The Frogs (1974)
Book: Burt Shevelove (1974), with additions by Nathan Lane (2004)
Based on a comedy by Aristophanes (405 BC)
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In short: The Frogs is a satirical niche musical that blends classical comedy with modern social critique. Originally a small production for Yale students, the show was expanded into a Broadway production 30 years later.
There’s low comedy and high comedy, and then Aristophanes would, through the chorus, speak to the audience and give them his political point of view. I guess it’s sorta like Saturday Night Live in tunics.
nathan lane (actor, writer)
Overview The Frogs - background and excerpts
The Frogs is an unusual and comedic departure in Sondheim’s body of work. The show combines a Greek classic with modern themes, blending slapstick humor with sharp critiques on leadership and politics. At its core, it’s a small-scale musical, to which Sondheim added songs over the years. Thirty years after its initial production, it eventually made its way to Broadway. However, The Frogs remained a niche production and never achieved broad commercial popularity.
Plot Summary
Loosely based on Aristophanes’ comedy of the same name, the story follows the god Dionysus, who decides to bring George Bernard Shaw (Euripides in Aristophanes’ version) back from the Underworld to write new plays that can elevate humanity. Along the way, Dionysus and his slave Xanthias encounter various characters and ultimately face a humorous and philosophical showdown between Shaw and William Shakespeare to determine who can best “save the world” with their words and wisdom.
Style and Music
The spirit of Aristophanes runs through the musical, especially in its satirical humor, vulgarity, and moral undertones. Sondheim composed music that draws on traditional Greek conventions, including several choral numbers.
Social themes include the role of art and artists in society, questioning whether art can truly drive social change. The musical raises critical issues around leadership and political responsibility, as the competition between Shaw and Shakespeare is not only about literary merit but also about who has the best ideas for improving society.
Development
The Frogs has an unusual production history. Sondheim wrote it as a favor to a friend who was asked to restage his 1941 adaptation of The Frogs at Yale. Sondheim agreed to add a few songs in a matter of weeks for a small run of performances (ultimately eight) in Yale University’s swimming pool. The cast included Yale students, among them Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and playwright Christopher Durang.
Reception
The production was ambitious and challenging, given its unusual setting and complex technical requirements. What began as a relaxed endeavor turned into a disaster, in Sondheim’s view, largely due to producer Robert Brustein, whom he critiques harshly in his book Finishing the Hat. Brustein had even secretly invited reviewers to attend a show that was not ready for performance. Despite this, the show was well-received by critics and audiences, with its satirical humor drawing praise.
Broadway production
In 2004, Nathan Lane adapted The Frogsinto a full-length musical. The script was revised and expanded for a Broadway production directed by Susan Stroman, with Lane starring as Dionysus. This version also featured new music and lyrics by Sondheim. The Broadway production received mixed to negative reviews; it was praised for its ambition and strong performances but criticized for lacking focus and placing too much emphasis on Nathan Lane in the script and staging. However, an abridged concert version by MasterVoices in New York in 2023 was well-received.
So please don’t fart.
There’s very little air and this is art.
And should we
get offensive,
don’t lose heart.
Pretend it’s just
the playwright
being smart.
Eventually we’ll get to the catharsis,
then depart.
But they stayed
there as stars
in the shape
of a crown.
And they’re there every night
as a sign of our love,
and it fills me
with joy,
and it fills me
with pain.[…]
There are
no stars in hell.
Just as well.
Let the leaders raise your voices
for you.
Let the critics make your choices
for you.
Somewhere somebody
rejoices
for you:
the dead.
Video excerpts (in show's order)
- “Prologos: Invocation and instructions to the audience” is the opening number, originally written as an intended opening for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
- “Ariadne” is one of the additions for the 2004 production, in which Dionysus remembers his late wife.
- “Fear no more” is a song with lyrics by William Shakespeare. In the musical, Shakespeare’s character uses this song to settle his contest with Shaw and to answer Dionysus’s question about a young man’s feelings toward death. Sondheim wrote this song a year after the initial production for a performance in Cleveland.
Stephen Sondheim about The Frogs
“Despite its botched birth, it was received rather kindly by both press and public, and it improved considerably during its second and final week, when Burt [Shevelove, red.] and I had a chance to tinker with the writing as well as the reverberant acoustics which made the orchestra sound as if it had been piped in from a neighboring tunnel, and Burt had a chance to pull the troops together. Neither of us spoke publicly about the ineptitude of the production process; we finished our work, licked our wounds, packed up our things and went home, only to find that Mr. Brustein had written an article for The New York Times, commenting on the difficulty of revivifying the classics while having to deal with “Broadway” types like Burt and me. […]
The experience of writing [the lyrics for The Frogs, red.] was primarily – wait for it – an academic one. It was an exercise: it offered me a chance to harangue an audience, to use a chorus a cappella to make sound effects, to write massed choral music, and to indulge in vulgarity, adolescent humor and moral preachment, just like Aristophanes. […]
The additional lyrics for the revival of the show […] were written to suit the requests of the star and director, a process I had encountered before; they were tailored for a commercial, albeit nonprofit production (the two are not as dissimilar as you might think, particularly in New York). Although the 2004 production was professional, it did have his problems, but at least they were professional problems: problems of writing, staging, performance and ego. And the egos of the professional theater are nothing compared to those lurking in the Groves of Academe. […] Although it had many and effective moments in both dialogue and staging, it suffered from inflation. In Aristophanes’ and Burt’s hands, it had been an hour and a half long; it should have stayed that way.”
More The Frogs: audio and video
Full shows/concerts
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Reviews of The Frogs
Original Yale production (1974)
“Mr. Shevelove’s adaptation —he is also the director—is faithful to the spirit of Aristophanes while taking outrageous liberties with his text. Dionysos still journeys to Hades to bring back a poet from the dead to stimulate the living. But the key to Mr. Shevelove’s healthy disrespect is the statement inserted in the program: “The time is the present. The place is ancient Greece.” The jokes, funny and ribald, are by Mr. Shevelove, the music by his “Forum” partner, Stephen Sondheim. There are six “musical numbers,” stretches of songs between the words, ranging from the effervescent “Parados,” the score for a sensational water ballet, to “Parabasis,” which simply marks time. Another week of effort from Mr. Sondheim and the show might have the full score it deserves. […] But most of “Frogs”‐90 minutes, without an intermission—is good adulterated fun.” – Mel Gussow, The New York Times (1974)
Broadway production (2004)
“Even the crème de la crème can curdle every now and then. Consider ”The Frogs,” which opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. This musical updating of a 1974 adaptation of Aristophanes’ 2,400-year-old comedy of gods and playwrights has the highest concentration of blue-ribbon talent of any show now on Broadway […] The composer is — reverent pause, please — Stephen Sondheim, whose name alone causes acolytes of the American musical to bow their heads. […] After dwelling with such craven procrastination on the fine ingredients that make up ”The Frogs,” I am forced to concede that what should have been a zesty, airy soufflé is a soggy, lumpy batter that never shows the slightest signs of rising. Staged in 1974 as a publicity-garnering, hourlong novelty by the Yale School of Drama — around and in the university gymnasium swimming pool, if you please — this bauble of a show has been reshaped to fill two and a half hours. The results suggest that to stretch something this slight is to shatter it. […]
Much of the score of ”The Frogs” exhales this musical complexity. Even many of the choral numbers, with their use of dissonant counterpoint and lonely solo lines, convey somber, barbed introspection. (One of them, ”It’s Only a Play,” is a beauty.) This inwardness unfortunately clashes like cymbals with the flashy outwardness of Ms. Stroman’s floor-show staging and of the gag-driven book.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times (2004)
Off West End (2017)
“Even if it takes time to get to the climactic bout, the journey is enjoyable. Disproving the idea that he can’t do touching love songs, Sondheim gives Dionysos a beautiful hymn to Ariadne. The chorus for the frogs spawns a fiendishly intricate number in which they contrast their easygoing existence with that of “fancy-pants humanitarians and chatty platitudinarians”. And, when it comes to the crucial contest, the advocates of Shaw wittily comment on “such sanity, humanity, who cares about the vanity” while Shakespeare’s “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” is given a supremely musical setting. The problem is that Shaw’s pugnacious wit is no match for Shakespeare’s poetic power and the verdict is predictable. Sondheim later intriguingly suggested that it might have been more dramatic if the antagonists had been Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.” – Michael Billington, The Guardian (2017)
