Word: sondheimer
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...role, it?s just another struggling Broadway musical. If he takes a liking to a project - a revival of Butley, say, which he starred in last year in Boston - it is immediately eyed as a possible candidate for Broadway. And if he wants to revive a little-known Stephen Sondheim musical - and not just star in it, but rewrite the thing too - darned if it isn?t the hottest ticket of New York?s summer season...
...what?s most amazing about Lane?s update of The Frogs, Sondheim and Burt Shevelove?s musical version of Aristophanes originally staged in a swimming pool at Yale in 1974, is that he?s turned it into a play about George W. Bush. In the Greek original, Dionysos, the god of theater, travels to the underworld to choose which of Athens? two late, great playwrights, Aeschylus or Euripides, should return to earth. Shevelove updated it by making the battle between George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare. Lane keeps those playwrights but adds a twist: Dionysos wants to bring back Shaw...
...Unfortunately, The Frogs is more successful as a barometer of the growing political bent of theater these days than as an evening?s entertainment. Though Sondheim has added six new songs for Lane?s expanded version (mostly filler, including a love song that Dionysos sings to his dead wife Ariadne), this is minor Sondheim - and even minor Nathan Lane. He?s as commanding as ever on stage, with a voice that can rally a herd of elephants, but seems oddly muted here, perhaps to suit his sober theme. The cast around him works hard, including pros like Roger Bart...
...Murphy is an actress I've followed since 1984, when at 25 she played the mother in Galt MacDermot's "The Human Comedy." She was a smash as an amnesiac chanteuse in the off-Broadway "Song of Singapore," as the obsessive jilted lover in Stephen Sondheim's "Passion" and as a dark-hued Anna in the 1996 Broadway revival of "The King and I." Here she uses her kabuki face to all manner of deadpan delight, then goes into giddy spasms in the dance numbers. She's Buster Keaton in repose, Diane Keaton in motion. Her and the show...
...kicking fluff. One of the four Best Musical contenders, Caroline, or Change, is somber meditation on race relations, focusing on a Jewish boy growing up in the South during the 1960s and his family?s black maid. The second-biggest nomination getter (after the musical Wicked) is Assassins, Stephen Sondheim?s dark musical about the killers or would-be killers of American Presidents. Even the new revival of Fiddler on the Roof has been reconceived in darker tones than many audience members (and critics) were prepared...