This show is not in a swimming pool. An odd thing to say, because of course most shows are not in a swimming pool, but The Frogs set a high bar when it premiered in 1974 by taking place in Yale University Swimming Pool in a production starring Meryl Streep AND Sigourney Weaver. Ridiculous. Other pool-based productions have followed. But not this one. No, this comparatively rare revival of Stephen Sondheim’s hands down weirdest show (just wait until those frogs arrive) is in the pinched space of Southwark Playhouse. Directed with the right mix of skill and silliness by Georgie Rankcom, and boasting a Glee star, it’s full of great moments, but never quite justifies its own point – which is that theatre might change the world.
Thankfully, for those who don’t know the Aristophanes comedy this is based on, the show is a primer as well as the thing itself. So, Dan Buckley’s vain, slightly hapless Dionysos – god of wine, theatre and nice things like that – tells us he is sickened by the state of society and decides to journey to the underworld to bring back a playwright who can change the world for the better. He takes his slave Xanthias with him, with predictably hilarious consequences.
In the original, Dionysos went to bring back Euripides and was won over by Aeschylus instead. In order to resonate with the kids of today, Sondheim and Shevelove updated it so that Dionysus goes to get George Bernard Shaw and ends up with Shakespeare.
Kevin McHale, famously of Glee, makes his UK stage debut as put-upon Xanthias in tabard and Converse. He’s very good: great voice (though he doesn’t have much to do with it), good comic timing, the lot. Buckley and McHale are solid, but it’s Carl Patrick’s double duty as Charon (here played as a kind of Manc stoner) and Aeakos, a doddering Hadean gatekeeper, who steals the show with some exquisitely funny delivery and a proper commitment to the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
It’s not nearly as rich a score as Sondheim’s other work. Some songs – Ariadne; It’s Only A Play – provide moments of surprising tenderness, but it’s no surprise he gave himself a break with this one, coming off the back of four years in which he reinvented musicals with Company in 1970, then wrote two of his best shows, Follies and A Little Night Music.
Then the frogs come! And we’re in the deranged world that songwriters enter when they write about frogs. Paul McCartney’s frog chorus plays pre-show, as do Kermit and the abominable Crazy Frog. They’ve got nothing on these crazy frogs, which evoke the strange sensation of being both terrified and slightly bored at the same time. Glowing green and pink, with foam mouths and lolling tongues, and wobbling bobble feet (costumes by Libby Todd), belting out a bizarre number in which they sing the Ancient Greek for ‘ribbit’ (which is ‘brekekekek koax’ by the way) the scene comes off like a fever dream induced by whatever Sondheim and Shevelove were taking in the mid-seventies.
A late stage star turn from Victoria Scone as a wonderfully diva-ish Pluto really lifts the second half, which is otherwise weighed down by a tedious competition between Shaw and Shakespeare. Rankcom and a strong cast bring excellence in flashes, but they’re too swallowed by the messiness of the whole thing.
The show has been tinkered with too many times and you can see the layers of each era in every line, like a chunk of rock, striated with Aristophanes’s original, then Shevelove and Sondheim’s 1970s reworking, and Nathan Lane’s 2004 sassifying, and the added ad libs of today. At every moment you can tell who’s done what, and the result is a mishmash of styles and signatures. It’s easy to see the promise of a show told across millennia by so many great talents: Aristophanes, Sondheim, Lane, Artie from Glee. Easy, too, to see all the ways that promise is unfulfilled.
Southwark Playhouse, to June 28; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
