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It’s easy to see why 81-year-old Broadway artist Stephen Sondheim wanted for 50 years to write a show about Willie and Addie Mizner.
The brothers – one a huckster, the other a would-be artist – are two sides of musical theatre’s basic coin: in their inextricably entwined life, money twins love, and salesmanship is conjoined with almost-artistry.
Ten years of labour – rewrites, retitles and rethinks – has finally birthed a bittersweet parable of American talent. Director and designer John Doyle’s sharp edit cut the cord which attached ‘Wise Guys’ (as it was formerly titled) to heterosexual conventions. His midwifery was inspired: Doyle has delivered a perfect chamber musical.
It may be too short, too itinerant and too critical an American allegory for Sonheim nuts who hanker after the big canvas and Europhilia of, say, ‘Sunday in the Park with George’. But it’s intimate, epic and especially touching in this traverse staging, which opens up Sondheim’s intricately plaited musical phrases and winds you in close to the brothers’ boom and bust lives.
Gorgeous casting, a tight eight-piece mini-orchestra and uncannily perfect amplification help every character pluck a different heartstring.
David Bedella is ideal casting as heartless Willie, making knowing use of his mile-wide smile, dark-eyed satanic charisma and twinkling toes (shod, in one of several nods to US Depression-era fantasy ‘The Wizard of Oz’, in ruby brogues).
Michael Jibson adds soul as plaintive, corruptible little brother Addie, who yearns to build a new America but instead follows Willie to destruction in the Alaskan goldfields, New York and Florida. (Addie’s whistle-stop visits to Hawaii, India and Hong Kong are brilliantly staged, but the cultural stereotyping is probably best written off as a misguided nod to Cole Porter.)
Jon Robyns is superb as Hollis Bessemer, the art-loving rich kid who Addie picks up on a train – they find love while fleecing Bessemer’s deliciously awful aunts, who go gaga for Addie’s villas (his architecture is a shallow stylistic tour of the world as well). Their duet, ‘You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’, is the best melody in Sondheim’s score.
Glyn Kerslake and Gillian Bevan as Papa and Mama Mizner make their overbearing dreams for their sons felt, even from beyond the grave, in a ghost-haunted show whose tour of Addie’s far-from-wonderful life begins and ends with his death. Sondheim’s musical ability to sculpt every emotional opportunity is absolutely suited to these characters, with their eye for beauty and the main chance.
The composer’s intrinsic subtlety and the naive simplicity of John Weidman’s book are replicated in Bedella and Jibson’s brothers, whose flashes of innocence and ardour can telescope you instantly from their cynically accumulated, coke-snorting middle age back to their pioneering beginnings. I wouldn’t want to see ‘Road Show’ spread too thinly on a larger stage, but here at the Menier, it’s practically perfect.