The Frogs at Southwark Playhouse review: bursting with unfulfilled promise

The show has been tinkered with too many times and you can see the layers of each era in every line, like a chunk of rock, striated with Aristophanes’s original, then Shevelove and Sondheim’s 1970s reworking, and Nathan Lane’s 2004 sassifying, and the added ad libs of today. At every moment you can tell who’s done what, and the result is a mishmash of styles and signatures. It’s easy to see the promise of a show told across millennia by so many great talents: Aristophanes, Sondheim, Lane, Artie from Glee. Easy, too, to see all the ways that promise is unfulfilled.