[Following on the reviews, both by Jesse Green, of the Broadway and Off-Broadway productions of Merrily We Roll Along that turned the legendary flop into a Tony-winning hit, I’m now posting the notices of two more revivals, Off-Broadway productions from 2019 (another review by Green) and 1994 (remember: I’m working backwards chronologically), then Frank Rich’s review of the 1981 première, and finally. Brooks Atkinson’s notice for the 1934 non-musical Merrily We Roll Along by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
[As I did in Part 1, I’ll give the record book details of each production (which are all included in my production history run-down at the beginning of the first part). Then, after the 1934 review, I’ll make some observations to address the question my friend Kirk Woodward raised about what Maria Friedman, the director of the 2022/2023 revival, and her collaborators did to produce that success from the problematic book with the beloved score that’s been undead for over four decades.]
“A BARE-BONES REVIVAL IN WHICH LESS IS
LESS”by Jesse Green
[Review-writer Jesse Green seems to have made something of a study of Merrily We Roll Along productions, which makes his notices good measuring devices for looking at what has happened to the play over time. Below is his review of a 2019 Off-Broadway revival of the musical which appeared in the print edition of the New York Times on 20 February 2019.
[As I’ve been doing since the first installment of this two-part post, I’ll now present the record book on this incarnation of the Sondheim-Furth musical:
The Roundabout Theatre Company of New York City presented the production of Merrily We Roll Along by its resident company, Fiasco Theater, at the Laura Pels Theatre in Manhattan’s Theatre District. After previews starting on 12 January 2019, the show opened on 19 February and ran through 14 April (54 performances).
(Fiasco Theater, founded in 2009, styles itself as a company that “produce[s] stripped-down, actor-driven productions . . . with an emphasis on musicality and language . . . presented by partner theaters” [such as RTC]. In the words of New York Times review-writer Alexis Soloski—of a 2024 staging of Shakespeare’s Pericles—the troupe employs a “poor-theater playbook—a mostly bare stage furnished with charisma, invention, spirit and song.” )
The show was directed by Noah Brody and choreographed by Lorin Latarro. The scenic designer was Derek McLane, costume designer was Paloma Young, lighting designer was Christopher Akerlind, and sound designer was Peter Hylenski. The music was orchestrated by Alexander Gemignani.
The reduced cast—six actors in all, with doubling by those who weren’t playing the three central friends—included Jessie Austrian (Mary), Manu Narayan (Charley), and Ben Steinfeld (Frank).
The production didn’t win any awards, but received five nominations, including for the 2019 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical and the 2019 Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Revival.
[Note, if you will, Green’s remark that “[o]n the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal . . ., I’m sorry to say that it’s still not “Merrily”’s time. Maybe it never will be . . . .” Then look back at what he had to say three and four years later (see Part 1).]
There are few moments in musical theater as heartbreaking as the one near the end of “Merrily We Roll Along,” when the reverse chronology of the storytelling lands us on a Manhattan tenement rooftop in 1957.
We have already lived backward through 23 years of disillusion, as three friends, Frank, Charley and Mary, first seen as hardened adults in 1980, gradually grow younger, shedding their cynicism. Now singing “Our Time” — an anthem that sounds like what dew on a cobweb looks like — they appear in all their unpolluted promise, anticipating important lives and unbreakable bonds.
The only thing sadder than this moment in “Merrily” is “Merrily” itself. A show with one of the richest scores of the 1980s, by Stephen Sondheim — but one of the most problematic books, by George Furth — it has spent the 38 years since its flop Broadway opening on its own backward trajectory to find its best self. On the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal, which opened on Tuesday at the Laura Pels Theater, I’m sorry to say that it’s still not “Merrily”’s time.
Maybe it never will be — and I speak as someone who’d gladly patronize a dedicated “Merrily” repertory theater, perhaps on that rooftop, running nothing but reworked versions in perpetuity. Even if all the productions I’ve seen since 1981 have fallen short in some way, each one has added to my understanding of the show, and human nature.
Until now. The current production, a six-actor, eight-musician, one-act reduction by Fiasco Theater, in residence at the Roundabout Theater Company, seems not so much stripped-down as emaciated. All of the contrasts of idealism and greed, gloss and substance so central to the story’s effectiveness are flattened under the pressure of forcing it to stand without enough legs.
Purists may focus on the prickly new orchestrations (by Alexander Gemignani) and iffy singing (by almost everyone). And yes, these are problematic, even though you can sense how they reflect the production’s priorities. Fiasco, known for imaginative, fat-free stagings, does not aim for fancy or swell.
That minimalist aesthetic has worked just fine in recent takes on “Cymbeline” and “Measure for Measure” — and, for that matter, “Into the Woods” [1987], also by Mr. Sondheim, with a book by James Lapine. Fiasco’s story-theater format was marvelously effective in conveying the complex morality of that tale, regardless of how well any one song came off.
But “Merrily” was written when Mr. Sondheim was still mining the rich seam of his peak Broadway style. By the time he wrote “Into the Woods,” six years later, having reconsidered his threat to leave the theater entirely, he had adjusted his palette in response to cerebral new collaborators and stories.
“Merrily” can’t really reach its potential by superimposing that later approach. As indicated by Derek McLane’s warehouse of a set, stuffed with the detritus of decades of showbiz, it is a story about theatrical artists, vivid and nostalgic. Frank (Ben Steinfeld) is a Broadway composer who sells out to Hollywood; Charley (Manu Narayan) is his word man, who loudly doesn’t; and Mary (Jessie Austrian) is a writer trying to figure out where she fits in, which we learn right from the drunken start is nowhere.
Especially as run in reverse, their conflicts over love and work and what it means to stay friends must be dense enough to support the score, which in its original orchestration by Jonathan Tunick had great Golden Age schmaltz in its veins. [Tunick, a longtime musical arranger for Sondheim, also did the orchestrations for the 2022/2023 New York revival and won a Tony for that work. See Part 1.]
Here, something has flipped. The songs, with all their polish removed, no longer reflect the coherent Broadway world of the story but instead try to excavate its various interior workings. Often radically reconceived, harshly truncated or left to dribble away, they no longer ennoble the characters or provide much pleasure for the audience.
So “Now You Know,” Mary’s deliciously brassy effort to buck up Frank and bring down the curtain at what used to be the end of Act I, is rendered here as a mid-show dirge, exposing subtext that was better off sub.
Or take the bitter torch song “Not a Day Goes By,” sung by Frank in the original production. Reassigned to his betrayed wife, Beth (Brittany Bradford), on the eve of their brutal divorce, it makes better sense, in theory; but because of the reverse chronology, it’s pretty much the first thing out of her mouth and thus seems to come from nowhere.
“Why is that lady singing?” you may wonder — just as the conceptual set often leaves you asking, “Where are we?” and the use of three actors to cover the entire ensemble (the original cast numbered 27) has you trying to sort out who’s who.
I’ll let completists detail the many other changes: more cuts than additions, it seemed to me, except for a new scene, near the end, adapted from one in the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play on which the show is distantly based. (Utterly unmusicalized, the scene lays an egg.) The director Noah Brody has also interpolated a lot of business during the inter-scene rewinds; some is succinct and clever (at one point even the lyrics are sung backward), but some just seems like doodling.
Say what you will about the original production, with its just-turned-professional cast and bizarre costume concept, but I found that “Merrily” more coherent and moving than any I’ve seen since. Of course, I was just out of college then, the age of the characters when they sing “Our Time.” So perhaps I’m guilty of the same sin Mary nails in the song “Like It Was”: blaming “the way it is / on the way it was. / On the way it never ever was.”
Even so, one has to stand in awe of Mr. Sondheim for his willingness to allow intelligent younger artists to futz with his classic work. (Look for the gender-switched “Company,” now in London, to make its way to New York soon.) One day someone may even get “Merrily” right.
[The “gender-switched” Company ran on Broadway from 9 December 2021 to 31 July 2022. Directed by Marianne Elliott, who had staged the London production, with Katrina Lenk as a woman named Bobbie (instead of a man named Bobby) and several other characters whose genders were shifted, the show won the 2022 Tonys for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Direction of a Musical, as well as the 2022 Drana Desk Awards for Outstanding Revival of a Musical and Outstanding Director of a Musical. Sondheim supported the show’s concept and saw a preview performance 11 days before he died on 26 November 2021. It went on tour around the United States after departing Broadway.]
In the meantime I find myself nodding in agreement when Frank says of Mary, “We go way back,” and she instantly zings: “But seldom forward.”
[Jesse Green is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times. (Further details in Part 1.)]
*
* * *“REWORKED MUSICAL SHOWCASES SONDHEIMBUT STILL HAS FLAWS”by Frank Scheck
[The review below, of another Off-Broadway revival of Merrily, is by Frank Scheck from the Christian Science Monitor of 23 June 1994. I had had a half-baked idea of doing all New York Times notices for this series, just for the consistency, but it turned out that the Times, the “paper of record,” didn’t cover the York Theatre staging. Hence, the CSM review.
[The book on this restaging of Merrily We Roll Along is as follows:
The York Theatre production was mounted at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan’s Midtown on the East Side. It ran from 26 May to 17 July 1994 (54 performances).
The show was directed by Susan H. Schulman, with choreography by Michael Lichtefield. The scenery was designed by James Morgan, costumes by Beba Shamash, lighting by Mary Jo Dondlinger, sound by Jim van Bergen, and projections by Wendall K. Harrington. The musical director was Michael Rafter.
The principal cast included Malcolm Gets (Frank), Adam Heller (Charley), and Amy Ryder (Mary). (Gets would play Frank again at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park in 2012, nearly 20 years later. See the production history in Part 1.)
The York Theatre revival won the 1995 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, receiving two addition Lortel nominations. It was also nominated for the 1995 Outer Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical.
[Scheck describes this production as “extensively revised,” but it wasn’t trimmed to the degree that the 2019 Fiasco Theater’s version was (see above). Sondheim, however, did compose new songs for York’s revival. Director Susan Schulman also broke the standard set by Harold Prince in 1981 by casting actors about a decade older than the youngsters who played the characters in the première. Read what Scheck made of that.]
“Merrily We Roll Along” was a quick flop on Broadway in 1981, but since then this Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical has assumed the status of legend. Over the years numerous attempts have been made at reviving it, and now the Off Broadway York Theatre Company, which presented a magnificent chamber-size version of “Sweeney Todd” [1979] a few seasons back [1989], is trying its hand at resuscitating this difficult piece.
The show has been extensively revised, and the production features three new Sondheim songs. It is cast with performers mainly in their 30s, unlike the original Hal Prince-directed version, which cast youngsters in all the major roles. (This meant that the children played characters who were in their 40s at the beginning of the play and by the end of the show were college age.)
Like the Kaufman and Hart play on which it is based, “Merrily” presents its tale in backward chronological fashion. It begins in 1976, as we witness the fractured relationship between its three main characters, and in succeeding scenes illustrates exactly how their dreams and ambitions were thwarted. We see their first meeting and the full flowering of their optimism and idealism in a climactic scene at the end.
The show chronicles the relationship between composer Franklin Shepard (played by Malcom Gets), his best friend and lyricist-collaborator Charley Kringas (Adam Heller), and their pal Mary Flynn (Amy Ryder), who loves Franklin from afar. The two men start out with ambitious plans to write musicals that will change the world, but after initial blazing success, they lose their way.
Franklin becomes embroiled in a nasty divorce from his wife Beth (Anne Bobby) and has an affair with, and eventually marries, the shallow but beautiful actress (Michele Pawk) who stars in their show. He winds up a Hollywood sellout. Charley, who has become increasingly disenchanted with Franklin’s attention to everything but the work, goes off on his own, winning the Pulitzer Prize but losing his best friend. In probably the clearest example of dissipation, Mary, who at the beginning of her career is an acclaimed novelist, winds up a drunken drama critic.
The show seems much more successful now than it originally did at making us care about these characters. Their transformation, culminating in their painful-to-witness hopefulness at the end, is powerful and moving. But the backward structure doesn’t work now as it didn’t work then. It too obviously makes the points that we need to make for ourselves; the ironies and connections between events are hammered home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Since we know how the characters are going to end up we don’t care as much about how they got there. It also isn’t easy to empathize with the problems of rich and successful artists, no matter how creatively unfulfilled they may be.
What does still work, and what seems even stronger, is Sondheim’s glorious score, putting his current amorphous doodlings for “Passion” [1994] to shame. Anyone who has ever doubted this composer’s gift for melody or emotionalism need look no further than “Old Friends,” “Not a Day Goes By,” or “Good Thing Going.”
Susan Schulman’s direction is necessarily hampered by the low budget and awkward theater space, but she has done careful, considered work that makes the show work probably as well as it possibly can. The cast is generally uneven, but the leading performances are quite skillful: Malcom Gets is particularly powerful playing a character who can be quite unsympathetic, and Adam Heller and Amy Ryder bring a strong comic flair to their roles.
The York’s “Merrily” will not revise anyone’s opinion of the work enough to consider it a neglected masterpiece, but it does provide an excellent opportunity to reappraise its strengths and weaknesses and to hear that marvelous score again.
[Frank Scheck has been covering film, theater, and music for more than 30 years. He was previously the editor of Stages magazine, the chief theater reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor and a theater critic and culture writer for the New York Post. His writing has appeared in such publications as the New York Daily News, Playbill, Backstage, the Hollywood Reporter, and various national and international newspapers. He’s provided on-air commentary for the BBC, MSNBC, and the Fox Business channel, among others.]
* *
* *
“STAGE: A NEW SONDHEIM, ‘MERRILY WE ROLL
ALONG’”
by Frank Rich
[Back, now, to the New York Times, here’s Frank Rich’s review of the première of Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, published on 17 September 1981. For the record, here is the book on the original production of the musical:
The Broadway and world première of the musical adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along started previews at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon Theatre on 8 October 1981, with opening night on 16 November. After an almost universally bad reception from both the press and the audiences, the show closed on 28 November, after 44 previews and 16 regular performances.
The director was Harold Prince, until this failure, a frequent (and successful) collaborator with Sondheim. The show was choreographed by Larry Fuller and the score orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick.
The scenery was designed by Eugene Lee, the costumes by Judith Dolan, the lighting by David Hersey, and the sound by Jack Mann.
The cast of 27 (mostly new, young professionals) included Ann Morrison as Mary Flynn, Lonny Price as Charley Kringas, and Jim Walton as Franklin Shepard as the three friends, and featured Jason Alexander as Joe (Frank’s producer) and Giancarlo Esposito as the valedictorian.
The production won a 1982 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics and was also nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music. It received a nomination for the 1982 Tony for Best Original Score.
[This is where the phenomenon that was Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along began. Part 1 of this series covers some of the ups and, mostly, downs of the saga of this legendary flop, until it rose to its greatest success so far in the 2022 Off-Broadway and 2023 Broadway revivals. See, now, what Timesman Rich, sometimes known as “the butcher of Broadway,” thought of the play at its début.]
As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals. Usually the heartbreak comes from Mr. Sondheim’s songs — for his music can tear through us with an emotional force as moving as Gershwin’s. And sometimes the pain is compounded by another factor — for some of Mr. Sondheim’s most powerful work turns up in shows (“Anyone Can Whistle” [1964], “Pacific Overtures” [1976]) that fail. Suffice it to say that both kinds of pain are abundant in “Merrily We Roll Along,” the new Sondheim-Harold Prince-George Furth musical that opened at the Alvin last night. Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful — that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles.
“Merrily We Roll Along” has been adapted by Mr. Furth from the second George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart collaboration, a Broadway curiosity of 1934. [The first collaboration was Once in a Lifetime (1930), the center of Hart’s autobiography, Act One (1959).] While the new version is rewritten and updated, it repeats the defects of the original text — even as it adds more of its own. Now, as before, “Merrily” is about three best friends who reach the top of the Broadway-Hollywood showbiz whirl only to discover, in two cases, that their lives are empty, petty and loveless. The gimmick is to tell the story backwards. The central plot begins with the principals at a present-day party, where they’re at their lowest, most jaded ebb. We end up at a high-school graduation, where the hero vows to uphold all the pure ideals we’ve spent the evening watching him betray.
Mr. Furth blunts the shock effect of the original play’s structure by enclosing it within a conventional flashback, and, even so, he fails to solve its major dramatic failure. We never do learn why the characters reached the sad state they’re in at the outset. While a busy story — often built around unconvincing, melodramatic twists — does tell us how the three friends fell apart, that’s not enough.
We keep waiting for some insight into these people — that might make us understand, if not care, about them — but all we get is fatuous attitudinizing about how ambition, success and money always lead to rack and ruin. Like Kaufman and Hart — but unlike Harold Pinter in the similarly designed “Betrayal” — Mr. Furth abandons his emotional issues entirely once he moves far back in time. Act II is all anticlimactic plot exposition — an undramatized, breathless recap of the red letter events that first brought the friends to fame.
There’s another difficulty as well, for the book’s tone often seems as empty as its characters. Mr. Furth’s one-line zingers about showbiz, laced with unearned nastiness, are as facile as those he brought to “The Act” [1977 Liza Minnelli vehicle by Furth and composer-lyricist team of John Kander and Fred Ebb] and “The Supporting Cast” [1981]. He defines the show’s principal female character, an alcoholic writer (Ann Morrison), by giving her labored retreads of the wisecracks he wrote for Elaine Stritch in his book for the Sondheim-Prince “Company” [1970]. Meanwhile, the emotional basis of the friendship between the two heroes, a composer (Jim Walton) and a lyricist (Lonny Price) — or between them and the heroine — is never established at all. We’re just told, repeatedly, that they’re lifelong friends.
Perhaps the libretto’s most unfortunate aspect, however, is its similarity to James Goldman’s far fuller one for the Sondheim-Prince “Follies.” That 1971 musical also gave us bitter, middle-aged friends, disappointed in love and success, who reunite at a showbiz party, then steadily move back through time until they become the idealistic kids they once were. Forced to contemplate the esthetic gap that separates these two like-minded shows, we see that not only the characters are rolling backward this time out.
“Follies” had everything the new version does not — most notably a theatrical metaphor that united all its elements, from its production design and staging and choreography (by Michael Bennett [1943-87; conceiver of A Chorus Line (1975)]) to its score. It also used the effective trick of assigning each major character to two actors, one middle-aged and one young, so that past and present could interweave at will to potent effect. With one passing exception, the roles in “Merrily” are always played by young actors, no matter what the characters’ ages or how high the toll in cuteness.
While Mr. Prince often finds brilliant unifying concepts for his shows, even the ones that don’t work, he’s come up with a flat one here — school. Eugene Lee’s set is a high tech jungle jim [sic] of bleachers, surrounded by gym lockers, that looks as if it’s left over from “Runaways” [1978 musical by Elizabeth Swados about street children who ran away from home]. When it is augmented by skyline projections, it becomes a decimated version of the set from “Company” — a parallel that’s reinforced by the staging of the party scenes and the dramatic uses of platforms. As has been true of some other recent Prince shows, the choreography, by Larry Fuller, is uninspired to the extent that it exists at all.
Although Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics seem less airborne than usual, as do Jonathan Tunick’s brassy, Jule Styne-esque orchestrations, the score only occasionally falls to the show’s level. There are two songs, “Rich and Happy” and “It’s a Hit!,” that are as glib as the book, and one parody number about the Kennedys (a 60’s composition of the heroes) that may be intended as a satirical pastiche of such parodies, but is unfunny in any case.
The other, sublime numbers give the three appealing principal players their only opportunities to reveal their talent. Mr. Price, in the most sympathetic role, is a charming, Woody Allen-esque fellow who brings fire to the show’s angriest song (“Franklin Shepard, Inc.”) and a plaintive undersell to its most conventional ballad (“Good Thing Going”). Mr. Walton, likable, if less than charismatic, as an innocent-gone-sour, gives a rush of sweetness to “Not a Day Goes By,” a relentless song of unrequited love that matches its equivalent, “Too Many Mornings,” in “Follies.” Miss Morrison’s heroine, attractively plump and sassy, sparks what may be the show’s richest song, the trio “Old Friends.”
With the exception of Sally Klein, as a jettisoned first wife, the rest of the cast is dead wood until the penultimate number, an ironic, idealistic anthem titled “Our Time.” At that point, Mr. Sondheim’s searing songwriting voice breaks through once more to address, as no one else here does, the show’s poignant theme of wasted lives. But what’s really being wasted here is Mr. Sondheim’s talent. And that’s why we watch “Merrily We Roll Along” with an ever-mounting — and finally upsetting — sense of regret.
[Frank Rich served as chief theater reviewer of the New York Times from 1980 to 1993. He first won attention from theater-goers with an essay for the Harvard Crimson (“Theatre: The Last Musical,” 26 February 1971) about the Broadway musical Follies by Stephen Sondheim during its pre-Broadway tryout run in Boston. (Follies had its Boston tryout at the Colonial Theatre from 20 February through 20 March 1971. It opened on Broadway on 4 April.) In his study of the work, Rich was “the first person to predict the legendary status the show eventually would achieve,” according to Ted Chapin in his book, Everything Was Possible — The Birth of the Musical Follies (Knopf, 2003).
[Before joining the New York Times, Rich was a film and television critic for Time, a film reviewer for the New York Post, and film reviewer and senior editor of New Times Magazine. In the early 1970s, he was a founding editor of the Richmond (Virginia) Mercury. Rich is currently writer-at-large for New York magazine, where he writes essays on politics and culture and engages in regular dialogues on news of the week for the “Daily Intelligencer.”
[Richard Linklater announced in 2019 that he would film an adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along over the course of 20 years, allowing the cast to age with their characters (a style Linklater used in Boyhood). Actors Ben Platt, Paul Mescal, and Beanie Feldstein portray Charley, Frank, and Mary. Feldstein played one of the students in the school production of Merrily in the 2017 film Lady Bird. (She also did Fanny Brice in a Broadway revival of Funny Girl in 2022.)
[In addition, the 2013 Menier Chocolate Factory production in London was filmed for broadcast to select cinemas, and on 18 June 2024, the producers of the current Broadway revival announced that RadicalMedia, the company that filmed the original cast of Hamilton for Disney+ and Come from Away for Apple TV+, would be filming that production.
[Also, there’s a 2016 documentary of the ill-fated 1981 début production directed by original cast member Lonny Price (Charley Kringas), Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened. Along with Price, the other members of the central trio—Ann Morrison (Mary Flynn) and Jim Walton (Franklin Shepard)—plus others, such as Jason Alexander (Joe), appear. The film, distributed by Atlas Media Corp., opened on 18 November 2016 in New York City, after premièring at the New York Film Festival in October.
[The original Broadway cast of Merrily recorded the show the day after their final performance. The recording was released by RCA as an LP album in April 1982, then compact disc in 1986. A 2007 remastered CD release from Sony/BMG Broadway Masterworks includes a bonus track of Sondheim performing “It's a Hit.”
[A cast recording of the York Theatre Off-Broadway production, which included extended cuts and dialogue, was released in 1994 by Varèse Sarabande, and a recording of the 2012 Encores! concert revival cast was released by PS Classics as a two-CD set, featuring Colin Donnell, Celia Keenan Bolger, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Betsy Wolfe, and Elizabeth Stanley.
[The recent Broadway revival announced just after the end of the performance on 14 November 2023, that a digital cast recording would be available for streaming within hours on the 15th. The physical CD was released on 12 January 2024.]
*
* * *
“ANATOMY OF WORLDLY SUCCESS IN ‘MERRILY
WE ROLL ALONG,’
[Since so much of the Sondheim-Furth musical was derived from the non-musical, Merrily We Roll Along, I am posting the New York Times review of the première of the play, published on 1 October 1934. The reviewer was the renowned Brooks Atkinson, arguably the most respected theater writer of his time, often called the conscience of the theater.
[As I have with all the productions in this series, I’ll present the record for this show:
Merrily We Roll Along, the straight pay by George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) and Moss Hart (1904-61), the writing team whose second collaboration this was, following Once in a Lifetime (1931), débuted at the Music Box Theatre from 29 September 1934 to 9 February 1935 (155 performances).
Kaufman staged the production himself (as he often did) with scenic design by Jo Mielziner and costumes designed by John Hambleton. (I haven’t found a record of the other production artists. It wasn’t common to list them in the playbill in that era.) Mielziner (1901-76) was described as “the most successful set designer of the Golden Age of Broadway” (Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik, Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time [2010]).
The cast of 55 included Walter Abel as Jonathan Crale (Charley Kringas in the musical), Kenneth MacKenna as Richard Niles (Franklin Shepard), and Mary Philips as Julia Glenn (Mary Flynn).
No awards were made, but the major theater awards for the most part hadn’t started being presented on 1934. (The Tonys started in 1945 and the Drama Desk Awards were first presented in 1955. Only the Drama League had started giving their awards—in 1922—but they weren’t established until 1935.)
[The non-musical Merrily was the basis for George Furth’s book for the musical version. The book, as you’ve read above and in Part 1, was the main problem with the musicalization, so it’s useful to see what Kaufman and Hart wrought that haunted theatergoers, reviewers, and Sondheim enthusiasts for over four decades.]
After fumbling around over inconsequential tasks for the past four weeks, the theatre has acquired stature again with the production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which was put on at the Music Box Saturday evening. This anatomy of worldly success, written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, is the first resolute, mature-minded drama of the season. Four years ago at this time Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart were making impudent faces at Hollywood in a hilarious satire labeled “Once in a Lifetime.” They still write brilliantly comic dialogue when the time is ripe for laughter. But “Merrily We Roll Along” is a reflective drama with a concern for the integrity of the characters it discusses. Having put their hands to a somber theme, the authors do not cheapen it with flippancy. They are looking anxiously into the background of a group of smug and successful worldlings and they see things that are likely to move you deeply. Mr. Kaufman has staged the drama with the same fidelity to high-minded purpose. Obviously, “Merrily We Roll Along” is a skillful piece of play-writing and staging. But it is also a fine one that dares to stand in principle. After this declaration of ethics it will be impossible to dismiss Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart as clever jesters with an instinct for the stage.
Their characters are the sort of moderns they know at first hand—creatures of the successful theatre, actors, producers, a playwright, a female wit and an artist. Some of them can be recognized out of the lore of the demi-monde. In the first scene you see them assembled in an ostentatious Long Island mansion, drinking, flattering and patting their egoes [sic]. It is fashionably decadent, and when the scene closes in a foul brawl of drunken abuse you are relieved to know that the time sequence of the play moves backward. From 1934 it goes back by easy stages to 1916 in a search for the sources of degeneracy. Gradually the chief characters emerge as Richard Niles, popular playwright; Julia Glenn, writer of trifles, and Jonathan Crale, non-conformist painter. Amid the mob of sycophants and triflers they are the ones who began their apprenticeship with devotion to high enterprise. But Crale, who has great gusto for living, is the only one who has preserved his integrity by making no facile compromises along the way. As a whole, “Merrily We Roll Along” is the rebuking story of how proud youth debases itself into shoddy middle age.
By telling their story backward the authors create a mood of private introspection. They recover the different periods by isolating small bits if evidence—short skirts in the costuming, fragments of popular songs, political gossip, military uniforms. Although their temper is pensive they enjoy the humors of remembrance and toss in neatly phrased gibes about familiar events. When they retreat as far back as 1925 to a sketch of life in Jonathan Crale’s disorderly studio their humor is broad, hearty and sympathetic. But their case study of the middle-aged charlatans who have succeeded in 1934 is in essence a pitiless, painful dissection of character, animated by an earnest concern for the common malevolence of living. You are likely to hold your breath from fear and horror when you see by what normal cupidity a cynical playwright can descend from a fervent college idealist. Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart have reminded us of the exalted impulses we lose when we connive to keep alive.
If “Merrily We Roll Along” reflects great credit upon the authors, it performs a like office for the actors. There is not a slovenly stroke in the acting. Most of it represents the players at the peak of their careers. Mary Philips, Kenneth MacKenna, Jessie Royce Landis and Walter Abel have never appeared to better advantage or in better form. In less strategic parts Cecilia Loftus, Adrienne Marden, Granville Bates, Malcolm Duncan, George Alison, Wilfrid Seagram and Grant Mills disclose genuine feeling for the idea they represent. Jo Mielziner has fitted the production to a wardrobe of versatile settings.
Although the cast is enormous and the production complicated, the performance is vigorous, resilient and impeccable. Mr. Kaufman and Mr. Hart have written a drama of which they may be proud. It restores a reviewer’s pride to be able to say so.
[The 1934 Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along received mostly good notices but was a financial failure and has not been revived on Broadway. The financial demands of the large-scale production—it had a cast of 55!—made the show expensive. A touring production planned to follow the 1934 production was cancelled.
[Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984) wrote for the New York Times from 1922 to 1960. Atkinson became a Times theater reviewer in the 1920s and his notices became very influential. He left the drama desk during World War II to report on the war, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his work as the Moscow correspondent for the Times. He returned to the theater beat in the late 1940s, until his retirement in 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him “the theater’s most influential reviewer of his time.”
[Atkinson was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. After his retirement, he became a member of The Players, a social club established by actor and theater-owner Edwin Booth (1833-93) in his Stanford White townhouse on Gramercy Park to bring actors into contact with men of different professions such as industrialists, writers, and other creative artists. The former Mansfield Theatre on Broadway was named the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in his honor between 1960 and 2022. It was renamed for actress-singer Lena Horne in 2022.
[If readers recall from my closing comments in Part 1, my friend Kirk Woodward wondered what Maria Friedman did with her 2022/2023 production of Merrily We Roll Along to make it work so much better than all the musical’s previous incarnations had over 41 years. From what I can glean from my superficial reading, Kirk seems to be at least partly correct in his guess that the improvement is due to “attention to detail.”
[Friedman, according to Jesse Green, jettisoned unwieldy ensemble scenes and substituted solo ones with Jonathan Groff. She made his character (and his performance) the centerpiece of the revised production, and she focused the narrative that (according to Frank Rich) was diffuse and pointless so that it makes (some) sense and seems more rational.
[One criticism put it that the authors never got around to developing the underlying point of the play. I think this is what Jesse Green, in his review of the Broadway production, meant by “the absent spine” of the play in its earlier interpretations, which was “revealed” only in the refocusing for the 2022/2023 revival.
[Rich also points out that in the première, the emotional lives of the characters aren’t revealed, we’re only told they’re friends. As I understand it, there’s no context for the closeness of the three focal friends, and without that, the dissolution of their friendship, the cause of the unhappiness that’s the center of the drama, isn’t emotionally engaging to the audience.
[The remedy for this, it seems is the shift in Friedman’s reworking from focusing on what Green calls (in the New York Theatre Workshop review) “the triangle” of Charley, Frank, and Mary to “its apex,” Frank. This can happen because Friedman made Jonathan Groff’s performance—and therefore his character—the center of the play (that is, the apex of the triangle) in a way “it has never been previously.”
[Apparently, that shift in focus, from the three friends to Frank as the prime mover of the drama, makes the shaky, famously “problematic” plot cohere—at least to a greater degree than ever before.
[In addition, there may be some benefit from the casting—especially Groff, whom Green said was the best Frank he’d ever seen. Daniel Ratcliffe gets praise for his character portrayal as well—his Charley became the sort of anchor that keeps the whole plot from flying off in all directions the way reviewers of previous versions of Merrily have found. But it wouldn’t have been possible if Friedman hadn’t put Groff in the role she was going to make the engine that drives the plot.
[It also sounds to me as if the reason Sondheim’s score has always been so cherished, despite the “problematic” book, was that the composer had the right understanding of what drives the story and the characters, whereas Furth got too caught up with the mechanics of telling a plot in reverse order.
[Friedman stressed the “insight of the songs,” using them as the guide to the nature of the play, rather than let the book take the lead. She deemphasized everything else and boosted the songs, observed Green. This put Sondheim in charge of the play’s dynamic, and he, apparently, nailed it.
[What Mary Friedman did, whatever it was, she apparently had Sondheim’s blessing, if not his input.]
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