Old Comedy After Aristophanes’ Frogs
Description
The first half of David Greenspan’s riff on The Frogs, in which Dionysus (Pedro Pascal, doing masterful comic work) and his wisecracking slave Xanthias (Derek Lucci) tool around the Underworld, is a dizzily intelligent, furiously hilarious political spoof. Greenspan is a titanic talent; like a vaudevillian Cronus, he swallows W.S. Gilbert and Bill Maher—and starts gnawing on Oscar Wilde. After intermission, however, the Aristophanic plot gets the best of Greenspan and his hyperintelligent director, David Herskovits, and the bottom drops out of the trireme.—HS
