Road Show

Road Show

Last night we went to New York City Center for a performance of Steven Sondheim’s musical Road Show. This is a twenty-year-old version of a story which has been produced under various names like Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold!. While we thoroughly enjoyed the show, it had little to do with the production and almost everything to do with good music/singing and the captivating story of the life and travails of the Mizner brothers, Addison and Wilson. The single scene was sparse on props and basically looked like a sound stage of a radio show, with players coming and going as needed. The orchestra was stage right and the row of old-fashioned microphones on stands on the front of the stage were the main props around which the primary players barely moved from. The tale was gripping enough to obviate the need for differing scenes and the “radio show” cover made it all seem natural.

The Mizner family of Northern California was versed in the legends of the Sutter’s Mill gold strike, so when the patriarch of the family died, he charged his sons (Addison and Wilson were two of six) to take care of the family and follow their road towards making America great, so off they went to seek their fortunes in the Klondike gold rush. This sets the stage for the interplay between the two brothers, a pattern that gets repeated over and over, with Addison using creativity and hard work to drive his mission while Wilson, a natural-born film-flam man uses chicanery, gambling and other less honorable means to work the situation.

Addison becomes an architect after he travels the world, seeing Hawaii, India, China and Latin American and bringing all those influences into his designs. He hones his craft in New York and then heads to Florida in search of commissions. Meanwhile, Wilson is up to his old tricks, bamboozling rich widows, promoting boxers, and pretending to write plays to position himself in Cafe society. They meet up again in Palm Beach, where Addison has discovered his true love of designing huge mansions for wealthy matrons and his equally passionate feelings for his young wealthy heir partner. Wilson begs for another chance and brotherly love overcomes common sense and integrity, as it tends to do.

The climax of the play centers around the great land swindle boom of southern Florida at the end of the roaring twenties. Addison and his partner have a vision for an entire city by the sea in a place called Boca Raton. Naturally, Wilson is allowed in and takes on the natural role for him as promoter. He spins things up with dreams of riches and creates a tulip mania in sub-tropical real estate, which soars high and crashes hard. And yet again the brothers clash on concept with Addison admonishing Wilson for his hyper-active and unethical ways. Wilson’s defense yet again is that life is made for the bold and anything less is a bore.

The show was fun and entertaining, but the lessons from the Mizners was even more meaningful. There is a part of me that greatly admires the daring do of both brothers. I know that dreams are rarely bought, they are necessarily sold. Promotion ala Wilson is as old as mankind. There was undoubtedly a promoter selling pyramids to the Pharaohs. We know Columbus sold Isabella a bill of East Indies goods. Should it surprise us that men trained in the hardships of the Klondike and sharpened on the streets of New York should try to get rich by invoking caveat emptor on unsuspecting new money sorts wanting a piece of the swamps of southern Florida? Do we think they all made those nouveau fortunes on the up and up?

I had a father a lot like Wilson Mizner, and even a lot like Addison Misner at the same time. Addison had no formal architectural training but likely pretended to be a Berkeley graduate. My father had a tale of architectural studies at Padua University, but given that I know he secured an artistically illuminated diploma from a forgerer in Rome and the year of his graduation does not even coincide with the years Padua was operational, my guess is that it’s all hype. These details neither stopped Addison in 1925 nor my father in 1965. But selling a city is where the two stories really converge. My father’s city was Visalia, California, not too far south of where the Mizners were born and raised. The vision was not an artist colony, but a home of their own for migrant farm workers looking to settle down in the breadbasket of America, the San Joaquin Valley. The Mizners wanted to build beach bungalows by the dozen. My father built tract homes by the hundreds.

The Mizners went bust when the bubble burst. My father went bust when he over-expanded and his financing bubble burst. Today, Boca Raton is an upscale retirement community and Visalia is home to 130,000 inhabitants, a 7X rise in fifty years, undoubtedly aided by the hundreds of homes built by my father in years gone by. It seems neither promoter picked a dry hole to promote. Was what they did ultimately good for the buyers they may have swindled? It certainly raises interesting questions.

I have built my career over forty-five years learning to honor my fiduciary obligations to the investors I serve. Full information, devoid of hype and any hint of unethical behavior. The Mizners and my father didn’t seem to favor that creed. But having vision and selling dreams is not always wrong. So long as the risks are known and disclosed, some investors prefer high risk – high reward situations. As a CEO of a venture-backed company, I must remind myself that it is my job to be optimistic without being unrealistic. That is such a subjective and difficult line to tread that one is always prone to criticism and excessive exuberance. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s appropriate.

That’s what I always find fascinating about the road show. As Wilson says in Road Show, it’s all about the game. We choose to play the game and know that success will have lots of champions and claims of good fortune, and failure will be that orphan that gets second-guessed every which way but loose. But as they say, the show must go on.