A Conversation with Isaac Bernier-Doyle

on Road Show, Seldom Sung Sondheim, and more

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Isaac Bernier-Doyle, artistic director of London’s Upstairs at the Gatehouse, to talk, among other things, about the theatre’s upcoming production of Road Show. For anyone less familiar with this musical, this conversation makes for a perfect starting point. Isaac is a font of knowledge and wisdom on Sondheim, and here he discusses the nuanced politics of the piece, its relevance to contemporary America, and why Road Show deserves a fresh critical reassessment. He also introduces us to each member of this very special cast.

*** Isaac has also created a Sondheim puzzle exclusively for Sondheim Hub readers!! To play, simply head to https://bit.ly/sondheimhubpuzzle. He is generously offering 2 free Road Show tickets to the first person to successfully complete it! ***

Our conversation begins below:

It’s so good to meet you. We’re talking shortly before your production of Road Show at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, London. Before we dive into Sondheim, I wonder if you could give people a flavour of this very special venue.

Absolutely. My partner, Annlouise, and I took over about two years ago. She was the theatre manager here for five or so years under the previous owners, John and Katie Plews, who founded the theatre in ‘97. And in Willy Wonka fashion, one day they called her into the office and asked if she might like to take over. But specifically, they were interested in the pair of us, because it’s more than two people’s work for less than one person’s salary—so you really have to love it.

And it helps that we live together and work together, because if just one of us worked here, you simply would never see them again. It’s a very all-consuming kind of job and space. The setup now is that she is the executive director, I’m the artistic director, and we’ve been really lucky with the venue because it already has a very dedicated fan base for musical theatre.

John and Katie made it their trademark to put on these very elaborate and high-production-value golden-age musicals in this space. I get Google alerts every so often when there is a big revival of a golden-age show, and it’s often a journalist comparing it to the Gatehouse production 20 years ago—so John and Katie had a very maximalist attitude to what you can do with an off-West End space. And in different economic times, we’ve tried to continue with that ethos of a big holiday musical, something that is unexpected in terms of scale and ambition. Our own interests are in lots of musical theatre directions: new writing and Sondheim predominantly, but other classics of the canon as well, and so it’s dovetailed very comfortably in that respect.

Can you talk me through the process of arriving at Road Show in particular?

Road Show was a piece that we had actually initially discounted, because festive is not a word that is often associated with it. But in all other respects, it ticked every box. We’re always considering cast size. We want to pay people fairly here, and that means a real consideration of cast size. And it’s a piece that has been on my bucket list, and that sits quite strangely in Sondheim’s body of work.

I think it came at a point when people were really ready for him to have another failure. I’ve been reading old reviews, and there is an interesting unwillingness to engage with the politics of the piece. It’s often painted as Steve really wanted to write a musical about these weird, kooky brothers. But I think that critical angle fails to take into account the calibre of the writing team. Sondheim and Weidman did three shows together, and the other two of them [Pacific Overtures and Assassins] are widely acknowledged as the most political musical theatre of that generation of work. And people are sometimes like, “And then there’s Road Show.” And I think that’s a complete failure in the critical imagination to understand what this piece is about.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I think this is a piece that is ready to assert itself in the same way that Pacific Overtures and Assassins have as being a serious, political, intellectual piece—and one that I think speaks really clearly, especially after the election. It’s unfortunate timing for the world, and interesting timing to be doing Road Show, because it’s a piece that I think has a lot to say about America, and the mythology of America. In form, it echoes a kind of parable about place. It’s so rooted in conversation with the American dream and the ever-accelerating line-must-go-up graph of capitalism.

And with the renewed interest in Sondheim’s work that follows his death and the subsequent deluge of revivals that we’ve had—which has been great—I think this is, for us, a fun challenge to stick Road Show’s hand up and ask people to reconsider it amongst that canon, to consider how it sits as an interesting piece that people just haven’t quite found the vocabulary to discuss.

And do you think there’s value in taking Road Show on its own terms, and not getting too bogged down in how it compares to its various previous iterations? Even for real Sondheim devotees, those chapters in Look, I Made A Hat can be quite intimidating…

It’s a challenge for people who, especially after his death, are absorbing as much Sondheim as remains on earth. I think the tendency often with people who are very devoted to Sondheim, and theatre in general, can be to lose sight of the forest for the trees. In the case of Road Show, the story of its writing process is so compelling, and so humanizing, that I think the outcome of that writing process is something that maybe Sondheim himself was not quite as clear-headed about as some of his other work—work that came out fully formed in a shorter period of time, and that he was able to move on from.

Writers are always in conversation with the audiences who first respond to their work. I think when the conversation becomes so muddied about the various iterations and the way in which dramaturgy has shifted between variations of a piece, it’s hard to put that aside and just examine, in a Roland Barthes kind of way, the text. What does the text have to say? And what made me so excited about Road Show was coming back to it, having not listened to it for years. My heart leapt when I listened to the score and read the book again, and it’s just good. The material is really solid, and it deserves to be considered without any of that baggage, interesting baggage though it may be…

And certainly, I’m more guilty than average of diving into the minutiae. I live for that stuff: what words changed between the various iterations? When the love ballad before was between Wilson and his wife, and now has shifted, what changed in the scansion? And that’s great. But I think that’s a very separate mindset to just evaluating the work as is.

And I was really, really pleased to find that the work just stands alone—as you would expect from Sondheim and from Weidman. It’s just great. It’s just a fun and dark score, and a book that is a masterclass in pace. The whole thing is so zippy. It’s complicated stuff as well: there’s a fair bit of time skip. There’s a lot of conceptual and literal place right alongside each other, and then there’s the sheer volume of locations that it explores. It’s a really difficult needle to thread to keep that book as tight as it is—but Weidman’s such a great book writer, and the whole thing really sings.

So yeah, it’s been fun to reexamine it through a lens of really zooming in on the piece. And it’s true that one’s ability to do that is predicated to some extent on having engaged with previous iterations and the conversation around the creation of it. But at some point, you have to just let that fall away and be like, okay, how do we get that character on stage for this scene? And that’s the level of engagement that I think is very helpful, to just let everything else recede and focus on the piece.

As you think about this score, are there musical moments that you’re particularly excited to bring to life?

For sure there are. There are two emblematic moments in the show that, for me, speak to the breadth of comedy and tragedy that it entails. More so than so many other scores, this one manages to go so fluently from the ridiculous to the sublime. There’s a song which is such classic Sondheim writing. His fingerprint is so audible, to mix metaphors, in the song “You.” It’s a really mighty scene in which Addison Mizner is meeting a bunch of potential patrons for whom he is going to build houses—and in that very wry way, Sondheim is conjuring parodies of upper-middle-class Americans of a certain snootiness, and giving them all of these lines that sit under each other. Before studying the score, you wouldn’t notice that one character has been talking about a floating gazebo for two uninterrupted pages, whilst everyone else is muttering about other things.

“You” is so funny and so much fun, and could not be written by anyone else. It’s such a clear example of that excellent part-writing that Sondheim was capable of, and lyrics that just should not be able to exist on top of each other in the same moment without causing some kind of absolute cacophony on stage. It’s the same kind of beat as in “God, That’s Good,” when everyone is talking about their experience of pies on top of each other. That is such a funny piece of writing, and such a joy and a challenge directorially speaking to work on.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, the penultimate number, which is called “Get Out/Go,” is just devastating. I think there becomes a tendency, with artists who are as singular in their field, for people to develop a kind of stock vault that they like to harp on about. This person’s great. Oh, of course they can’t do X. Sondheim’s had a few of these. The most famous one was about the lack of memorable melody writing, which as we know is nonsense. But if there were one of those critiques that I’d identify as being relevant in this case, it’s that a lot of people are not satisfied by the kind of endings that Sondheim works build up to. I’m sure we’ve all, as Sondheim fans, had the frustrating experience of explaining why Into the Woods’s second act, or why Sunday in the Park with George’s second act, has to be there.

Road Show has such a classic ending. The whole piece sits in an ambivalent sort of space, but the emotional stakes are continuously rising, and they culminate in this song between the two brothers, where one of them is just begging the other one to leave him alone, to just get out of his life. He says, “Everything I’ve done has been ruined by my association with you.” And at the same time, the other brother is saying, “You don’t want me to go. Just say it.” And it ends them just screaming at each other, in a way that’s hard to find analogues to in other Sondheim works. There’s very little subtext. He’s not really playing with duality of meaning here, other than that Addison is at once begging this person to leave, but knowing that they can’t, and knowing that deep down it’s a completely futile request, because he’s not going anywhere. They’re joined at the hip. But the straightforwardness of that emotional beat is really hard to find analogues to, particularly in other ending moments.

And it hits so hard. Even in auditions, when we had people doing that number, everyone on the panel had goosebumps for the entire thing. It’s just devastating music, and it builds and builds in a really relentless way. It’s tough, but it’s very, very honest and raw, and an expression of the theme of masculinity that runs through the piece—which feels, again, very current at this present moment.

You mentioned your audition panel there… As we’re speaking, you’ve just made your casting public. Sondheim Hub readers will be familiar with Madeleine [Morgan—click here to read our interview with her], but could you briefly run me through this brilliant cast you’ve assembled?

We often have this challenge in casting, which is that the standard and level of everyone that we see is just overwhelming, and it’s such a difficult process. It’s so invigorating to know how many people are excited about Steve’s work—and it’s cool to be into Sondheim. The younger generation of graduates are all so fluent in what is by far the most complicated musical language in the popular MT canon. That gives me such hope for the future. Someone like Maddy, Madeleine Morgan, is a great example of that: just such intelligent work in building these characters and in relating complex lyrics to text. And that was the case with all of these people that we saw. Incidentally, as a little bit of behind-the-scenes info for you, we added to the cast twice. We were originally aiming to do it with six. And it was such an overwhelming crop of auditionees that we were like, okay, we can’t not have them. So then it became seven, and then it became eight.

Returning to The Gatehouse after a truly singular and triumphant performance in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is Oliver Sidney, who is, in my view, the number one triple threat working in London. He’s the most beautiful dancer, and a good friend. He did Charlie Brown here last year, and then we were lucky enough to transfer that show to Shanghai this summer. He’s playing Addison. That was such an easy casting decision. We didn’t have to think about it—he’s just perfect for the role. It’s a role that demands a kind of flip-flopping between strength and vulnerability that Ollie can conjure in a heartbeat, and it will be a real joy to see that come to life.

His counterpart, Reece Richardson, is such an impressive actor—and they work so well together. Looking at the headshots together, they actually could be related, which is fun. These two brothers operate as two sides of the same coin. They feel like the same person who has traveled down two different paths—and watching the two of them together in chemistry tests, that was really clear. They bounced off each other straight away. And Wilson, for those who don’t know, is the older, more domineering brother, who has a very challenging relationship to morality, and who, although incredibly charismatic and likeable, ultimately leaves a trail of misery in his wake. He’s very self-serving, and aware of that, which is tragic in its own way. So, those are the two brothers at the heart of the story.

Completing the Mizner family we have Robert Finlayson and Katherine Strohmaier, who were, again, both exceptional auditionees and who brought such pathos to those parts, but then such comedy to the moments that demand it. The setup for this show is that anyone who isn’t on stage as their character—the two brothers notwithstanding—is probably going to have to do some multi-roleing at some point. Like I said, there’s such an array of locations, which engenders a wide array of other characters. And so from an acting perspective, it’s a fun challenge to both define very clearly this father character who actually maybe sings a cumulative 80 bars of music as himself, but then has to slot in as a gambler, as a potential house buyer, and all of these other roles. And with these actors—well, with all of them in fact—that versatility and intelligent comic acting was super important, so I’m really looking forward to working with both of them.

Then Rhys Lambert is playing Hollis Bessemer. I guess it’s probably quite well-known in conversations about Road Show that it contains the only gay love ballad in Sondheim’s canon. And with this relationship between Addison and Hollis, there is an immediate tenderness to it. It may be venturing slightly more into spoiler territory to imagine where it might end up, but suffice it to say that it’s very important for the actor playing Hollis to be able to win us over such that this cycle of violence, not in necessarily a physical sense, but in terms of one’s relationship to those in positions less powerful than themselves, is made very clear. We see Wilson controlling Addison controlling Hollis: this kind of stepwise downward flow of how people are treating each other, and how people are using each other instrumentally rather than as ends in themselves. Rhys was just phenomenal in auditions.

And then our ensemble, which is Madeleine Morgan, Folarin Akinmade, and Emily Friberg, they were just so funny and so chameleon-like in their ability to inhabit all of these different roles. We’re obviously looking for people who are also just incredibly on top of difficult music, and all three of them were able to pick that up so immediately. We’re a very vibes-based organisation, and so we also just loved the moments that we were working with them in auditions—and that was true for so many of the people that we saw. I think you’ll see when you come and see the show just what an incredibly talented bunch they are.

The thing you’re always looking for with Sondheim performers, maybe more than if I was casting a different show, is that interest in the intellectual conversations surrounding the work, and an instinct that relates to the politics of the text or to the emergent properties of the text beyond just putting on a good show. I always find that the people who are work best as Sondheim interpreters are either in the Bernadette Peters category of just having that completely faultless instinct for exactly what Steve meant with every single second of music, or people who are so considerate in their choices that they’re able to dive in and find layers to text that even someone who considers themselves very well-versed in it had never thought of. I think sometimes the best people to talk to about Sondheim are the people who perform it, because they’ve usually excavated something that you would never have noticed unless you’ve inhabited the role, unless you’ve had those words in your mouth. I’m very confident that that applies to all of this cast.

That’s so exciting, and I know anyone near enough to London will already be searching for Road Show tickets as they’re reading this. You’re also doing this brilliant-sounding Seldom Sung Sondheim evening on December 15th. Tell me a little more about that…

We pitched it alongside doing Road Show, so it was at the forefront of our minds. It’s a really fun privilege to be able to present people with another look into the finished work of an artist’s life. Sondheim has a body of work that rewards those who look beyond the most obvious songs. Bryn Terfel did this concert at the Albert Hall for his 50th birthday. I was probably nearer the start of my Sondheim journey. I was relatively late to Steve’s work; it wasn’t until university that I properly started engaging with it. And at this concert, out came Daniel Evans to sing a song that I’d never heard before called “I Remember.” I thought, Jesus Christ, what an incredible piece of writing.

Songs in that category, where his signature is so clear, are just such a joy. And my hope is that for anyone who comes to that show—or if you can’t make it, set a day aside and go deep diving into Spotify, or email me for some recommendations—that there will be at least something in there that is new, is fresh, or is reinterpreted in a way that is very satisfying.

I put my thumb on the scale slightly with the director, because my current obsession is the song “Country House,” cut from Follies in London. And so I said to the director, “Feel free to run with the theme however you like. But if we don’t hear “Country House,” I will burst into tears and leave.” I can’t guarantee that it’ll be there, because maybe he values the integrity of the show and its plotting more than my personal wellbeing, which is fair enough. But fingers crossed for “Country House,” because that’s a cracking song.

Road Show runs Dec 12—Jan 12 at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London. For more information and tickets, simply click here.

Seldom Sung Sondheim takes place on Dec 15, and features Madeleine Morgan alongside a whole host of talented young performers, as well as special guest Jak Malone. For more information and tickets, click here.