Road Show, Menier Chocolate Factory

Flawed but fascinating, Stephen Sondheim's latest continues its ongoing journey

by Matt WolfThursday, 07 July 2011

Brotherly love, or not: David Bedella and Michael Jibson play the Mizners, Wilson and Addison, in Stephen Sondheim's latestAll images by Catherine Ashmore

"Onward we go," the hearty but essentially hapless Wilson Mizner (David Bedella) remarks well into Road Show, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical that has been slow-aborning, and then some, since it first appeared in workshop form in New York as Wise Guys in 1999. Three titles and two directors later, the same material has been refashioned into the restless, always intriguing, fundamentally incomplete musical now at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the south-London venue whose Sondheim forays to this point (Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music) have generally struck gold.

That Addison Mizner was gay allows Sondheim to write what for him is an unusual power duet for two men

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