12/27/2023 0 Comments The frogs musicalProdigal scenery by Giles Cadle and lavishly impudent costumes by William Ivey Long are condignly lighted by Kenneth Posner Lane and Bart, inspired comedians, make the good jokes resonate and the poorer ones bearable. Topical jokes (many anti-Bush, and some rather hoary) proliferate, flames spout from balustrades and chorines’ hats, as Las Vegas meets Cirque du Soleil, and hodge melds with podge. Unfortunately, this is the show’s high point, the finale of an amusing first act swiftly followed by an anticlimactic second.Īmong the cast, a swaggering Herakles (Burke Moses) and an aged-hippie, pot-smoking Boatman Charon (John Byner) contribute amiable levity to the first act, as does, in the second, Peter Bartlett’s grandly effete Pluto. So how do you buttress batrachians? Here they are made menacing defenders of the status quo, and Susan Stroman, who directed and choreographed, gives them a rowdy ballet with bouncing and leapfrogging, bungee cords embroiling even Dionysos (later on, the three Graces descending acrobatically from silken cords), and a comic-nasty climax. Aristophanes, however, couldn’t do anything very dramatic with them. Greek drama, like modern musical comedy, needs a chorus, and the croaking, often underwater frogs seemed the right choristers among the croaked underworldlings. Lane’s other problem is the frogs themselves. Lane initially thought of further updating Shevelove’s contestants, Shakespeare and Shaw, but eventually found it less froggy-versus-mousy to stick with the near-mythic Bard and the barbed Bernard. This rhetorical duel is adjudicated by a now much more godlike Dionysos, but for contemporary audiences it’s a meaningless battle-no more significant than the pseudo-Homeric mock epic The Battle of the Frogs and Mice. The second half is taken up by the literary contest between the robust but somewhat archaic Aeschylus and the more modern but slightly too glib Euripides for the guerdon of resuming life and reluming Athenian patriotic fervor. Much comedy hinges on who gets to wear the awesome gear of the hero Herakles, who has dragged the hellhound Cerberus up from the netherworld: Should it go to the cowardly god or his scrappily resourceful servant? The god of wine and drama, Dionysos (Nathan Lane), and his slave, Xanthias (Roger Bart), set out for Hades to bring back the dramatist most suited to spur the Athenians to their martial duties. In the first act, Athens, threatened by Sparta, needs a dramatic poet to rouse her citizens from lethargy. One obvious problem with the original play is that it splits into two rather discrepant halves. 1974), was performed at Yale’s Olympic-size swimming pool, and now has emerged as a full-fledged Nathan Lane–Shevelove–Sondheim musical, not even a tad tadpolish.Ĭlassicists tend to rave about the humor of Aristophanes, which, in large measure, escapes me. 1941), a mini-musical by Shevelove and Stephen Sondheim (A.D. Only the first two apply to The Frogs, the musical which, based on the comedy by Aristophanes (405 B.C.), became a nonmusical farce by Burt Shevelove (A.D. The epithet froggy has several meanings: frisky, pugnacious, hoarse, or French. Peter Bartlett and Nathan Lane in The Frogs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |