With a flutter of fake dollar bills hurled in every direction, here comes a Stephen Sondheim British premiere. The Menier arena is stripped back to a warehouse alleyway, piled with crates and oddments: people and furniture swoop and revolve through a sharp 100 minutes, and the music clatters between tongue-twisting recitative and lovely melodies. A black-clad chorus achieve instant impressions of a gambling den in the Yukon gold rush, a fire in a pineapple plantation, a cyclone in India, a prizefight, a revolution in Guatemala ... all dodgy investments made by one or other of the famous Mizner brothers, Wilson and Addison, in the boom-and-bust frenzy of the early 20th century.
John Weidman’s book gives Sondheim a fresh opportunity to telescope — and zestfully mock — American history: in tone and music this is a close relation of Assassins. An earlier version of this show (Bounce) apparently emphasised the comic, and flopped. This revision — directed and designed both for Broadway and for this UK premiere by John Doyle — has a darker and stronger line.
It begins and ends with a deathbed, the gentler brother Addison (a mournfully whiskery Michael Jibson) regretting his wasted talent, and the ebullient Willie teasing him. Willie is David Bedella: the unforgettable Satan in Jerry Springer the Opera, his deep, vibrantly grainy baritone suits the role of the chancer, the gamester, the amoral adventurer leading his artistic sibling astray. He gambles away a gold-claim, exulting “The Game! — better than girls, better than booze, even if now and then you lose”.
Addie becomes an architect, singing love duets with his rich-boy lover Hollis and building grandiose fanciful mansions for the Palm Beach set: “I see Chinese red, I see gingerbread, and a huge Victorian potting-shed . . .” Tasteless but harmless, until Willie arrives, broke again, and rots things up with a cocaine-fuelled speculation at Boca Raton. Amid the absurdity flickers a spark of real anger at the way an artist’s vision is hyped and wrecked: Addison dreams of an artistic community, a new Paris, while Willie just wants the sport of making fortunes and losing them.
They are the co-dependent brothers, the two halves of the American dream. Overhead, the little band picks up every cunning reference to march tunes, ballads and hootenanny: it’s like a multicoloured spinning-top made audible. Could be another Menier hit.
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Box office: 020-7378 1713 to Sept 17