divine comedy; Nathan Lane and Chris Kattan put on tunics, sing Sondheim, and hop through Hades in the Greek musical farce The Frogs.

Byline: Adam Green

Great theater often begins with the collision of two apparently unrelated elements. In the case of Burt Shevelove's original production of The Frogs, those elements were a 405 b.c. Greek comedy and the 1941 Yale swim team. As a grad student in New Haven, the late playwright decided to update Aristophanes' rude political burlesque, which follows the god Dionysos through the underworld in search of a great tragic writer to rescue a society in decay, ending with a battle of the bards between Euripides and Aeschylus. (Trust me-to a bunch of Greeks getting pounded in the Peloponnesian Wars, this was funny stuff.) Shevelove substituted Shaw and Shakespeare for the Attic scribes, and cast the Yale swimming pool as the River Styx, with the swim team playing the amphibian chorus of the title.

According to Shevelove's friend Stephen Sondheim, The Frogs "made a great-pun intended-splash." It got written up in The New York Times and seemed headed for Broadway. But then came World War II, and the play was, so to speak, dead in the water. For the next three decades, Sondheim says, "there it lay-or, rather, floated." In 1973, Shevelove asked Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, to pen a few songs for a revival. After little more than a month of writing and rehearsal, they mounted-once again in the Yale pool, whose acoustics Sondheim describes as those of "a giant urinal"-a now-fabled production. The cast was composed of professional actors, young drama students (among them Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, and Christopher Durang), and, yes, the men's swim team.

This month, The Frogs is finally making the leap to Broadway, minus the chlorine and the Speedos. But the new production at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, which begins previews on June 22, more than makes up for it, with half a dozen new tunes by the musical theater's greatest songwriter (that would be Sondheim), fresh staging by the nifty director and choreographer of The Producers, Susan Stroman, and a reworked script by Max Bialystock himself, Nathan Lane, who will also don a William Ivey Long tunic to play Dionysos, doing his signature double takes and slow burns among the pillars and pottery of Giles Cadle's sets.

With his volcanic energy, exquisite timing, and mournful eyes that hint at long-suffered indignities, Lane is best known as a brilliant comic performer. But he doesn't come ...