[There was a segment on PBS News Hour on Monday, 10 June, about the recent Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along, a famous 1981 flop musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) and a book by George Furth (1932-2008), and the reworking it got that made it a success this time around. (The production won the 2024 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.) I thought it'd make a good post for Rick On Theater, accompanied by some of the reviews the play garnered over the years as it underwent numerous revisions.
[In addition, in the report by News Hour arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown, the director, Maria Friedman, a former British actress who’s done several Sondheim shows and became a friend over several years, talked a bit about working with the composer and working on his plays.
[Merrily We Roll Along is adapted from the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) and Moss Hart (1904-1961). (See Part 2, coming up on Sunday, 14 July, for a review of the original Broadway run of that play.) Some of the problems reviewers and audiences had with the Sondheim-Furth treatment have been credited to Kaufman and Hart’s script.
[The background and production history of the musical version of Merrily We Roll Along that follows is based on the Wikipedia entry for the musical.
[The show tells the story of how three friends’ lives and friendship deteriorate over the course of 20 years; it focuses particularly on Franklin Shepard, a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends, most notably lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas and journalist and critic Mary Flynn, and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies. Like the play on which it’s based, the show’s story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends’ lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best.
[Merrily, the musical, originally premièred on Broadway on 16 November 1981 in a production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince (1928-2019), with a cast almost exclusively of young adults (see Pary 2). The cast included Jim Walton (b. 1955 – age at opening: 27) as Franklin Shepard, Lonny Price (b. 1959 – 22) as Charley Kringas, and Ann Morrison (b. 1956 – 26) as Mary Flynn, the three central friends of the plot. Also featured were Jason Alexander (b. 1959 – 22; Joe) and Giancarlo Esposito (b. 1958 – 24; valedictorian).
[However, the show was not the success the previous Sondheim-Prince collaborations had been: after a chaotic series of preview performances, it opened to widely negative reviews, and closed on 28 November.
[In subsequent years, the show’s been extensively rewritten and enjoyed several notable productions, including an Off-Broadway revival in 1994 (see Part 2), and a London premiere in 2000 that won the Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys, for Best New Musical. Until the recent production, however, it had never returned to Broadway since its première 42 years ago.
[The 2022 Off-Broadway production staged at New York Theatre Workshop transferred to Broadway in fall 2023, starring Jonathan Groff (Franklin Shepard), Daniel Radcliffe (Charley Kringas), and Lindsay Mendez (Mary Flynn), directed by Maria Friedman, and winning four Tony Awards (see below).
[The original play tells the story of “Richard Niles, who is revealed on the opening night of his latest play [in 1934] to be a pretentious playwright of successful but forgettable light comedies,” and over the course of the play, gradually moves backward in time to 1916. The play concerned, overall, “three friends, their artistic ambitions, the price of fame, and the changes in American society from World War I to the Depression” (“Merrily We Roll Along (1934),” George S. Kaufman [website]).
[For the musical adaptation, the story was revised to take place between 1955 and 1980, and the characters were changed: playwright Niles became Franklin Shepard, a composer; Jonathan Crale, a painter, became Charley Kringas, a lyricist and playwright; and Julia Glenn, a novelist, became Mary Flynn, a journalist and eventually a critic.
[George Furth was brought on to write the musical’s book, making Merrily a reunion for Sondheim, Furth, and Prince, who had all worked together on the landmark 1970 musical Company (1971 Tonys for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, plus 3 more Tony nominations; 5 Drama Desk Awards). Merrily premièred at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway, where Company had premièred.
[For budgetary reasons, Merrily didn’t get an out-of-town tryout production, and instead the production performed over 40 previews on Broadway before the opening. The previews, beginning on 8 October 1981, had a poor reception, with audiences walking out. By 21 October, the New York Times reported that the original leading man had been replaced and the Broadway opening had been postponed. The rehearsal choreographer was also replaced, and the opening was delayed a second time, from 9 November to 16 November 1981. By opening night, the production team thought they’d fixed the show, but they’d only improved it, and the critical response was harsh.
[The Broadway production received mostly negative reviews. While the score was widely praised, reviewers and audiences both felt that the book was confusing—the audience had trouble following the story—and the themes were unpleasant. Hampered by several critical reviews published before its official opening, as well as more negative ones published afterward, Merrily ran for just 44 previews and 16 regular performances.
[Throughout the years, with Furth’s and Sondheim’s permission, the musical has been restaged with numerous changes. Sondheim has contributed new songs to several of the show’s incarnations, most notably “Growing Up,” added to the La Jolla 1985 production.
[A “streamlined” Off-Broadway revival, directed by Susan H. Schulman and choreographed by Michael Lichtefeld, opened on 26 May 1994, at the York Theatre in St. Peter’s Church, and ran for 54 performances (see Part 2). The cast included Malcolm Gets as Frank, Adam Heller as Charley, and Amy Ryder as Mary.
[Another Off-Broadway revival, directed by Noah Brody with choreography by Lorin Latarro, began previews on 12 January 2019, opening on 19 February and originally set to run to 7 April (extended to 14 April), by Roundabout Theatre’s resident company, Fiasco Theater, at the Laura Pels Theater (see Part 2). The reduced cast included Manu Narayan (Charley), Jessie Austrian (Mary), Ben Steinfeld (Frank), and three more actors.
[A production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator James Lapine (librettist for Sunday in the Park with George, 1982; Into the Woods, 1987; Passion, 1994; Sondheim on Sondheim, 2010) opened on 16 June 1985, at San Diego’s La Jolla Playhouse, where it ran for 24 performances. The cast included John Rubinstein, son of classic pianist Arthur Rubenstein (1887-1982), as Frank, Chip Zien as Charley, and Heather MacRae as Mary, with Marin Mazzie as Beth.
[In Washington, D.C., an Arena Stage production directed by Artistic Director Douglas C. Wager and choreographed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, opened on 30 January 1990, in the Kreeger Theater, where it ran slightly more than two months. The cast included Victor Garber (Frank), David Garrison (Charley), Becky Ann Baker (Mary) and, as in San Diego, Marin Mazzie as Beth.
[In his New York Times review of the production (“A Show Keeps Coming Back, Getting Closer on Every Orbit,” 27 February 1990), Frank Rich wrote, “Many of the major flaws of the 1981 Merrily, starting with its notorious gymnasium setting, have long since been jettisoned or rectified in intervening versions produced in La Jolla, Calif., and in Seattle.” He called the score “exceptional.”
[A 2007 Signature Theatre production also ran across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. Directed by Eric D. Schaeffer, it opened on 4 September 2007 and ran through 14 October. The production received four nominations for Helen Hayes Awards, the Nation’s Capital area’s honors for local theater, with a win for Erik Liberman as Charley.
[As part of the Sondheim Celebration at Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a limited engagement of 14 performances opened on 12 July 2002 in the Eisenhower Theater. The cast featured Michael Hayden (Frank), Miriam Shor (Mary), Raúl Esparza (Charley), Anastasia Barzee (Beth), and Emily Skinner (Gussie).
[In September 2002, a concert production of Merrily We Roll Along was a part of the 2002-2003 Reprise! series of Los Angeles. The single performance on 23 September at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse starred Hugh Panaro as Franklin, Kevin Chamberlin as Charley, Lea DeLaria as Mary, Teri Hatcher as Gussie, and Jean Louisa Kelly as Beth.
[Available Light Theatre presented the revised version at the Vern Riffe Center in Columbus, Ohio, from 19 August 2010 through 4 September 2010. It was directed by John Dranschak and featured Ian Short as Frank, Nick Lingnofski as Charley, and Heather Carvel as Mary. The musical director was Pam Welsh-Huggins.
[The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park presented a revival directed by John Doyle, using the actor-musician concept, opening on 3 March 2012. The cast included Malcolm Gets (Frank), Daniel Jenkins (Charley), and Becky Ann Baker (Mary). This production used the 1994 version from the York Theatre, in which Gets had played Frank as well.
[Astoria Performing Arts Center produced an Off-Off-Broadway production in 2015 starring Jack Mosbacher as Frank, Ally Bonino as Mary, and Nicholas Park as Charley. The production won Outstanding Production of a Musical at the 2015 New York Innovative Theatre Awards.
[The Wallis Annenberg Center for The Performing Arts in Beverly Hills staged a production from 23 November to 18 December 2016. Directed by Michael Arden, the production starred Aaron Lazar as Frank, Wayne Brady as Charley, and Donna Vivino as Mary.
[Under Maria Friedman’s direction, the Huntington Theatre Company produced her own 2012 version of the musical in Boston, running from 8 September to 15 October 2017. Mark Umbers and Damien Humbley reprised their roles as Frank and Charley from the London production at Menier Chocolate Factory (see below), with Eden Espinosa joining as Mary.
[The original 1981 Broadway cast reunited to stage a concert version of the show for one night on 30 September 2002, with both Sondheim and Prince in attendance. An Encores! staged concert at New York City Center ran from 8 to 19 February 2012. (Encores! is a concert series dedicated to reviving forgotten and neglected American musicals.) Many members of the original production were invited to attend on 14 February and joined the Encores! cast and Sondheim on stage following the performance to sing “Old Friends.”
[The première of Merrily We Roll Along in the United Kingdom was at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama on 11 May 1983. The first professional production in the U.K. was by the Library Theatre Company in Manchester in 1984, directed by Howard Lloyd Lewis and choreographed by Paul Kerryson.
[Paul Kerryson directed a production of the show at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, with orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick and music direction by Julian Kelly. The production opened on 14 April 1992 with a cast that included Michael Cantwell as Frank, Maria Friedman (the director of the recent Broadway revival) as Mary, and Evan Pappas as Charlie.
[The show finally received its West End première at London’s nonprofit Donmar Warehouse on 11 December 2000 in a production directed by Michael Grandage, running for 71 performances following eight previews. The cast was led by Julian Ovenden as Frank, Samantha Spiro as Mary, and Daniel Evans as Charley. Spiro and Evans received Olivier Awards for their performances, and the production received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical.
[Maria Friedman, who staged the recent Broadway production of Merrily, directed a revival of the musical at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, which opened on 28 November 2012 (before Sondheim’s death) and transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End on 1 May 2013. The production starred Mark Umbers as Frank, Jenna Russell as Mary, and Damian Humbley as Charley. The revival won the Peter Hepple Award for Best Musical in the 2012 Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards. (The Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards cover all of the U.K., while the Oliviers cover specifically London productions.)
[Clwyd Theatr Cymru at Mold in North Wales performed the musical 12 May-2 June 2012, directed by Nikolai Foster. The three friends were played by Simon Thomas (Frank), Rebecca Lock (Mary), and Matt Cross (Charley).
[In 2002, across the U.S. border to the north. the show ran for approximately 120 performances from 24 May to 26 October at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, in a production directed by Jackie Maxwell, the festival’s artistic director, and featuring Tyley Ross as Frank, Jay Turvey as Charley, and Jenny L. Wright as Mary. (For a report on a later Shaw Festival, see my post “The 2006 Shaw Festival,” 8 and 11 December 2015.)
[Farther abroad, the first Australian professional production was presented by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Footbridge Theatre from 25 May to 6 July 1996. It featured Tom Burlinson (Frank), Greg Stone (Charley), and Gina Riley (Mary), and was directed by Wayne Harrison.
[The Hayes Theatre in Sydney, Australia, staged a production directed by Dean Bryant which was intended to start its run on 16 April 2020, but was delayed by the COVID pandemic. The production finally premiered on 21 October 2021, with an expected run to 27 November. The production, starring Ainsley Melham as Charley, Andrew Coshan as Frank, and Elise McCann as Mary, was well-reviewed, and extended its run to 9 December.
[PAN Productions staged Merrily We Roll Along in 2014 at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre for the musical’s first time in South East Asia. Directed by Nell Ng with music direction by Nish Tham. This production featured Peter Ong (Frank), Aaron Teoh (Charley), and Chang Fang Chyi (Mary).
[In New York City, an Off-Broadway revival, directed by Maria Friedman and based on her 2012 staging at the Menier Chocolate Factory, ran at New York Theatre Workshop from 12 December 2022 to 22 January 2023 (see below), starring Jonathan Groff as Frank, Daniel Radcliffe as Charley, and Lindsay Mendez as Mary. The production won the 2023 Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Musical Revival and the Outer Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, along with other awards and nominations.
[In September 2023, the NYTW production transferred to Broadway for a limited engagement at the Hudson Theatre, with all six principal actors reprising their roles (see below). Previews began on 19 September 2023 with opening night on 10 October. It’s the first time that Merrily We Roll Along has run on Broadway since the 1981 original production. During its first week of previews, the show broke the house record at the Hudson Theatre and played to sold-out audiences, grossing over $1.3 million.
[On 5 December 2023, the show’s producers announced that it would be extended with the original cast from its originally scheduled closing on 24 March 2024 until 7 July. The New York Times described the revival as “the first convincing revival” of the “cult flop,” crediting the success to “Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff . . . . Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust” (“After 42 Years, A Flop Flourishes” by Jesse Green, 11 October 2023; republished below).
“REVIVAL OF
SONDHEIM’S ‘MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG’
by Jeffrey Brown,
Anne Azzi Davenport, and Lena I. Jackson
[Below is the transcript of the PBS News Hour report aired on 10 June 2024 discussing the then-current successful revival of Sondheim and Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along. As I noted above, Correspondent Jeffrey Brown speaks with director Maria Friedman about the show and working with Sondheim.
[I’m treating the News Hour report as a sort of lead-in to a look back at Merrily through the reviews of some of its previous productions—working backwards in a manner similar to the structure of the musical itself and the Kaufman and Hart straight play that was its source. (I end with a review of the 1934 Broadway production of the play as the last piece of Part 2.)]
Amna Nawaz [PBS News Hour Co-Anchor]: When Stephen Sondheim died in 2021, he was remembered as one of musical theater’s all-time greats, creator of masterpieces like “Sweeney Todd” [1979 – Tony for Best Musical] and “A Little Night Music” [1973 – Best Musical]
But one of his musicals, “Merrily We Roll Along,” never achieved that success. Now it has, and the show actors and director, Maria Friedman, are all up for Tony Awards this Sunday.
[At the Tony Awards ceremony on 16 June, Friedman was nominated for Best Direction of a Musical, but didn’t win; Jonathan Groff won for Best Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical and Daniel Radcliffe won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. The show won for Best Revival of a Musical.]
Jeffrey Brown recently joined Friedman on Broadway for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown: It’s a musical about making friends and making art and how life can go very wrong.
Maria Friedman has spent much of the past 12 years trying to make it right. [Friedman staged an early version of her adaptation in Britain in 2012; see above.]
Is obsession the right word?
Maria Friedman, Director, “Merrily We Roll Along”: Passion.
Jeffrey Brown: Passion.
Maria Friedman: Passion and a deep love for the material. I love — yes, and the man who wrote it.
Jeffrey Brown: The material is “Merrily We Roll Along,” now on Broadway [it closed on 7 July] with rave reviews and star turns by Jonathan Groff as Frank, a composer-turned-film-producer, Daniel Radcliffe as Charley, a playwright, and Lindsay Mendez as Mary, a novelist-turned-theater-critic.
Actress: Congratulations on the movie. Your performance will stay with me for a long time.
(Laughter)
Jeffrey Brown: The man who wrote its music and lyrics, theater legend Stephen Sondheim, working with a story by George Furth. But “Merrily” has long been seen as Sondheim’s major flop.
When it first arrived on Broadway in 1981, it closed after just 16 performances. When we recently met at Broadway’s renowned Sardi’s Restaurant, Maria Friedman spoke of first working directly with Sondheim in 1992, when he and Furth tried out a new version of the play for a production in England [see above].
Friedman, then a young actress and singer, played the role of Mary.
Maria Friedman: Being in a room with Stephen Sondheim and George Furth rewriting a piece, new songs, new dialogue every day. And Stephen — everybody knows Stephen Sondheim, when you’re working with him, is completely exacting. When you’re working with him as an actor, he just drills into your psychology and expects the world from you.
Jeffrey Brown: How does he do that? I mean, what is it like?
Maria Friedman: Like, lots of questions, asking you about, why would you be singing this? And how — he would offer you the internal dialogue that you need in order to sing the actual material.
So, every — and he had a reason for every single note and lyric he wrote. So I was full up as an actress. It just felt like this was like the greatest gift.
Jeffrey Brown: She would go on to work with Sondheim in other plays and regularly perform his music.
When he died at age 91, they’d been friends for decades. In 2010, Sondheim spoke to us [“Stephen Sondheim on the time and rhymes of his life,” 8 December 2010] of the intensity of his approach to writing lyrics, put forth in his book “Finishing the Hat” [2010].
Stephen Sondheim, Composer: If you think of a lyric as a little one-act play, then each line is a scene. And a quatrain becomes an entire act.
Jeffrey Brown: Each line is a scene.
Stephen Sondheim: Each line is a scene. And you have got seven words in a line. And so we have got — so let’s say each word is a speech. Well, if you’re writing a play and something’s wrong with a speech, you cut or change the speech, the same you have got do it word by word. It is as focused as that.
Maria Friedman: What he always said to me, whenever I was working, he said, “Story, story, story, character, character, character,” but story, story.
You have got to be interested in the narrative, where you put the anchor down at the beginning, keep the tension and make sure that you keep your audience with you all along.
Jeffrey Brown: Friedman says her biggest task, without changing words or notes, was to bring out the essence of “Merrily We Roll Along,” a story told backwards through several decades, with scenes and songs that take us through life’s loves and betrayals, successes and failures, back to the first moments of friendship and sense of possibility.
While others have regularly attempted to revive “Merrily,” Friedman first took it on as a director some 12 years ago, slowly developing it production by production, finally bringing it back to Broadway last fall.
Maria Friedman: My job is to get the authors, Stephen’s words and music and George’s text, the story, the story, the story, the characters out to the audience in my most — in the most direct way.
Jeffrey Brown: Did you see yourself as kind of giving this a deserved new life or bringing it . . .
Maria Friedman: Well, every time you do anything you want to, you want to give it a deserved life, whether it’s — I never saw myself as saying, like, you know I’m going to run to victory with this thing.
Jeffrey Brown: You’re not resurrecting . . .
(Crosstalk)
Maria Friedman: No, I never — no, no, that would be really arrogant of me.
No, what I did is, I had a point of view. And I think you need a point of view as a director. And I didn’t know that point of view was not something that everybody had seen. I was very lucky. I had never seen a production. I’d been in one.
Jeffrey Brown: Really?
Maria Friedman: But I’d never seen a production of “Merrily We Roll Along.” So it was a clean sheet for me.
Jeffrey Brown: In fact, Sondheim had seen Friedman’s vision of the play in an earlier production and, Friedman says, was thrilled it would come to Broadway. Soon after the announcement, however, he died.
It must be bittersweet that he wasn’t alive to see this success on Broadway.
Maria Friedman: Yes. Yes. He meant that — I didn’t have a dad. And he took that role for me. Anyway, sorry. That’s why I don’t talk about it.
There’s a wonderful line in the piece where he — there’s a young man standing on the rooftop looking at the universe, and he says to these two frightened friends, he says we could — we can have everything. Look — look at the possibilities.
I know it’s a wonderful bubble of fantasy, but he changed my world with music and words. And I know that if he saw the commercial success that he is having, his foundation is now having, thank you very much, for his — this money will be going, a lot of it will be going to future composers — he would take me out for a very big drink.
Jeffrey Brown: Now Maria Friedman and her cast and, through them, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, may well find themselves having a very big night at the Tony Awards on Sunday.
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.
[In his more than 30-year career with PBS News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent, he’s profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists.
[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.
[As Senior Producer of Canvas, Anne Azzi Davenport is the primary field producer of arts and culture pieces for PBS News Hour and oversees all coverage. She’s been leading Canvas since its beginning, collaborating with Chief Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown for most of her 24 years at the News Hour as well as with others.
[Davenport arrived at the News Hour as the Media Producer after serving for 15 years as a political producer at ABC and CBS News and as a producer and on-air reporter for NBC stations. She supervises the Brief But Spectacular and Race Matters series as well as the PBS Primetime show Beyond the Canvas.
[Lena I. Jackson, currently a producer for PBS News Hour based in its western bureau in Phoenix, is a filmmaker and video journalist. She researches, pitches, field produces, writes, and edits feature stories for the show and helps line-produce News Hour West’s update of our breaking news. Jackson covers everything from immigration and the environment to arts/culture and politics.]
*
* * *
“AFTER 42
YEARS, A FLOP FLOURISHES”
by
Jesse Green
[Jesse Green’s review of the Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along ran in the print edition of the New York Times of 11 October 2023. His assessment of the production was generally shared by most other reviewers, making the first revival of the musical to play on Broadway following the debacle of its 1981 première (the review of which is included in Part 2 of this post, coming up on Sunday, 14 July).
[Even though many of the details of the Broadway run are in the production history at the top of this post, here’s the book on the Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along:
The play started previews at the Hudson Theatre for a limited run on 19 July 2023. It opened on 10 October 2023 and closed on 7 July 2024, after 20 previews and 304 regular performances.
The production was directed by Maria Friedman and choreographed by Tim Jackson. The scenic and costume design was by Soutra Gilmour; lighting design by Amith Chandrashaker, and sound design by Kai Harada. The score was orchestrated by longtime Sondheim musical arranger, Jonathan Tunick (who also did the orchestrations for the 1981 première).
The cast included Jonathan Groff as Franklin Shepard, Daniel Radcliffe as Charley Kringas, and Lindsay Mendez as Mary Flynn.
The production won the Tony for Best Revival of a Musical, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical (Groff), Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical (Radcliffe), Best Orchestrations (Jonathan Tunick), and 3 more Tony nominations.
[The Broadway run was short but clearly a success—the most Merrily had pretty much ever had. The TV ads used the tagline (and I’m approximating. I’m afraid): It’s never been this good; it never will be this good again. I felt that last clause was an unnecessary dig at any future productions—and a little at Sondheim and Furth, as well—but it sure seems that the first part is accurate. The famous flop came out a winner this time.]
Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.
To be a fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim, as Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times [see Part 2], is “to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He meant not only that Sondheim’s songs are so often crushingly poignant but that the experience of loving them can feel unrequited. The shows they are in — he was reviewing the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” — don’t always love you back.
That was in 1981, when “Merrily,” with a problematic book by George Furth, suffered an ignominious Broadway debut of just 16 performances after 44 previews. No matter that Sondheim, responding to the story of a songwriter, had written his most conspicuously tuneful score to date, prompting pop recordings by Frank Sinatra (“Good Thing Going”) and Barbra Streisand (“Not a Day Goes By”). It was universally deemed a debacle.
The debacle ended the working relationship between Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, whose five shows together in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” — had redefined the American musical. With “Merrily,” they thought they were taking the form even further, with a complicated backward chronology and a cast of mostly inexperienced actors who played 40-ish adults at the start and grew into themselves at the end.
After the show’s death by a thousand pans, Sondheim, saying he’d rather make video games, threatened to leave the theater entirely. Luckily, that didn’t happen — and “Merrily,” too, refused to give up, instead undergoing a seemingly endless series of unsatisfactory “improvements” that only seemed to confirm the hopelessness of making it matter.
But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, “Merrily” is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, “Merrily” has been found in the dark.
When we meet him after the uplift of the gleaming overture, Groff, as the composer Franklin Shepard, is alone in an empty and unappealing liminal space. (The deliberately ugly sets, perhaps uglier than necessary, are by Soutra Gilmour.) He is wearing, and will throughout the show, a solemn undertaker’s outfit — black pants, black tie, white shirt. Even as everyone else changes with the times, in vivid costumes (also by Gilmour) that mark each notch on the timeline from 1976 to 1957, Frank always remains what he was: a one-man show. “Merrily” is the funeral he throws for his own ideals.
The contrast between the pleasures that music can provide and the damage obvious in Frank’s demeanor immediately frames what follows as a solo psychodrama. Yes, Charley Kringas, who writes the words, and their friend Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theater critic, are there throughout, trying to encourage his better angels and corral his worse ones. But despite high-wattage, laser-focused performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, they have no effect on him; they are clearly Frank’s pawns, willing or otherwise.
How he destroys Mary, and nearly Charley as well, not without their assistance, is revealed as the musical’s formerly absent spine. In the first scene, a 1976 party for “Darkness Before Dawn,” a hack hit movie Frank has produced now that he no longer writes music, Mary is dispatched with barely a blink, or drunkenly dispatches herself.
In the next scene, as Charley enumerates Frank’s misplaced priorities in a 1973 television interview — Radcliffe handles the song “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” superbly — Groff’s coldblooded rage is terrifying. Collateral damage along the way includes Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke); his second, Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown); his probable third, Meg (Talia Simone Robinson); his producer, Joe (Reg Rogers); and even his adorable young son. Who but a monster would betray such a punim [Yiddish for ‘face’]?
“Merrily” is thus no longer, as it seemed in 1981, the story of the gradual, almost inevitable dimming of youth’s sweet illusions but rather the story of their falsity in the first place. Frank is only devoted to Mary and Charley when he doesn’t have access to anyone more useful. To think he turned into that monster is a mistake: He always was one, as Sondheim clearly understood. “That’s what everyone does,” Mary sings once the three-way friendship has collapsed. “Blames the way it is/on the way it was/On the way it never ever was.”
Friedman has thrown in her lot with the coruscating insight of the songs, making a tactical decision — successful but not without consequences — to deprioritize everything else, including the score’s brassy élan. “Merrily” Kremlinologists will want to know that the version onstage at the Hudson Theater, though slightly bigger than the Off Broadway version that opened at New York Theater Workshop in December 2022, is still somewhat underscaled for Broadway. It has a cast of 19 instead of 17 and an orchestra of 13 instead of nine.
It takes more than even those larger numbers to deliver the Golden Age thrill that is, after all, the show’s milieu. (The original orchestra had 20 players.) Other than the costumes, the minimal design is more practical than inspiring; the sound of the band (playing new orchestrations by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) is especially unbalanced. The choreography by Tim Jackson too often seems charades-like. Some of the solo singing could be more effective, technically and thus emotionally.
And then there is, as always, the book. Friedman has apparently made her peace with Furth’s final Frankensteined version; though its pieces are coarsely sutured and don’t quite line up, at least the thing walks. If in seeking to sweeten the main story it still leans too heavily on thin satire for laughs — morning news shows, Hollywood sycophancy — the trajectories for the secondary characters, especially Beth and Gussie, who are now more than cannon fodder, at last make some sense.
In this production, though, it wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t. Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.
I don’t know whether that’s what Furth intended, but Sondheim is brutally clear about the insidiousness of great talent. In Frank, it eats everything it can find, eventually including itself. “Who says ‘Lonely at the top’?” he sings amid the end-stage cynicism of his loveless Bel Air party. “I say, ‘Let it never stop.’”
What a strange and daring thing for the great and greatly missed Sondheim to dramatize, and for Friedman to forefront. I’d call it heartbreaking if the result weren’t finally such a palpable hit.
[Jesse Green is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, regional, and sometimes international productions. His latest book is Shy (2022; see “Shy by Mary Rodgers” by Kirk Woodward, on Rick On Theater, 11 November 2022), with and about the composer Mary Rodgers (1931-2014; Once Upon a Mattress, 1959), daughter of composer Richard Rodgers (1902-79); he’s also the author of a novel, O Beautiful (1992), and a memoir, The Velveteen Father (1999).]
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“A BIG FLOP
RETURNS, LOOKING UNFLOPPABLE”
by Jesse Green
[The Off-Broadway notice, from Jesse Green again (and we’re not done hearing from him yet) was published in the print edition of the New York Times on 13 December 2022. Once again, I present the book on this production (though it’s nearly identical to the one above:
The New York (and for all intents and purposes, the world) première of this revival of Merrily We Roll Along was produced by the New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan’s East Village. Its first preview was on 21 November 2022, and it opened on 12 December, closing on 22 January 2023.
The production credits and principal cast are the same as the Broadway record above.
The production won the 2023 Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Musical Revival and garnered nominations for other awards, including the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival.
[The reception of Maria Friedman’s adaptation was the force that drove the musical revival to Broadway and its vindication as a successful entry in the Sondheim canon.]
Maria Friedman’s rethinking of the much-loved, much-monkeyed-with 1981 Sondheim-Furth flop gets very close to coherence, and all the way to enjoyable.
Many people love something about “Merrily We Roll Along” but few people love everything.
It has that brilliant Stephen Sondheim score! It has that meshuga George Furth book! It’s a comedy of misbehavior, a tragedy of cynicism, a big Broadway musical, a tiny domestic drama, a timeline in search of a story that’s never found and, anyway, doesn’t make sense. Even if it did, no one is old enough/young enough to convincingly perform roles that age in reverse from 40 to 20. And if they do, they can’t sing.
What no one wants is to leave the 1981 flop alone. Though too often lifeless in its many incarnations, it is also somehow deathless, rising repeatedly from the glossy grave of its beloved original cast album — remembered more fondly than the messy if emotional original production — in hopes of a transfiguration that finally makes it work.
The revival that opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, after earlier iterations at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London and the Huntington Theater Company in Boston [see above], comes closer to meeting that goal than any of the many I’ve seen before. Maria Friedman’s staging brings the intelligence of the songs fully alive and justifies the baroque construction. Her framing snaps the picture almost fully into focus. And with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the show’s central trio of backward-tumbling friends, it is perhaps for the first time perfectly cast.
Is that enough to make it great, the way it never was?
The question resonates with the material — which, being about show business, is always involved in a meta-conversation with itself. Groff plays Franklin Shepard, a hacky movie producer in 1976, trailing two wives with a third on the way, who gradually evolves (backward) into a promising theater composer in 1957. Radcliffe plays his word man, Charley Kringas, who, in a nationally televised meltdown in 1973, spectacularly splits from the oldest of his old friends. Mendez plays the third wheel, Mary Flynn, an embittered (what else?) theater critic and washed-up novelist whose fog of alcohol slowly burns away to reveal, by the final curtain, a hopeful innocent in love forever with the unavailable Frank.
Friedman clarifies this rangy structure from the first image, which replaces the ensemble scenes of previous productions with Frank standing completely alone in the ruins of his life. As disembodied voices sing the opening phrases of the upbeat title song we quickly understand that we will be focusing not on the triangle so much as its apex. No one else in the story, not even his besties and exes, is quite real to Frank anyway; they are props in his monodrama, and often mangled. This is going to be the story of a brilliant young man who, failing to grow up, inevitably punches down.
Happily, Groff has the glamour and fury to shoulder that interpretation. No Frank I’ve seen has been so unapologetic in his solipsism, so sure he deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card to life’s every complication. And when someone crosses him, as Charley does singing “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” on that TV show, Frank is so livid, staring straight ahead as if his friend no longer exists, that you wait in terror for what will happen next. What you get, even worse, is what happens before.
The laminated ironies of Furth’s timeline, lifted from a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play [see Part 2] with the same title and a similar arc, have always seemed better integrated into Sondheim’s ingenious score than into the plot itself. The songs are structured like a musical in reverse, with reprises preceding instead of following fuller versions, and bits of accompaniment later revealing themselves as new melodies. By the time you hear “Our Time,” the exquisite hymn of hopefulness that ends the show, you will recognize that it has already been cannibalized for parts; a few of its bleached bones show up as early as the second number, “That Frank,” with much more cynical lyrics.
Friedman’s staging for the first time raises the story to nearly the same level of expressiveness. The dialogue, which in most productions sounds like movie lines instead of actual speech, has been put through some sort of sanding machine that removes its polish and restores real texture. Even in the songs, phrases that can seem too perfectly crafted are now engorged with specifics that inform the actors’ delivery and thus our understanding. For “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” Radcliffe seems to have written a Bible of back story, giving wild spins to every line that help send the song into orbit.
Visually too, Friedman simplifies, reinforces and focuses what we see. Soutra Gilmour’s costumes, though changing with the years, are similar enough to immediately specify everyone in the cast. (Frank is usually in a black suit, Charley in eye-jarring argyle, Mary in busy print shmattes [Yiddish again: ‘old, ragged piece of clothing’].) And since all the action takes place within the cold unit set representing Frank’s midcentury Bel Air house (also by Gilmour) we never wonder why we’re watching a scene, even if it nominally takes place somewhere else. We’re watching it because it’s his brain.
But those fixes, however successful, are also compromises. The Bel Air house, fairly hideous and mostly blank to allow for its transformations, necessitates a lot of choral furniture-handling that works against the sleekness of the material. Though the cast, especially Mendez, is vocally splendid, the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, vastly reduced to nine players from 19, have undergone a radical deglamorization, making it a smart if sad choice to drop most of the brilliant overture. And if dancing doesn’t really fit Friedman’s more interior approach (the limited choreography is by Tim Jackson) the general lack of Broadway pizazz leaves the show feeling deprived of half its inheritance.
With the Off Broadway run (through Jan. 22) all but sold out, and commercial producers teed up for a transfer, we may yet find out what “Merrily” can be at its best. For now, it’s just at its best so far. That means some scenes work as they never have; the Act II opener, “It’s a Hit,” which often lays an egg, is for the first time hilarious, thanks in large part to Reg Rogers as Frank and Charlie’s producer. The unlikely progress through the story of Gussie Carnegie — the producer’s secretary, then wife, then star, then ex, but in reverse — suddenly seems clear and, in Krystal Joy Brown’s fetching performance, charming if not credible.
Yet at the same time, some things that used to work no longer do. The supporting characters, heavily doubled, are mostly a blur. The song “Old Friends,” which at its root is about the fatal compromises that keep people together, has a case of fake giddiness. And “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a comedy number about the Kennedy family that the three friends perform in a downtown club in 1960, lays the egg that “It’s a Hit” no longer does.
Musicals are mysterious. Even the best are games of Whac-a-Mole: Fix one problem and another pops up. It’s therefore no small thing to say that in her effort to drag a half-living thing like “Merrily” to full life, Friedman is more than halfway there. Maybe, finally, it’s a hit.
[When the new production of Merrily We Roll Along was announced two years ago, considerable discussion of the legendary play and its problems began. Comparisons were drawn with other plays that had similar elements. A couple of comments occurred to me.
[For instance, many—well, some—commentators invoked Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978) as an example of a reverse-chronological play that worked better than the Kaufman-Hart play (and thus, the musicalization). But no one, at least that I found, mentioned J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways (1937), which doesn’t move backwards entirely, but starts in the present, jumps back 20 years, and then comes back to the present.
[I also noted that no one made the comparison of Merrily as a musical with a score that’s admired and a book that keeps being replaced with Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (1956; revision, 1974), which has the same situation.
[Merrily is a theatrical phenomenon: a flop that won’t die, a musical with a terrible book but beloved score. On that basis, I’m going to publish a two-part post to look at some of the past attempts to “fix” the musical. In the first installment, I’ve presented the PBS News Hour report, aired during the run of the Broadway revival, and the New York Times reviews of that Broadway production and its Off-Broadway predecessor.
[In Part 2, I will post reviews of other past productions here in New York City. Like the play itself, I’m going backwards in time with a 2019 Off-Broadway revival and moving through a 1994 Off-Broadway production to the failed 1981 Broadway première. As a final statement, I’ll post the 1934 review by the renowned Brooks Atkinson of the Kaufman and Hart play that was the source of Sondheim and Furth’s musical treatment.
[When I first watched the News Hour segment, I e-mailed my friend Kirk Woodward (a frequent ROT contributor), suggesting he watch a video of the report. Kirk, a musical-theater writer and composer himself as well as a Sondheim fan, responded: “I can’t tell from what I’ve read so far what they did that made the difference in this production from all the others; it may just be an attention to detail.”
[Part of what I intend to do is explore that question. After reading the notices in Part 2 of this post, I’ll offer my notion of how Maria Friedman made this Merrily work where so many before her failed. Check back on Sunday, 14 July.]
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