Review: Road Show - The Jewish Chronicle

If nothing else, this European premiere of Stephen Sondheim's most recent musical proves that a misfiring Sondheim show is more rewarding than most other musicals that run smoothly on all cylinders.

In many ways Road Show is typical Sondheim. The lyrics are irresistibly witty and it contains vaulting melodies and unexpected key changes so poignant, they leave you a little bit devastated. But unlike the previous shows on which Sondheim and book writer John Weidman have collaborated (Pacific Overtures and Assassins), this one lacks the sense that its story - about America's real-life 19th- and early 20th-century entrepreneurial Mizner brothers - is relevant to anyone beyond the people who are in it.

True, Addison Mizner (Michael Jibson) and his charismatic brother Wilson (David Badella) embody much of America's spirit. Addison is the talented one. A self-taught architect who wanted to build America's future but who ended up building pastiche homes for the super rich in Palm Beach, his is a story of unfulfilled potential. And Wilson, who ran a saloon, collaborated on a Broadway play and even shone as a boxing promoter, is the embodiment of America's can-do attitude, or would have been if it was not for the can't-do results. And OK, the brothers' boom-bust successes and failures chime with our credit crunch times.

But Weidman's book tells the brothers' story in a way that makes it almost impossible to draw wider lessons about the price paid for chasing the American dream. And because the price for the brothers' failures is mainly borne by investors and chancers (unlike the current real-life financial crisis in which hard-working ordinary folk who are the ones paying for the failures of big business), it is hard to care much about their fate.

Despite the occasional judgemental presence of the ghosts of the brothers' parents - who for some reason haunt their sons' not particularly disgraceful progress through life - the moral here does not amount to much more than "you win some, you lose some."

Still, John Doyle's production is brimful of quality. And the director has clearly learned lessons from previous unsuccessful versions of the show. These not only had different directors - such as Sam Mendes and Harold Prince - but different titles, including Bounce, Gold and before that, Wise Guys.

For this production, which is largely based on Doyle's Public Theatre staging in New York, the action is played out in a corridor that bisects the Menier's audience and along which the tightly-drilled cast of 15 propel the action back and forth like a pinball.

Jibson's intense Addison makes a fine foil for Badella's smooth operator Wilson - the brother's chalk and cheese personas bringing to mind the mixture of talent and showmanship that drives American prosperity. Or is it greed? It is probably all of these, and to make the point hundreds of dollar bills are thrown into the air like confetti throughout the show's uninterrupted one hour and 40 minutes.

Yet none of these grand, state-of-the-nation metaphors work nearly so well as the closely observed characterisations contained within Sondheim's songs. Beautifully sung and superbly accompanied by the eight-piece band that nestles in the corner of the Menier's intimate space, they say much more about human life than the tale told by Weidman's book.

Isn't He Something, performed with poise and precision by Gillian Bevan as the boys' mother, says everything about a parent's blind pride. And The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened unsentimentally celebrates unexpected love.

The thrill of songs this good, sung this well at such close quarters, is compelling. But the realisation that they are attached to characters to whom we are so indifferent is inexorable. Put another way, the songs are elating, the story is deflating, and the combination leaves you both hugely impressed and slightly disappointed.