The Curving Path to Road Show
By Harry Haun
14 Nov 2008
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Stephen Sondheim
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| photo by Jerry Jackson |
Stephen Sondheim talks about his fascination with two American dreamers and how it led him and collaborator John Weidman down the long road to Road Show.
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The ever-revivable Stephen Sondheim has, sez IBDB (the Internet Broadway Database), accumulated 26 Broadway credits in the past 14 years. That's nearly two a year, but his first new musical to hit New York since his Passion of 1994 is the Road Show that opens at The Public on Nov. 18.
If you think 14 years is an extravagantly long coffee break, you don't know the half of it — or even the quarter of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea of making a musical out of the colorfully twisted lives of the Brothers Mizner — con man Wilson and architect Addison — has reverberated in Sondheim's mind for 56 years, since 1952 when he came across Alva Johnston's biography, "The Legendary Mizners."
"They're extraordinary people," says Sondheim. "They represent a kind of vitality, both misguided and well-guided, that's peculiarly American. But what got me were the two guys themselves — the yin and yang of an intimate brother relationship. The fact that they also represent a kind of American energy enriches the story, I think."
With no formal training but a spark of genius, Addison became a master builder of the 20th century and created Boca Raton. Wilson countered his lack of training with helium and chutzpah, zigzagging through life a jack-of-all-trades and expert-at-none: raconteur, gambler, boxer, film hack ("20,000 Years in Sing Sing"), Brown Derby host.
When their real-estate misadventure went kerplunk, says Sondheim, "Addison felt responsible and guilty, and Wilson — typically — did not. He just walked away. That's what he always did in life. Whatever he did, he would ruin and then walk away."
Addison died Feb. 5, 1933, in Florida, paying off creditors; Wilson followed him in death, his body wracked from drugs and drink — two days short of two months later.
In the highs and lows of their lives, Sondheim saw his first musical forming — an intense interest that lasted three years, until he learned some pretty big guns had hijacked the Mizner biography: Producer David Merrick was turning it into a Bob Hope vehicle called Sentimental Guy, with songs by Irving Berlin and book by S. N. Behrman. Years later, when Sondheim and Merrick were working on Gypsy, the composer inquired about the project and was told it had been abandoned after five scenes and a handful of songs. Immediately, Sondheim was interested all over again, but he didn't know who to write it with until, many years later, he pitched the idea to John Weidman, his musical-book collaborator on Assassins and Pacific Overtures.
Two of their Roundabout Assassins are now Mizners — Michael Cerveris is Wilson, and Alexander Gemignani is Addison — under John Doyle's direction. They're not the first: Victor Garber and Nathan Lane originated those roles in a 1999 developmental reading at New York Theatre Workshop helmed by Sam Mendes, and Howard McGillin and Richard Kind reprised them in Chicago and Washington, DC in 2003 in a revamped version Harold Prince directed (Michele Pawk was the vamp added to the mix). Continued...
