacturing of Sunday within the Park With George. The finale to that present, “Sunday,” might be the perfect instance of Sondheim’s choral writing for a significant rating. “I saw that number take shape,” he shares. “It was very much a melody that then got fleshed out in rehearsal. I believe The Frogs was really written into a choral arrangement from the get-go.”
That provides the songs a novel high quality of getting all of Sondheim’s trademark rhythmic complexity however realized for a big group. And meaning it may be extraordinarily tough. “It really has bass parts, which you almost never hear in the theatre,” says Sperling. “And there’s very high soprano writing, and complex counterpoint. In the title song, there’s a place where there are seven different melodies being sung simultaneously.” Sperling says rising to the problem has made for some robust rehearsals. “We spent two and a half hours on just the title song. It wasn’t our first go at it. And it won’t be our last.”
And like several good Sondheim materials, the work concerned pays off. “People have this idea that it was a college show because it was produced at a college, but it was not written when Steve was in college,” Sperling says of the rating. “It was written at the height of his glory. He had just written Company, Follies, Night Music, and was about to write Pacific Overtures and Sweeney. I think you can hear all of those in this piece. Some of it even reminds me of Merrily, to be honest.”
Also of word to Sondheim followers, The Frogs accommodates a uncommon Sondheim trunk tune second. The night’s first tune, “Invocation and Instructions to the Audience,” is one among a number of discarded opening numbers for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It’s additionally most likely the one place you’ll hear a high-brow Pulitzer winner rhyming “fart” with “art.”
The authentic pupil manufacturing of The Frogs wasn’t a breakout hit, working simply eight performances on the Connecticut establishment. Sondheim has been quoted as saying that the swimming pool’s acoustics made the expertise “like putting on a show in a men’s urinal.” No open-ended run. No solid recording. Just an obscure Sondheim curiosity for significantly fervent theatre nerds to surprise about.
And thus The Frogs turned a selected favourite for religious theatre fan Lane, who held on to his copy of the script and would sometimes write notes within the margin as he thought of it. “It was this holy rescue dog I fell in love with,” he says.
Flash ahead a decade or two and Sondheim’s seventieth birthday was being celebrated at The Library of Congress, with a live performance model of The Frogs starring Lane. His casting didn’t simply come from his love of the fabric. He’d received a Tony Award a couple of years prior starring as Pseudolous in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, making him a pure alternative for Dionysus in The Frogs. Well-versed in Shevelove’s wit with phrases, Lane inserted some ad-libs into his efficiency, which Sondheim observed and liked. He later informed Lane that Shevelove (who died in 1982) would have preferred them, too. “I was very touched by that,” Lane remembers.
That 2000 live performance efficiency ended up getting recorded—the rating’s first-ever full recording past a couple of one-offs of individual songs. “I was listening to it and wondering if this piece from 405 B.C. and 1974 could speak to a contemporary audience,” Lane recollects considering. Perhaps due to these advert libs, Sondheim quickly thereafter signed on to work with Lane on a brand new revision of The Frogs that may modernize it additional and develop the rating considerably, as properly. This model opened on Broadway by way of Lincoln Center Theater in 2004, with Lane once more starring (in addition to writing the brand new e book).
As Shevelove had, Lane labored to retain the spirit of Aristophanes in his model of the present. And not simply the comedy. According to Lane, The Frogs has at all times been salient political commentary. “As the original play was a reaction to the Peloponnesian War, mine was a reaction to the Iraq War and the, let’s call it, lack of eloquence on the part of George W. Bush.” And so artwork’s significance is timeless, in any case.
Lane says one factor he centered on along with his take was the titular frogs. In the Aristophanes play, the animals serenade Dionysus and Xanthias on their journey to Hades however in any other case served little or no goal. “I decided to make the frogs something to be feared,” explains Lane. “Their attitude towards everything is that we should leave well enough alone. Don’t rock the boat. They don’t want change. They don’t like new ideas. They just like things the way they are. They’re a threat to Dionysus, and they’re trying to stop him from bringing back a great writer to speak to the ills of society and inspire us to action.”
Nathan Lane and Roger Bart in The Frogs on Broadway
Paul Kolnik
Working along with the revised model’s director-choreographer Susan Stroman (the 2 had been reuniting after setting Broadway on hearth with The Producers simply two years earlier), Lane’s frogs turned bungy leaping horrors, “with a surprisingly innate sense of rhythm,” as his Dionysus remarks.
And that rating enlargement meant six songs being added to the setlist for the night. This places Lane’s model of The Frogs amongst the final works that Sondheim ever wrote for Broadway (all eyes on the potential for a Broadway bow for Here We Are, after all). “They’re wildly funny and quite ambitious in scope,” Sperling says of the latest materials. “It’s a significant score, and interesting that it spans from the mid-‘70s to the mid-aughts, and encompasses all his different influences and styles from those periods.”
Delightful new Sondheim songs apart, Lane says he wasn’t totally happy with the Broadway iteration. “I think we expanded it too much,” he admits. “I could tell it was bursting at the seams. I wanted to cut it back down to a one act, but the powers that be didn’t want to do that at that point.”
Critical reception was combined, and the manufacturing didn’t lengthen past its Lincoln Center Theater subscription run. “It certainly had its flaws, but I was very happy that we did it, and very proud of it in that we tried to do something political in a very politically divisive time. The fact that I got to write a musical with Steve Sondheim was one of the high points of my career.”
And thus even now with a Broadway debut to its identify and two separate recordings (a Broadway solid album was launched as properly), The Frogs has kind of remained a seldom carried out Sondheim curiosity. But Lane isn’t achieved with it fairly but. He’s starring as soon as once more, now because the narrator for MasterVoices’ upcoming concert events. And he lastly bought his approach and has been making trims to his e book.
“It will be a lean version of the show, which I think will probably be the best so far,” Sperling reveals. “We’re not going to be bungee jumping, but I think you’ll feel like you saw The Frogs at its very best. The reason to come see it is to appreciate the great writing.”
The star of the present will probably be MasterVoices’ 130-member choral ensemble. But the group has assembled an A-list of actors to play the roles too, together with Douglas Sills, Kevin Chamberlin, Peter Bartlett, Dylan Baker, Chuck Cooper, Marc Kudisch, Jordan Donica, and Candice Corbin.
And after all, simply was it was in 405 B.C., 1974, and 2004, The Frogs is coming again in a politically divisive time. Though, as Lane wonders rhetorically, “When aren’t we in a politically divisive time?” He then provides, “There’s nonetheless, sadly, many issues that resonate nonetheless. It’s about, do not simply sit again and watch. Take motion. Get concerned. Vote. I’m very joyful that we did it and really happy with it in that.”
Tickets for MasterVoices’ upcoming concert events are available at MasterVoices.org.
