SONDHEIM AND THE STYX
I final noticed this 405BC Greek basic in Spymonkey’s model and located it – sorry – unfroggettable. Giant puppetry, a neighborhood refrain tap-dancing as frogs whereas Xanthias and Dionysos journey to Hades to clown-up Aristophanes’ story in regards to the god of theatre, apprehensive about battle and chaos going to Hades to carry again both Euripides or Aeschylus to avoid wasting the world with heroic knowledge. This time it’s Stephen Sondheim’s take, although he was by no means fairly pleased with it because it ran too lengthy and was launched in a Yale swimming pool the place everybody received moist.
This is neater, shorter and dryer, and does lastly provide past the laughs some knowledge. There’s a mass of clever theatre reference and jokes from the beginning, the amiable Dan Buckley as Dionysos instructing the viewers Greek-style and Kevin McHale from Glee, on a London stage debut, as Xanthias his slave (“I want to say intern). Sondheim – with Burt Shevelove and bits from Nathan Lane – updates it in order that that the playwright they first search for in Hades is George Bernard Shaw (the outdated windbag is serendipitously up West proper now, with Mrs Warren’s Profession). In the tip they do discover him, Martha Pothen taking part in it barnstormingly, irritatingly intellectual-Irish in a saggy go well with and large beard with well-known traces like “All nice truths start as blasphemies. Amid the circle of useless dramatic colleagues we get his rants towards Shakespeare as a vapidly decorative, intellectually null stealer of plots. Which of them does the troubled world want most – the poet or the pragmatist? Which ought to Dionysos carry residence?
But that every one comes later – certainly within the final quarter of the present – when the pair battle a powerful brawling quote-off, culminating in Bart Lambert as a mild Shakespeare singing “Fear no more the heat o’the sun” as towards Shaw’s St Joan on the stake. Before that we’ve the journey, Joaquin Pedro Valdes as a supercool Heracles in lionskin with the “Gotta dress big!” Number, a hilariously Yorkshire Charon the ferryman (Carl Patrick) declining accountability on behalf of the River Styx Cruise Line, and a few unexpectedly pretty songs like Dionysos’ lament for Ariadne and “Its only a Play”.
And oh sure, we’ve the frogs that torment the travellers: the limber, hyperactive refrain immediately in horrible rubberized lips and lolling tongues, representing the lumpen mass, cynical inactive resignation, sucking the idealists down. “Ri-ke-ke-kek, Ri-ke-ke-kek – whaddya care , the world’s a wreck, Why’d’ya wanna break your neck? what the hek, ri-ke-ke-kek!”. They solely get one scene, however make it depend.
So does Victoria Scone as Pluto, god of the underworld in an Edna-Everage getup of marabou and spangles, receiving whoops of drag pleasure in praising Hell as a va-va-voom sizzling resort. So there are many moments, and a few actual feeling, notably in Buckley’s anxiously well-meaning however preening Dionysos as he struggles to carry again knowledge and sweetness and referee the ultimate battle between Shaw and Shakespeare. Once or twice I felt it sag a bit – regardless of the crisp two-hours-plus-interval form – however when these final scenes arrived forgave it every thing.
And good for Southwark: who doesn’t thrill on the arrival of a uncommon Sondheim revival, completed with merry vitality and coronary heart for £35, much less in the event you’re younger, outdated or unwaged? As younger Kevin McHale, self-mocking on his UK stage debut down in direction of Elephant and Castle murmurs, “It’s not technically West End, but it’s cute”. It’s greater than that.
Southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. To 28 june
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