‘Please don't fart, this is art' – Stephen Sondheim's musical The Frogs review

The Guardian

29-05-2025

The interval playlist includes Crazy Frog, which isn't by Stephen Sondheim. But the composer's own springy numbers are the best reason to catch this rarely seen musical based on ancient Greek satire.
Aristophanes, writing at the fag end of a protracted war, conjures demigod Dionysos, accompanied by Xanthias, his slave ('though I prefer 'intern''). He braves the underworld to reclaim a dead genius, picking Aeschylus over Euripides. The musical's Dionysos considers George Bernard Shaw, but eventually plumps for Shakespeare.
Originally staged at Yale in 1974 (Sondheim: 'One of the few deeply unpleasant professional experiences I've had'), it was expanded for Broadway in 2004 (Sondheim: 'It suffered from inflation'). The extended version takes a jape too far.
We open with the best number: a fanfare plus jaunty injunctions to the audience ('Please – don't fart. / There's very little air and this is art'). Dan Buckley's droll Dionysos and Kevin McHale's Xanthias, all wriggle and snicker, begin their quest, though Burt Shevelove's book makes scenes feel more like skits. Herakles (Joaquin Pedro Valdes) is a himbo totting up his abs, the boatman Charon (Carl Patrick) a lugubrious stoner and Pluto, lord of the underworld, has a breathy cabaret number delivered by regal guest star Victoria Scone in a brushed steel bouffant.
The musical never develops Dionysos' daddy issues or frog phobia, or nails its notion that the ribbiting amphibians represent stick-in-the-mud grouches impervious to change. The frogs get a waddling ballet, in goggles, bobble toes and spangly waistcoats – choreographer Matt Nicholson devises nifty, wide-legged moves. But Shaw's battle with Shakespeare, trading smug aphorism and voluptuous word-painting, is an awful slog, unleavened by Georgie Rankcom's heavy-footed production.
'You can stop rhyming right there,' snaps Dionysos, but it would take more than a testy god to halt Sondheim, for whom rhyme was reason. 'Hippy-dippy insurrectionists' meet 'hasty pasty-faced perfectionists,' while a song to Shaw moves from animosity through pomposity to verbosity. Melancholy songs also slide between the shtick (Sondheim has a bittersweet tooth). The god's final call to arms can't give gravity to this show – but however stodgy the setting, the songs still shine.