THE FROGS
Well, you can’t fault this show for its dry humor, its refusal to make waves, or any lack of buoyancy, let alone chlorine. Written in 1974 for the Yale Rep and performed in that school’s Olympic-size swimming pool (Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver were in the original swimming chorus), Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs is as amphibian as its title: his “semi-aquatic” musical effectively splits itself between land and water. The source of the musical, Aristophanes’ most literary comedy, The Frogs, a prizewinner in the Dionysian festival of 405 BC, was a no-holds-barred defense of Aeschylus’s supposedly virile theater against what grumpy Aristophanes saw as Euripides’ effete decadence. Nearly two and a half millenia later that controversy has cooled off enormously (except in certain classics circles). Burt Shevelove’s updating doesn’t strike fire as a debate on the merits of the former’s poetry versus the latter’s polemics. Or as deathless entertainment (this Frogs is more collegiate humor than Aristophanic excess and the swimming pool gimmick wears thin very fast). It is, however, a great 90-minute excuse for eight vintage samples of Sondheim’s supple lyrics and, here surprisingly melodic, music.
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In an unlikely twist, Shevelove has substituted Shakespeare for Aeschylus and George Bernard Shaw for Euripides, based on the real Shaw’s claim to be Shakespeare’s rival. But otherwise, the story cleaves mightily to the original. The demigod Dionysos, patron of drama as well as inventor of wine, and his Sancho Panza-like servant Xanthias travel to hell to try to restore to life the one dramatist Dionysos believes will cure contemporary theater of triviality: G.B. Shaw. Along the way Dionysos assumes the accommodating Herakles’ identity (he needs the lion skin and club for clout); the switch yields the usual mistaken identity complications (Dionysos must atone for Herakles’ sexual escapades and brave Pluto’s wrath for the slaughter of three-headed Cerberus). Dionysos has run-ins with the taunting, complacent, synchronized-swimming frogs, a “revel” of worshipping Dionysians (true believers who “always went to the theater and never came late”), and several of the livelier dead–Charisma and Virilla–who naturally no longer need to worry about safe sex.
Sondheim’s brightly goggled, syncopated croakers paddle their way through a rich round that combines the composer’s own trademark rhythms with “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and Gershwin’s “Who Cares.” Other gems are a sambalike “Evoe!” sung in a bacchanalian debauch, the eerie, minor-key “It’s Only a Play” (a perfect ironic distillation of the Sondheim credo of art’s power over life) performed in Roman tragedy masks, and a campy “Invocation to the Muses,” in which an Esther Williams-style nymph rises from the pool in picturesque tableaux. Sondheim fans will drink it up.
Michael Menendian’s Raven Theatre staging could easily–and hilariously–have parodied this confessional crap. Menendian treats it with deadly seriousness. His cast give lines that should have died before a first reading a heartiness, fury, and conviction as depressing as the overwritten dialogue. Wantland Sandel plays the blowhard father as if auditioning for a net, John Alcott’s academic son is earnest to no avail, and, as the family’s only sailor, Richard Schrot reduces his character to a nonstop public service announcement. Because of the good work Lucina Paquet and JoAnn Montemurro have given Raven audiences, their presence here amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
