Matt and I saw Nathan Lane’s new adaptation of Aristophanes’s The Frogs last night.

Oy.

With all due respect to Nathan Lane (and keeping in mind that it’s still in previews), this is a really misguided production. It’s too long, many of the jokes are high-school amateurish (although there are some good ones), and it’s overly preachy. I liked much of the music (the score is by Sondheim), but a lot of it sounded like very derivative Sondheim. (I’d never heard Sondheim’s original score for the show, so I don’t know what was new and what wasn’t.) Chris Kattan does Chris Kattan, and he’s quite endearing, but he can’t really sing. The final quarter of the play — a verbal duel between George Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare — is absorbing and moving in and of itself, but within the context of the show, it drags everything to a halt.

The last 10 or 15 minutes of the production left me depressed about the state of the world, which I guess means that it did its job, although there is one really cringe-worthy and by-now-clichéd piece of scenery that briefly appears onstage before the final curtain and actually has little to do with the play’s message if you think about it.

As for audience reaction, there wasn’t much of one. The applause after each number was tepid. One song, sung by Shakespeare, didn’t even get any applause. Zero. It made for an awkward moment. (I think the song put everyone to sleep.)

The best aspect of the show was probably the frogs themselves. There is some very cool frog choreography by Susan Stroman, the frog costumes are fun, and the frog music is appropriately discombobulating and frog-like. There were also some well-done performances; Peter Bartlett as Pluto, God of the Underworld, was a hilariously bizarre standout.

As a whole though, the production is wildly uneven. I could see what Nathan Lane was trying to do with this, and as an academic exercise it’s interesting, but as theater it just doesn’t work.