#this is a mainly normal review but with the occasional batshit descriptor that only ben brantley could write

[gayfrasier]

Brothers in Flimflammery on a Continental Sojourn

It’s raining greenbacks in “Road Show,” the latest version of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s long-aborning, ever-evolving and eternally slender musical about curdled American dreams, which opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater. Throughout this short and sardonic production, directed by John Doyle and starring the marvelous team of Michael Cerveris and Alexander Gemignani, fistfuls of dollars are flung into the air with such enthusiastic frequency that by evening’s end they carpet the stage floor.

But if that falling money at first suggests confetti, the more appropriate image turns out to be that of autumn leaves, of the hopeful green of spring turned sere. And with those ominous rumbles of thunder punctuating the show, you don’t have to look hard to see a timely metaphor for an economic boom gone bust.

Murmur a world-weary greeting, if you will, to the trimmed-down, toughened-up and seriously darkened new edition of the musical formerly known as “Bounce” (in 2003) and “Wise Guys” (1999) and somewhere along the way, “Gold.” And, yes, its current version could be said to hold a mirror to a nation in a recessionary hangover after years of overindulgence.

But the show’s greatest interest for fans of Mr. Sondheim lies in seeing how what was once meant to be light and buoyant fare has been reshaped into something more somber. The great living master of the American musical has returned to the shadows where, artistically at least, he has always felt most at home.

This picaresque work clearly has a lot in common with its central characters, inspired by two real entrepreneurial brothers who demonstrated a tireless gift for reinventing themselves. Their names were Addison and Wilson Mizner, and they made and lost a bundle or two in a variety of fields in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Mr. Sondheim has said he wanted to write a show about them since the early 1950s, and you can see their attraction for a man who has always been fascinated by stories of breakdowns and flameouts on the road to fame and fortune. Many Sondheim works — particularly “Follies,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Assassins” and the second half of “Sunday in the Park With George” — have brooded over the penalties exacted by the American hunger for celebrity and success.

Working on his Mizner musical with Mr. Weidman (his collaborator on “Assassins” and “Pacific Overtures”), Mr. Sondheim seemed to regard the show as a welcome side trip to something breezier, saying he had in mind a latter-day variation on the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road” movies.

I didn’t catch the workshop production in New York called “Wise Guys” in 1999, but I did see “Bounce” at the Kennedy Center in Washington five years ago. Staged by Harold Prince — Mr. Sondheim’s director of choice from 1970 into the early ’80s — “Bounce” had color, crispness and the panoramic sweep you associate with Mr. Prince. But it felt oddly remote, and the sourness of its story seemed at odds with the blitheness of its tone.

“Road Show” has decisively stepped over to the shadier side of the street. Mr. Doyle, a resourceful director out of Britain, has made a reputation for himself on Broadway with physically scaled-down, emotionally intensified productions of the Sondheim classics “Sweeney Todd” and “Company,” in which the performers doubled as musicians.

His “Road Show” has a separate and highly accomplished mini-orchestra of its own, which does full justice to melodies that often evoke Sondheim standards past. But otherwise, it bears the expected hallmarks of a Doyle production: a single, elegant, multipurpose set (designed by Mr. Doyle as a sepia-toned wall of trunks, crates and suitcases, with costumes to match) and a sense of people trapped claustrophobically within their own minds.

But the rethinking that has turned “Bounce” into “Road Show” has also involved condensation and rewriting. It is telling that while the first musical number in “Bounce” was “Bounce,” the opener in “Road Show” is “Waste.”

And in following the winding careers of Addison (Mr. Gemignani) and Wilson (Mr. Cerveris) — from their start as gold-prospecting partners in Alaska to their disastrous venture as land speculators in Florida — “Road Show” has pared away a major supporting character from “Bounce” (a lively, gold-digging girlfriend for Wilson) to tighten the focus on the brothers’ relationship with each other.

True, the Mizners’ mother (a very good Alma Cuervo, looking like a Walker Evans photograph), and father (William Parry), who haunts them as a disapproving ghost, are still around. So are Hollis Bessemer (Claybourne Elder), an aesthete and heir whom the gay Addison both adores and exploits, and an assortment of fleeting peripheral figures enjoyably embodied by a flexible supporting cast.

But ultimately “Road Show” is all about the brothers, who here come to seem like flip sides of the same personality. Addison, who became a designer of extravagant pleasure palaces in Florida, is the manipulable, wistful artist; Wilson, whose many ventures included backing prizefighters and plays, is the manipulative, hedonistic gambler. Try though they might to break away, they are hopelessly and destructively held together by elements that, in the production, daringly include incestuous tensions. By the show’s end, they are wrung-out, red-eyed, cocaine-snorting wrecks.

Mr. Cerveris (who was Sweeney Todd for Mr. Doyle) and Mr. Gemignani (who appeared in recent revivals of “Sweeney” and “Assassins”) are a pleasure to watch throughout. Mr. Cerveris brings a dangerous, feral charm to Wilson, who comes across as part weasel, part vaudevillian huckster, while Mr. Gemignani has a sweet transparency of mien and voice here that makes Addison as affecting as the show allows.

Unfortunately, that isn’t all that affecting. The bulk of “Road Show” continues to be extended expository musical numbers that trace the brothers’ travels, schemes and metamorphoses. These are often brisk, forward-moving songs — with unusually simple and straightforward lyrics by Sondheim standards — that essentially iterate “And then they did this.”

While they’re cleverly shaped and staged, they do grow repetitive, and they tend both to shrink and enlarge the brothers in ways that keep us from really knowing them. Despite the creepier Freudian accents provided in this version, the Mizners mostly come across as emblematic figures in a pageant of American ambition and folly.

In “Assassins” Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Weidman created a gallery of historical figures who existed as American archetypes and also as frustrated, lonely individuals of piercing emotional resonance. Clearly, the creators of “Road Show” are trying to realize that gleaming double edge once again. The problem is that this musical’s travelogue structure precludes its digging deep. It hints at dark and shimmering glories beneath the surface that it never fully mines. Like its leading characters, “Road Show” doesn’t quite know what to do with the riches at its disposal. 

Ben Brantley, Nov. 19 2008