On Broadway: Fake News

  

[New York Times culture correspondent Jesse Green is taking a look at what he finds is a new phenomenon on stages in the Western world.  It’s related to documentary theater, but has some intriguing differences, according to Green’s analysis. 

[As regular readers of Rick On Theater will have noticed, documentary theater is of special interest to me, and I have blogged on the subject quite a few times since I started ROT.  (Hence my inclination to post this article.)  Some of the previous posts on the blog regarding documentary theater are: “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama” (9 October 2009), “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017), “Documentary and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025).

[Below, there are a couple of embedded links to posts on ROT that touch on theater of fact or verbatim theater, variations on documentary plays.  I didn’t include them in the list here because they’re placed where Jesse Green’s article treats a closely related point, but also because those posts aren’t strictly about documentary theater.  Nonetheless, I urge interested ROTters to check them out.] 

“FAKE NEWS”
by Jesse Green

[The article republished below was originally seen in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026; it was also posted on the New York Times website as “On Broadway Stages, a New Kind of Fake News” on 12 May.  Author Green was the New York Times’ chief theater reviewer from 2020 until 2025.]

A new style of theater has emerged in which the characters and events are real — even when the dialogue isn’t. Or is it?

Recent plays are approaching the archival density of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Mark Rosenblatt’s [British; b. 1978] “Giant” [2024], about the children’s book author Roald Dahl [1916-90; British author of popular children’s literature and short stories, poet, and screenwriter], arrived on Broadway this season [23 March-28 June 2026] bristling with monstrous excerpts from published accounts of Dahl’s antisemitic screeds. Off Broadway earlier this year, the director Daniel Fish [b. 1967] devised “Fauci/Kramer” [sic; program and reviews have Kramer/Fauci at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 11-21 February 2026] from the transcript of a brawlsome 1993 C-SPAN debate between the AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci [b. 1940; physician-scientist and immunologist; director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1984-2022] and the AIDS activist Larry Kramer [1935-2020; playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist]. Last year’s “Liberation” [Laura Pels Theater (Roundabout Theatre; Off-Broadway), 20 February-30 March 2025; James Earl Jones Theater (Broadway), 28 October 2025-1 February 2026], by Bess Wohl [b. 1975], about the hopes and failures of second-wave feminism, is based partly on interviews with participants in real meetings of a 1970s consciousness-raising group. In 2024, Mario Correa’s [b. 1969 in Chile] “N/A” [Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City, 27 June-4 August 2024] — the “N” for Nancy Pelosi; the “A” for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — offered ferocious, mile-a-minute yet totally imaginary depictions of private conversations between the two congresswomen.

I could go on: The 1933 obscenity case against James Joyce’s 1922 “Ulysses” [The United States vs Ulysses by Colin Murphy; premiered in Ireland in November 2023; U.S. premiere: JL Greene Theatre (Irish Arts Center; Off-Broadway), 30 April-1 Jun 2025], the secret back-channel negotiations behind the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords [Oslo by J. T. Rogers at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater (13 April-16 July 2017)], a woman’s taped recollections of being held captive for five months and an FBI transcript of another woman’s arrest for leaking classified information have all been remixed for recent drama [Is This a Room, conceived and directed by Tina Satter; premiered at The Kitchen on 4 January 2019; Off-Broadway premiere on 21 October 2019 at Vineyard Theatre; Lyceum Theatre, 11 October-27 November 2021]. And we in the audience have been left like reporters in darkened rooms to judge the resulting dialogue for ourselves. Is it real or does it just sound as if it might be?

This isn’t entirely new. Peter Morgan’s [British; b. 1963] 2006 play, “Frost/Nixon,” borrowed liberally from the British broadcast journalist David Frost’s [1939-2013] grilling of Richard M. Nixon [1913-1994; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74] in 1977. David Hare’s [English; b. 1947] 2004 play “Stuff Happens” featured another U.S. president, George W. Bush [b. 1946; 43rd President of the United States: 2001-09], conferring with members of his administration during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. (Some of the dialogue, not to mention the title, was drawn from the public record.) And since 2001, the Civilians, a Brooklyn-based “investigative theater” company, have been creating narratives from interviews conducted with evangelicals, porn workers, prisoners and politicians.

But then the line starts to dwindle. Other than the verbatim collages of Anna Deavere Smith [b. 1950] starting in the 1980s [see “Fires in the Mirror (Signature Theatre Company)”(12 December 2019)] and the occasional nostalgia act (like Hal Holbrook’s [1925-2021] “Mark Twain Tonight!” from 1954) or courtroom drama (like Jerome Lawrence [1915-2004] and Robert E. Lee’s [1918-1994] “Inherit the Wind” from 1955), 20th-century plays didn’t generally try to borrow, or simulate, the actual speech of historical figures. No evidence suggests that [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616] consulted 11th-century Scottish transcripts to create “Macbeth” some 600 years later. The Greeks kept the muses of theater and history distinct.

[In point of fact, the Greeks did, at least in one instance, combine history (as distinct from myth) and theater. The first known true history play, Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) The Persians (premiered 472 BCE). is based on actual events rather than myths. The oldest extant ancient Greek drama, the play focuses on the defeat of Xerxes’ (ca. 518-465 BCE; fourth Emperor of Persia: 486-465 BCE) navy at the Battle of Salamis (26 or 27 September 480 BCE) and the Persian reaction to the battle.]

So why are playwrights now so eager to eavesdrop on reality, offering audiences facts and quasi facts in the form of dialogue? It’s hardly the purpose, and rarely the case, that theater should profit by telling us what real people said. Drama has historically been considered a form of fiction or poetry. Yet as recent plays approach the feeling of reportage, what’s surprising isn’t that so many fail to convince but that several succeed, in the process inventing a new style befitting our time.

Take “Giant.” Set on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1983, it presents Dahl (John Lithgow) dealing with the repercussions of having made anti-Jewish comments in his review of a book about Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. A lunch at his home with representatives of his British and American publishers has been organized to encourage him to walk back the comments before they affect sales of his own book “The Witches,” set to be published later that year. Instead, he doubles down, referring to the media, for example, as “a nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews” [Brian Appleyard, “The Master Storyteller,” The Independent (London, Eng.) 20 March 1990].

Hearing that line, one would like to take comfort in the idea of dialogue as fiction. But in “Giant,” one cannot. The worst of Dahl’s antisemitic comments are verbatim — and when not verbatim, close enough. “They control the media,” he said of Jews in a 1990 interview eight months before his death. “Jolly clever thing to do” [Hugo Williams, “The Big Friendly Giant and the Kids,” Independent (London) 18 March 1990]. Yet Rosenblatt writes in a preface to the script that the play is “never striving to be documentary.” The lunch with the publishers’ representatives is plausible but invented, and one character, the American, who’s Jewish [Jessie Stone, played on Broadway by Aya Cash], didn’t exist.

That’s why it makes good drama. The combination of direct quotation from published accounts and close approximations in fully imagined scenes creates a compound glue that’s stronger than its components. Having Dahl say awful things at home, in front of his fiancée and within earshot of his housekeeper and handyman, suggests more about his character than similar things he wrote for public consumption. His antisemitism isn’t just a sound bite, it’s embodied — and thus more absolute and complex.

The paradox recalls Marianne Moore’s [1887-1972; American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor] description of poetry as a form that presents “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” [“Poetry,” first published in Alfred Kreymborg, ed., Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (N. L. Brown, 1920)]. Regarding “Giant,” the phrase “real toad” is especially apt. But in “Liberation,” it’s the garden that’s real: a feminist group in an Ohio gymnasium 50 years ago. I say “real” because Wohl based most of the play’s characters on women who were part of an actual consciousness-raising group from that era, and drew additional inspiration from her mother’s own circle of friends. What they say sounds real too. In their meetings, the women argue about how to respond to the unenlightened men in their lives (“I think you should kill him”), what the goal of feminism should be (“If we don’t take action, we have no group”) and whether it’s permissible for one character to open the top button of her blouse to get a promotion at work (“She has to get through the day somehow”). Eventually, the narrator figure, a semifictionalized stand-in for Wohl, has a debate with her late mother, who materializes to say the play has “some funny lines” but “you got most of it wrong.” That scene is heartbreaking, even if you know that Wohl’s mother is alive and attended the Broadway production eight times.

[Liberation was nominated for the 2026 Best Play Tony, though it didn’t win the award; however, it did win the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Off-Broadway, it won the 2025 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, and it was nominated for the 2025 Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play.]

The acknowledgment of the blurry space between quotation, paraphrase and guesswork — the subtitle is “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember” — makes “Liberation” feel more accurate. “It has to do with the way theater rewards emotional truth over literal truth,” Wohl told me. “The invented dialogue is all in support of the emotional truths I’m investigating, which spring from tons of research and firsthand conversations.”

Wohl’s method, like Rosenblatt’s, works because, even if the dialogue sounds accurate and is sometimes verbatim, the playwrights take a freer hand with the characters, inventing some and compositing others. Notably less successful are those plays, like Stefano Massini’s [Italian; b. 1975] “The Lehman Trilogy,” which opened on Broadway in 2021, that work the other way around, putting fake speech into real mouths, in this case those of three generations of the American banking family. Even putting real dialogue in real mouths can be a problem, though: The historic political statements in “Stuff Happens” are never as convincing as what Hare invents because you cannot reach the depths of character with language designed specifically to be shallow.

Current events have rarely been theater’s forte. Catastrophes that once seemed epochal have over the past two decades merged into one continuous sludge. But it’s not just the pace of the events; it’s how we now encounter them. Social media and A.I. have flooded our field of attention with hot takes and chaotic imagery, leaving us to extract the truth on our own. We learned of the killings of George Floyd [1973-2020; African-American man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 25 May 2020], Renee Good [1988-2026; American woman fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, 7 January 2026] and Alex Pretti [1988-2026; American intensive care nurse for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs shot and killed by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis, 24 January 2026]  within hours, with disinformation, false narratives and even, in some cases, deepfake videos soon following.

What the English poet William Wordsworth [1770-1850] described as his poetic ideal in 1800 — “emotion recollected in tranquillity” [sic; British spelling] — was for almost 200 years drama’s watch cry as well. But with no tranquillity left in which to recollect emotion, it’s no wonder that playwrights have looked for workarounds. Many have discovered, or rediscovered, the way older crises can serve as analogues for newer ones: AIDS can speak to Covid, Dahl to the antisemitic tropes of today, second-wave feminism to third-wave and beyond. What’s new is that playwrights have begun leaning into the objective techniques of nonfiction to sidestep the noise of fake news.

The best works to emerge from this movement toward facts are those that nevertheless manage to exploit the expressive opportunities of fiction. It may have been Smith, in her verbatim plays, who provided the inspiration, paradoxically achieving the imaginative weight of pure invention while observing strict verbal fidelity. The potency of that approach was established by two of her works from the early 1990s: “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities” (about the riots [19-21 August 1991] following the death of a 7-year-old Black boy when a car driven by a Hasidic Jew struck him [19 August]) and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (about the violence that ensued after police officers who attacked Rodney King [1965-2012; African-American victim of police brutality on 3 March 1991 in Los Angeles] were acquitted in state court). But their power also derived from Smith herself, who was usually the only performer onstage, filtering as many as 40 oppositional voices through her own singular lens. The filtering was itself the drama, making the point that any of us contain the possibility of all of us.

Smith’s achievement has been difficult to replicate in other formats, only partly because of her extraordinary mimetic skills. With a strong enough actor, like Michael Benjamin Washington [b. 1979] in the 2019 revival [see also link above] of “Fires,” the play remains overwhelming. But a 2021 Off Broadway revival of “Twilight,” which divided the play’s characters among several actors, dissipated much of its strength. That may be why interview-based dramas in her wake, like those devised by the Civilians and by Tectonic Theater Project (most recently “Here There Are Blueberries,” a 2022 play about the discovery of an album of concentration camp photographs), have inched toward more familiar territory with elaborate settings, projections and song [see also my reports in Rick On Theater on 26 May 2024, 29 May 2024, 1 June 2024, 4 June 2024, and 7 June 2024].

Now playwrights are fudging the line between transcription and transformation even further. Often enough, the result, like an A.I. image in which someone has extra fingers, doesn’t pass the most elementary smell test. But handled properly, the combination of “maybe real” and “Could it be?” and “OK, yes, this actually happened” feels strangely right for our time — and serves as good practice for life. When we can no longer trust what real people say, the fictional facts and factual fictions of plays like “Giant” and “Liberation” make for a new kind of realism. Like little else onstage, they feel true.

[Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for the New York Times.  He was previously the chief theater reviewer for the Times from 2020 until 2025, having been co-chief from 2017.  Previously, he was the theater reviewer at New York magazine.]

'Merrily We Roll Along,' Part 2

 

[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 SONDHEIM

BUT 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,’
BY GEORGE S. KAUFMAN AND MOSS HART”
by Brooks Atkinson 

[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.]

'Merrily We Roll Along,' Part 1

[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’
GAINS RAVE REVIEWS AND TONY NOMINATIONS”
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).]

*  *  *  *
“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.]