Only so-so Sondheim
Watching Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s “Road Show,” in its Theatre Rhinoceros Bay Area premiere, is a fitfully enjoyable and confounding experience. Why, you can’t help but wonder, can’t we get a decent production of Sondheim’s most recent major show?
There’s certainly no lack of reverence around here for America’s greatest living musical theater composer and lyricist. There’s also no lack of large and midsize companies — on both sides and ends of the bay (you know who you are) — that have had considerable success with his other musicals, including those written with Weidman (“Pacific Overtures,” “Assassins”). And this is a show that not only deserves to be more widely seen but also has some local connections.
Benicia, for example. Sondheim and Weidman’s lightly episodic, bittersweet exploration of the all-American ethic of make-or-break greed and get-rich-quick opportunism is based on the true story of Benicia’s Mizner brothers, Addison (played by Bill Fahrner) and Wilson (Rudy Guerrero) — from their youthful exploits in the 1890s Alaskan gold rush through Wilson’s highflying New York playboy, playwright, boxing promoter and con man days to architect Addison’s part in the 1920s Palm Beach and Boca Raton land boom and bust.
But it’s the show’s intrinsic merits that make Rhino Artistic Director John Fisher’s production such a gift. Even in this stripped-down and rather amateurish outing, it’s easy to revel in Sondheim’s deliciously but unobtrusively complex and tuneful score and devilishly cutting lyrics and in Weidman’s cleverly constructed book. Just as it’s impossible not to keep imagining how much better almost every moment could be presented and performed.
Sondheim aficionados take heed. Unless you got to see one of this longtroubled play’s few prior outings elsewhere, this is your first opportunity to see how nicely the book and score can nestle together onstage. But if you know the show from only one of its two original cast albums, you might be in for some disappointments.
Sondheim and Weidman reworked this material for several years in various forms before it opened in Chicago and Washington in 2003 as “Bounce” — in an ill-fated Harold Prince production that left behind a tantalizingly fine album. Rhino is presenting the very much rewritten “Road Show” — minus some very good songs and considerably tightened and improved in structure. This version, also recorded, premiered in ’08 at New York’s Public Theater, with dramaturgical help from Oskar Eustis, a key player in the once-bustling Eureka Theatre (the only remnant of which is the building where the show is playing).
Fisher graces his barebones staging with a few clever strokes, such as a cut-paper snowfall. On the whole, though, the effort is underwhelming. Musical director Dave Dobrusky’s deft piano accompaniment uses Jonathan Tunick’s fine orchestrations but can only hint at the intricate riches of the score.
The nine-member cast is refreshingly un-miked, but none is capable of hitting all the notes or selling the songs — though Guerrero suggests Wilson’s song-anddance attributes, and Fahrner and Michael Doppe are touching on “The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened” love duet. What’s best about Rhino’s “Road Show” is the opportunity it offers to sit back and imagine how exciting this show could be if staged with more skill and brazen panache.