After a long journey fraught with difficulty, several changes of title, casts, and directors, Road Show, the musical by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman is finally playing in New York. The show can be seen at the Public Theater off-Broadway where it opened Tuesday.

The tenacious Sondheim and Weidman have created two strapping antiheroes, Wilson and Addison Mizner, two brothers who are constantly looking for fortune and the American dream. Their journey is a rollercoaster with quite a number of bumps.

The show’s creators have managed to bring us an elegantly small show full of big ideas. It’s a lucid, attractive look into the American psyche, both the good and bad sides of it.

The musical’s title protagonists are based on two real-life Mizner brothers, early 20^th century (mis)adventurers and jacks-of-all-trades who’ve left their mark on everything from playwriting, to architecture to entrepreneurism.

Despite their constant mishaps, they always were able to bounce back, and that’s one of the themes pervasive in Weidman’s play. So much so that Bounce was one of the show’s titles, back in 2003 when it ran at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and Washington’s Kennedy Center.

This time around, director John Doyle’s contribution can be heavily felt. He helped the two writers clarify the story, and stripped it to its bare bones. It deals with the lives of two very different men who are unable to live with or (without) each other. The pair is played beautifully by Michael Cerveris and Alexander Gemignani.

Doyle, who also did the set design, gave the play an old-time look, straight out of a daguerreotype. The debris, bits and pieces which make up the set look like they’ve simply been found and placed among stacked boxes.

The play starts with the death of Addison, and does a flashback to the two’s beginnings, looking hopefully to the new century, and keeping in mind their dying father’s advice to “keep your eyes on what's afar, not on what we are, but what we can become!”

The meaning of that is very different of course to each brother. Addison is the more idealistic of the two, a dreamer and a globetrotter. His travels take him to Alaska, Hawaii, India, China and Guatemala, where he hopes to find himself and his fortune.

Wilson is a gambler to whom “The only thing that matters is the game,” as one of the show’s mantras goes. He goes from poker player to prizefighter, play production and horse racing. He shares with his sibling only his lack of success.

“Road Show” along with Sondheim’s 1976 play “Pacific Overtures” and the 1990s’ “Assassins,” comprise a trilogy of American history educating plays, which provide a wonderful and full of flavor look at the events and people which made America what it is today.