If making a musical were a science instead of a bizarre mixture of luck, carpentry and black magic, then any show reuniting the composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim with director Harold Prince would sail automatically past the science shelf and into history.
But making a musical is more like a seance than like science. There is no formula. It’s infernally difficult to get right. A second visit to “Bounce,” which continues through Aug. 10 at the Goodman Theatre before moving to Washington, D.C., this fall, confirmed as much.
Bittersweet as the experience was, I’m glad I saw and heard it again, if only to try to figure out more fully why this long-gestating chronicle of the famously reckless Mizner brothers feels so conflicted.
“Bounce” purports to tell the story of why Wilson Mizner, the dissolute bon vivant, and Addison Mizner, the closeted homosexual architect, were flip sides of the early 20th Century American character. The relationship isn’t pretty. So far, so good: Sondheim’s glorious and far-reaching career has delved into every rich, dark, human behavioral extreme — and a lot of love, too — the world has to offer.
Watching “Bounce,” however, is a little like listening to two different Sondheim lyrics simultaneously. The tunes are “We Do Not Belong Together” from “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Together (Wherever We Go)” from “Gypsy.” And if that sounds more conflicted than intriguing, well it is. In “Bounce,” we care about Addison Mizner some of the time, and we care about Wilson Mizner almost none. And that’s the first of its many problems.
A good second visit
There’s nothing conflicted about the overture. I was extremely happy to hear it again. It’s an overture brimming with promise. Sondheim and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick: Now that’s a brother act made in heaven.
The show attached to the “Bounce” overture betrays more uncertainty than exuberance.
There are, however, exceptions. Midway through Act 1 comes a sequence billed as “Addison’s Trip Around the World.” It depicts Addison’s comic travails in Hawaii, Hong Kong and Guatemala, as well as his propensity for collecting things and his realization that he should design a house to accommodate it all.
Four years ago an earlier version of the song carried the optimistic title “On My Way.” Nathan Lane bounded through it in the 1999 off-Broadway workshop, back when the show was called “Wise Guys.” Despite the huge differences between the 1999 and the 2003 versions of the musical — I didn’t see the workshop, but a couple of years ago I signed my life away to watch an archival tape of it — this was the song that temporarily made you think the show itself was on its way too.
It could only have been written by a master. It accomplishes so much, so deftly, buoyed by a sprightly, globe-trotting melody line. At the Goodman, audiences perk up the moment they hear the four notes accompanying the lyric “I’m on my way.” Here, as in the “Bounce” score’s other melodic high spots — “The Game,” “Talent” and especially “You” — Sondheim writes simply, but without slumming. It’s different with the bluntly insistent melody he offers for “The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me,” which does sound like a terrific talent writing down. Same, too, with the title tune. “Bounce” may stick in the brain, but I suspect it’s for reasons Sondheim himself might attribute to melodic repetition and two reprises, which is two more than most Sondheim songs ever get.
The Sondheim songs “Talent” and “You” stand out here largely because the book scenes they support actually work. The first wholly successful passage in John Weidman’s libretto doesn’t arrive until early in Act 2, when Addison (Richard Kind) meets his future lover, Hollis Bessemer (Gavin Creel) on a train to Florida. Then Hollis sings “Talent,” and the show feels like it’s going somewhere: Toward Addison’s fulfillment, which is something we can care about.
Pursuit of humor
Addison’s Act 1 round-the-world sequence ends with director Prince’s best visual stroke. As Addison arranges his dream home in his head, a full-stage architectural blueprint designed by Eugene Lee descends from the stage flyloft. It’s a satisfying moment. And yet, en route to this capper, Addison must serve as the butt of three different swindles, dully executed. The dialogue lets Sondheim’s song down. Funny is an elusive quality, but funny is one thing “Bounce” isn’t, at least not enough.
At the end of “Bounce” you’re left with a lot of questions bouncing in your head. What kind of funny is this show trying to be? How dark, or light? What sort of mother figure is Mama Mizner meant to embody? She’s stuck halfway, as written, between a blandly supportive cipher and a more ambiguous and callous obstacle.
Another question: What level of stylization are we dealing with? The idea, I believe, is to start the show (which begins with the Mizners’ deaths, travels to heaven for their testy reunion, and then goes back to Earth for the boys’ early years) in a heightened vaudevillian vein. Gradually the colors turn darker. But by the time Addison Mizner is spitting rage at his late, unlamented mother, dead on the sofa with a blanket over her head — what must poor Jane Powell be thinking under there? — we don’t know where we are.
Arcane though they may be to 21st Century audiences, the Mizners offer handy and contrasting images of the 20th Century American character. The “Bounce” authors have spoken of Addison as the artist, Wilson as the promoter; Addison the creator, Wilson the user (in more ways than one). Surely these wise guys could anchor a brash, headlong musical comedy with teeth. Couldn’t they?
Irving Berlin thought so. One version of his Mizner musical, ultimately unfinished, carried the working title “Palm Beach,” based on Cleveland Amory’s book “The Last Resorts.” The musical was to have focused on the Florida land boom exploits of the Mizners. This narrow slice of the Mizners’ larger story feels stageworthy. And “Bounce” acquires its clearest sense of direction when Addison boards that train southward from New York.
Struggle to feel
In 1952 Berlin wrote an outline for a relationship between Wilson and Addison that was “hard as nails. Their insults are devastating,” he wrote, “but we sense a great affection between these two hardboiled characters.” That applies to the fraternal struggle in “Bounce,” but it’s a struggle we hear about, over and over, rather than experience. In one Sondheim lyric Mama sings of being “drunk with laughter” over Wilson’s wit, but Weidman’s book offers scant evidence. In the climactic sequence called, rather drably, “Last Fight,” Wilson pulls the words “I love you” from his bitter brother’s mouth like so many bad teeth — but the show spends more time talking about a fractious relationship than dramatizing it.
In 1962, Sondheim’s first produced show as composer and lyricist, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” made it to Broadway and eventually became a classic. People forget that “Forum” looked mighty grim out of town. The director George Abbott, a whiz when it came to fixing a show in tryouts, hadn’t a clue how to fix “Forum.” In the Sondheim biography by Meryle Secrest, Sondheim remembers Abbott throwing up his hands and saying: “I dunno. You had better call in George Abbott.” Ultimately it took Jerome Robbins to fix it, along with Sondheim’s “Comedy Tonight” as a new opener.
Can Harold Prince fix “Bounce”? Can Sondheim? Can Weidman? It’s a horrible cliche, but: Time will tell. Time, along with every clear-eyed, tough-minded Weidman and Sondheim revision — revisions that may yet determine what this show is really about, and why — prior to the show’s Kennedy Center run.
