A Sondheim premiere in New York! Besotted fans of one of the four greatest-ever Broadway composer-lyricists (the others being Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Cole Porter, all, regrettably, dead) were resigned never to seeing another. I feared that we were going to have to make do, perpetually, with repeated, indeed incessant, revivals of Sweeney Todd, and those anthologies, such as Side by Side by Sondheim and Putting It Together, which started out as such fun but became funerary lamentations for the lack of something novel, exciting and, most of all, unknown.
Yet now, 14 years after Passion, Sondheim’s adaptation of an Italian film about an embarrassingly neurotic love affair, comes Road Show. I saw it a few days ago, shortly after its opening.
True, Road Show is not entirely new. Predecessor incarnations, variously named Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold, have been wandering around the United States for ten years. During this prolonged period of gestation its composer and the librettist John Weidman, who worked with Sondheim on his extraordinary Pacific Overtures and the mini-masterpiece Assassins, have been re-modelling it, changing its mood, its storyline and its songs.
Unlike such revered predecessors as Follies and A Little Night Music, Road Show did not have a traditional Broadway opening filled with glitter and razzmatazz. It almost crept into town, in one of the several auditoria, holding a capacity audience of only 300, at the Public Theater, a revered but remote institution in the East Village. I knew that it was a short work, only a hundred minutes, with no interval: but then, so was the unforgettable Assassins.
When I arrived at the theatre, directed by a bus driver who actually knew where it was, I was excited but fearful.
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