Raúl Esparza and Brandon Uranowitz in Road Show. Picture: Joan Marcus
Road Show, an Encores! Off-Center production, played at New York City Center.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Road Show is a brilliant but daunting enterprise, so all kinds of credit and thanks have to be heaped on the Encores! Off-Center series for giving us another look at it. And it was a highly satisfying look as well.
(In case you need to be reminded, Encores! Off-Center is the summer spin-off of the famed Encores! series at New York City Center. While Encores! resurrects Broadway musicals, Off-Center looks to musicals that have Off-Broadway roots.)
Road Show is a project that has gone through deep revision after deep revision since its original public unveiling – a very buzzed-about workshop production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1999, when the title was Wise Guys and temporarily Gold! The director was Sam Mendes.
With the new title of Bounce and director Hal Prince at the helm, there were full-fledged try-out productions in Chicago and Washington, DC, in 2003. But they didn’t work, and it wasn’t until 2008 that the show returned to New York with an Off-Broadway mounting at the Public Theater.
The title became Road Show, and the director was John Doyle. That version, which transformed the piece into a single act, served as the template for the Off-Center mounting.
The Public Theater show, though, was not a hit. In his book Look, I Made a Hat, Sondheim suggests that the show was “perceived unconsciously (or maybe consciously) by the critics and theater cognoscenti as having passed its sell-by date…
“But what matters to me,” he continues, “is that John (Weidman) and I finally got the show we wanted.”
Since then, there have been regional productions around and about the US, and a London production played the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2011. And as happens with Sondheim shows, the journey never seems to end.
To have the show – which at this moment is the last to emerge in the Sondheim canon – back in New York makes for a momentous occasion, even if it was just for five performances.
The story of Road Show is loosely based on the lives of the Mizner Brothers, Wilson and Addison. As depicted in the show, their careers streaked like comets – minor comets but comets – through the 1920s. Their various adventures took them from the gold rush in Alaska to the sunny climes of Florida, with some quick bounding over several other continents.
The older Wilson was a relentless gambler, con man and charmer. Addison was serious, artistic and eventually became an architect creating fantasy Florida mansions for the wealthy citizenry of Palm Beach. When the brothers combined to promote the construction of another fantasy Florida city, Boca Raton, it contributed mightily to the Florida land boom and bust of that decade.
Road Show tells their tale as a saga of the American Dream, mixing ironies with inspiration in the search for fame and fortune along with the possibility of personal reinvention. It’s also a probing study of two souls locked in brotherly love, the joys, tensions and pathologies of it. It’s a heady mix.
Will Davis, director and choreographer of the Off-Center production, presented the show as if it were a 1930s radio broadcast. There was no particular explanation for this, but we knew it by the old-fashioned microphones in Donyale Werle’s set, the actors wearing period clothes (designed by Clint Ramos) and holding scripts, and the sign that lit up saying: “On the air.”
The staging gave way in part to more optics, with choreographic bits, shifts in lighting and even a sort of production number when the brothers promote investments in Boca Raton. But the radio broadcast format never faded away totally, and it was a good choice for covering the sprawling narrative.
As in the Public Theater version, the production grouped the cast into five principals and a 10-person ensemble. This, too, keeps the storytelling nicely in focus, and the fact that every cast member –principals and ensemble – seemed to be performing at the top of their game made the proceedings come vibrantly alive.
Raúl Esparza exuded a buoyant charisma as Wilson. He let you know it was often forced, but it kept you watching the character, waiting for all that charisma, all off the carefree and yet scheming bon vivant to run out – and then to see it all bounce back.
As Addison, Brandon Uranowitz went deep into the man’s sober sensitivity, seasoning the probe with humour and explosive moments of anger directed at the missteps of his brother. Together, Esparza and Uranowitz made the unbreakable sibling knot an affecting element of their relationship.
Jin Ha invested undeniable sincerity in Hollis Bessemer, the disowned heir to a family fortune, who becomes Addison’s lover, helping his career along with social connections, and whose dream of establishing a colony for artists is perverted into Boca Raton.
As Mama Mizner, Mary Beth Peil exhibited both irresistible maternal warmth and womanly smarts, while Chuck Cooper gave the dying Papa Mizner’s call to his sons to take charge of their futures – ‘It’s in Your Hands Now’ – impressive solemnity but not without a touch of pomposity as well.
Throughout the show, the singing of the entire company and the clarity of the delivery of the cascades of Sondheim’s rhythmic lyrics were simply great. When the score gave way to one of its distinctively melodic ballads – like ‘You’ and ‘The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened’, both duets for Addison and Hollis – they were moments of sheer gorgeousness.
Another such moment, purely breathtaking from start to finish, was Peil’s rendering of ‘Isn’t He Something?’, Mama Mizner’s paean to the feckless charm of her son Wilson.
Conducted by music director James Moore, the on-stage orchestra, always a profound Encores! asset, was totally up to form. It captured the richness and intricacies of Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, even though the number of players at 13 was considerably smaller than the usual complement for the regular Encores! season.
The next stop for Road Show may be unclear, but there’s little doubt this road can keep stretching on.
Ron Cohen
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