Performance Diary: 'Follies,' Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[In his account of the work on the Gas Lamp Players’ production of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies, Kirk picks up where he left off in Part 1 of his “Performance Diary”: in the middle of the rehearsal period.  Kirk will take us through the final dress rehearsal to opening night and the short performance run.

[If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on 15 December, I suggest readers go back and pick that up before reading Part 2, below.  Kirk has been presenting a day-by-day chronicle of the progress of the show and without his commentary from the beginning, you will have missed the build-up.]

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – There are some rehearsals you just have to have, whether you want to or not. What I am going to write here should not be taken in the slightest as a criticism of the creative team of our Follies production. I think they’re splendid and doing a fine job. But a production has to work with what it has – including its schedule.

Tonight was a “stumble-through” of Act 1, which is basically a series of vignettes at a party, meaning that its focus frequently changes, while movements occur around the main events that seem to be random (they are not). It was the first time we’d tried to play the act from beginning to end.

The central story, about four characters, is played by eight actors, and that fact in itself demonstrates the complexities of the script (the additional four actors are younger versions of the “present day” characters). 

I have written before in this blog about my conviction that any part of the rehearsal process should have a single focus [see, for example, “Performance Diary, Part 2,” 28 August 2024: “I still feel that a director should define for the cast a single, definite purpose for each rehearsal, or for each run through . . . .”] – in particular, when something new like, say, stage lighting is introduced at a particular rehearsal, that should be the focus, and the actors should be told to concentrate on that and not worry much about acting (which nevertheless will happen, usually effectively, because the pressure is off).

[In “A Directing Experience, Part 1” (13 October 2023), in which Kirk explains this principle as applied by the director he was assisting: “One important directing technique, which I have come to strongly endorse, is that he tried to give goals for each rehearsal. This communication practice frees actors to concentrate on a few specific things, and in the process, everything else is likely to improve as well.”  ~Rick]

Tonight, though, was full of new items, and the result was predictable. Among tonight’s major “firsts” were:

We had a pianist for the first time – previously we had been moving and singing to recordings of previous productions. As far as I could tell, the pianist, who I have the impression will eventually be quite good, was unfamiliar with the score, which, being a Sondheim score, has plenty of complexities. He made his way through the score, but often what he played was unrecognizable.

We also had a musical director present for the first time, but since none of us had worked with him before, he had no idea of what the actors might want in the way of accompaniment, and he spent most of his time either indicating a tempo that might or might not work with the song, or turning pages.

We were in a new space – the cafeteria of the high school. The stage was marked out by tape on the floor, so we could tell how small the playing area is, but being in a big room gave the feeling of spaciousness. Next week the small size of the performance space will be a shock, even if intellectually we know the dimensions of the set.

The act was being put together for the second time, so many were unsure of their cues for entrances and exits (including me). Not everyone was completely “off book” with their lines entirely memorized (I was, but I have very few lines), and, again, the singers in particular were suddenly singing against musical backgrounds that were entirely new to them.

So we worked our way through the act, and it was necessary and useful to see how all the separately rehearsed pieces fit together, but there was a lot of confusion and little sense of performance – how could there be? As an example, Janet Aldrich, a powerhouse singer, made a huge impression singing “I’m Still Here,” but she had to call for lyrics twice and was being coached on movement while she sang, a reflection of how muddled things were.

At this point it doesn’t seem to me that the central story of the musical is clearly told – not that the authors have helped much with that problem. A friend told me that she had talked to a film director recently who said, “I tell the actors, you can do this or you can do that, but you have to do this, because if you don’t, the story doesn’t get across.”

That, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter – a director is always trying to answer the question, “How can the story best be told?” I don’t doubt that Kristy and Susan are aware of this.

And it’s foolish to judge a production based on rehearsals. We have almost two weeks until opening, nine full rehearsals, and as my friend also pointed out, we don’t have any of the “wizardry” in place yet – lights, amplification, orchestra, costumes, and so on.

At this point there’s also no coherent sense of style about the production, but the same point applies – there’s a long way to go, and we have good people in charge of the process. So, onward! Act II tomorrow night!

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – Act II is less complicated than Act I as far as staging goes. Basically, after a brief argument among the leading couples, a kind of “Follies” called “Loveland” begins, and a series of brilliant songs takes ironic looks at the couples’ troubles.

I wrote last night about difficulties in telling the story of the show, but tonight the principals seemed to have that under control, so that’s good. We worked our way through the act; two of the male principals, for various reasons, are still using their scripts, but I doubt that anyone is worried about either of them. The teen company of dancers and actors is terrific, and so were several of the numbers tonight.

We eight men did our dance to baffled applause. Deshja Driggs, an extraordinarily talented performer who sings the lead in the song, eyed the solid floor of the cafeteria warily as she considered how safe our lifting her into the air could possibly be (I’m not one of the lifters, thank heaven), but her life was spared, at least for tonight.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – I arrived a little early (always a good idea – maybe even an imperative) while some scene work was going on, and Susan, the director, came over and told me that her husband, who has been playing the second male lead, has got a role in another major show.

He’ll be “swing,” a form of understudy, for a production that starts rehearsals next Tuesday. Obviously he can’t be in our show, and Susan and Kristy were interviewing a replacement when I arrived. Susan asked me not to tell anyone else, and I said, “Tell them what?”

I was complimented twice tonight on my opening speech. Of course that was before rehearsal; I hope they feel the same about it now.

When our rehearsal began, Kristy fine-tuned parts of the opening scene, and it’s now clearer and more fun. She really is a very good director. Then the cast separated for detailed work on three smaller scenes, and finally we eight male “dancers” worked out the glitches in our number until I thought my feet would fall off, especially my right one.

A note to directors: actors are not pleased if a director, having looked elsewhere, tells them that they ought to do something they just did. Much better to ask “Did you . . ." or “Were you able to . . .? I couldn’t see.”

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – In our performance space (the Glen Ridge, NJ Women’s Club) for the first time as a cast. It’s a lovely auditorium; the stage is definitely smaller than one would imagine (I think that was true for all of us), and tonight’s rehearsal was basically dedicated to adjusting our movements to the new conditions.

The set is basically in place. There are three stage curtains at the back of the stage (“upstage”), each gathered together in the middle so the back of the wall – a theater wall, appropriate for the show! – is visible. There’s a three-level staircase, not walled in but “skeletal,” a smaller platform on the other side of the stage, and that’s it. Properly lit (we had a few stage lights already), it’s lovely.

We needed to make many adjustments to the staging in the new space, there were basically four people making the changes (two directors, the choreographer, and the musical director), and both time and patience ran short as the evening went on. (Talent is important, but patience is one of the greatest theatrical virtues.)

Our dance comes toward the end of the show, and therefore of the rehearsal as well. There were questions about its ending, lots of conversation, no decision yet . . . .

That’s when I left, because my right foot, never sturdy because of two falls on ice over the years, pretty much gave way when I twice stepped clumsily on stairs. I was limping, it’s really sore, and I need to do my best to get it in shape for the rehearsal tomorrow night.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – Although I hadn’t broadcast my hurt foot, I hadn’t kept it a secret either, and when I arrived early for rehearsal tonight Susan was solicitous, asking if I wanted to stay in the number (I did) or if I’d rather get out (I wouldn’t), although she said it would be a loss because I’m so adorable in the dance, which I’m afraid means . . . well, you can figure it out.

The actor replacing Tony in the role of Buddy was working with Kristy, Susan, and the pianist when I arrived. He looks and sounds great but doesn’t read music, so I know what he’ll be doing this weekend, or at least I expect so – listening to performances of the show over and over.

We eight male “dancers” got together to find that Emily didn’t plan to work with us, which caused some grumbling, since the very end of the routine hadn’t been staged. However, we did get her for about 20 minutes; she didn’t have anything planned but by the time she went in to work with the new Buddy there was an ending in place.

I made it clear at the start of our work that my foot was in bad shape, but I was able to do the whole rehearsal, although I didn’t push it. Our next rehearsal will be Monday night in the performance space; it’ll be a technical rehearsal, settling light cues, microphones and sound cues, costumes, and so on, and considering the size and shape of the show it’s likely to be a long and grueling evening. We shall see.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – Not a rehearsal, but a performance of the musical “Singin’ in the Rain Jr.” by Gas Lamp’s junior high school cast. (The original movie was released in 1952, the adaptation for the stage first opened in London in 1983.) It was quite impressive – close to 90 children, every one aware of what they had to do, and several exceptional voices. A good omen, I hope!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – All right, class, write one hundred times, “I will not judge the show by a rehearsal.” Tonight was a technical rehearsal and those can be expected to be rough. Lights, sound, a full set, costumes . . . all new. I had managed to pull together a full tuxedo, which I’ll wear through the whole show.

The night was extremely ragged, and when we had to stop at 10 PM we weren’t quite finished with the first act. That in itself isn’t a problem; the second act, which we’ll tackle in the same way tomorrow night, is shorter and less fragmented.

My foot behaved itself, and Susan told me I was “a breath of fresh air” because “you’re so confident.” She may say the same thing to everyone for all I know, but many if not all actors thrive on praise. The music is still under-rehearsed, with some not at all helpful tempos. There was no way to evaluate the acting, which has little chance in a technical rehearsal.

There was a nice feeling of camaraderie among the cast, I thought. People seem to be having fun for the most part. “It’s such a big show,” Susan said tonight.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 – I told you they were smart! We left rehearsal last night planning for a 6:30 arrival time tonight for rehearsal. Today we got an email giving specific times for groups of people between 6:30 and 7:30, with the rest of the cast arriving at 7:30.

Deduction: as I wrote yesterday, the music still needs to be settled down, and the orchestra (14 altogether!) will be there tonight, so the first rehearsal hour will be spent getting the singing and the accompaniment together. Once again, the creative team is looking at what’s most important to accomplish, and putting that first. Good for them!

I was wrong, or at least I think I was. When I arrived there were a few musicians tootling (actually only half the orchestra, the students; the rest arrive tomorrow night), actors hanging around, not much sign that anything important was happening.

Eventually we got started, picking up where we left off last night. Basically the two nights went the same: with numerous stops to set or fix things, a few actors holding scripts (including our Buddy, who of course is new) or unsure of lines . . . I kept thinking of the theatrical proverb “No matter how long you rehearse, you always need two more weeks.”

In particular I’m not sure about the musical part of the show. Some of the tempos strike me as off, usually too slow; there are clunker notes, and for several songs in this particular show, the orchestra needs to accompany the singer as they sing, not lead them – no matter how difficult this may be. It can be done, but so far, in our production, it only happens sporadically.

I added to the fun by stepping badly again in the same spot I did the other night, a setback to my ability to move. Susan was solicitous, had me put my foot up, gave me some Advil, and I was able to dance in our number, probably making no more than five major mistakes.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – The first of two full run-throughs in costume, with orchestra (complete and playing together for the first time), lights, sound, and no stops – except during “Who’s That Woman,” the most complex number in the show, where the orchestra lost track of the sudden tempo shifts.

I thought the evening as a whole did what it needed to do. Tomorrow night the transitions between scenes should be tighter, Buddy should be more secure on his song lyrics, and the cast’s main focus should be able to be on the show rather than on the technical elements.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – Final dress rehearsal, better than yesterday, the orchestra much improved. The run through wasn’t perfect, but the glitches were either song lyrics or the occasional transition. I also understand that ticket sales are good so far. I wasn’t good, particularly in the dance, but it wasn’t entirely my fault, I beefed to Emily about the spacing at the start of our number, and she said she’ll work with the dance tomorrow at 7.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, OPENING NIGHT! – I was irritated about how I was handling the short scenes where I have lines. My daughter Heather said something I agree with: she said that a monolog is easier to handle on stage than a short scene with only a line or two in it, because a monolog has a context, while a short scene can seem to pop up out of nowhere, and in Follies that’s the way they seem to me.

So I rewrote my cheat sheet of cues and lines to clarify the sequences, and spent time reviewing it, and that helped. On to the opening performance! The house was full, maybe a hundred or so people. The orchestra regressed a bit from last night, I thought; I suppose musicians get nervous like anyone else.

The audience was enthusiastic and the show can be declared a success. The people I know who saw it felt that the story was clear, and they were impressed with various things including the general talent level, the scale of the production, and of course the score of the show.

Several people I know felt that the book of the musical was problematic. I agree – it’s really an avant-garde musical masquerading as a typical Broadway show, and it seems determined to make the audience’s experience a difficult one.

My choreographer friend Colleen liked the choreography; the general feeling seems to be that the problems with the production were largely technical (some sound glitches) and orchestral.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – A two show day, one at 2 PM and one at 8 PM. Feeling that my scenes were finally under control, I spent time on two parts of the dance number that I never seemed to get right, and ended up fairly confident about them.

The afternoon show, the matinee, was splendid, with the orchestra far more together again and the performances filled with an energy that had not been there before.

Our dance, I am happy to report, was quite good, and I basically did well. A friend said to me last night, “You don’t have to worry about how the men look anyway; Deshja is so good that no one’s paying any attention to you anyway.” She really is wonderful in her role; all the principal actors are excellent, and the singing is on a high level throughout the show.

There was one incident in our dance number: one of the dancers dropped his cane, stooped to retrieve it, and missed the second “lift” of the number, when Deshja is carried from the front to the rear of the stage. However, another member of the group, seeing the problem, immediately stepped in and helped carry her, so the number proceeded safely.

The evening show wasn’t as good, for two reasons that I can identify: everyone was tired (two big shows in a day is a lot), and we probably tried to repeat the good points of the afternoon show. Trying to recreate what happened last time almost never works. The audience was pleasant but not boisterous. However, I think they still got a good show.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – Another big crowd for our final performance of Follies, a performance that may not have matched the spirit of yesterday’s matinee but was nevertheless fine, and our dance number finally worked the way we wanted it to.

I was so tired that I actually felt myself momentarily fall asleep at one moment in the first act while I was sitting backstage. As a result I didn’t go to the cast party that followed a brief “strike” where everything was put away; wherever I tried to help, someone beat me to it, so I finally just went home.

A few observations:

This diary illustrates something that beginning directors need to know: directing a play is not the same activity as directing a musical. A play is an artistic activity of which you are the leader. A musical is less like a play than a military operation, with intensive strategic planning, a staff, orders, placement of troops, discipline, and so on. Musicals take extensive planning. Someone must do it.

In this case the creative staff (I’m told they called themselves the “Dream Team,” and they’ve worked together on several shows) simply are first rate. They seemed to work together seamlessly, they at least visibly stay calm, and they know their stuff.

The football coach Lou Holtz (b. 1937) used to tell his teams to expect at least three times in a season when things would look bad for them. They shouldn’t be alarmed, he said; these things happen.

This production of Follies was a succession of difficulties and successes. This, it seems to me, is true of theater in general, and in life too, I suppose. Patience, as I said above, is an important theatrical virtue.

Theater has the advantage of aiming for a specific goal: the production will open on this date, regardless of how rehearsals are going. If the date has to be changed, it’s still a date, and if the production has to fold without opening, well, at least it was aiming for a date until it didn’t have one.

So in theater, which is more important, what the show is like when it opens, or how it gets to that point? There are arguments for both “process” and “product,” and they don’t necessarily conflict with each other.

Old-timers – I mean through around the nineteenth century – might have firmly said, “Theater is about what the audience gets, and that’s that.” On the other hand, many directors today, including me, would say that the nature of the rehearsal process is crucial to the success of a play. (A few directors don’t even aim to present their productions, only to work on the material. To each their own, but I don’t feel that way.)

An example of process: as I reported, as far as I know we plunged right into staging numbers at the beginning of rehearsals. Looking back, I think it would have been valuable to have had a sit-down readthrough of the show, maybe just talking through the songs, so the director could frame how the story was to be told, suggest some atmosphere, talk about the theme of the show and how it would affect the staging, and so on.

Like any work of art, a production of a musical is really a projection of the imagination, and early group work would help to have the cast sensing and feeling the same things.

On the other hand, most of my evaluations of how things were going turned out to be wrong, so maybe the lesson is that people in a show are poor judges of how things are going – or at least that I am.

The creative team demonstrated that they could be trusted. I will miss being around that skilled, stimulating group of people. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if I weren’t the only person to be inspired by their highly professional work ethic to do a little better myself next time I’m working on a show. I hope so.

[Just a reminder for readers who are just finding Rick On Theater and have enjoyed Kirk’s account if his work in this production: Kirk has written two previous pieces based on his journal entries about working in theater, “Performance Diary, Part 1” (25 August 2024) and “Performance Diary, Part 2” (28 August 2024).  I recommend giving them a read.]

Performance Diary: 'Follies,' Part 1

by Kirk Woodward 

[In a continuation of his August posts on Rick On Theater, “Performance Diary, Part 1” (25 August 2024) and “Performance Diary, Part 2” (28 August 2024), Kirk Woodward, a prolific contributor to this blog (133 posts and counting), returns with a two-part contribution on his participation as a cast member of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies. This production was mounted by the Gas Lamp Players of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, a non-profit community theater founded in 2007.

[Follies ran on Broadway from 1971 to 1972, after which there were many regional and international premières and revivals.  Because the musical’s book was problematic, there were many efforts to revise it for several of the post-Broadway stagings.  Even though the score was praised and even beloved, Sondheim wrote new numbers and revised some of the original ones. 

[The script that Gas Lamp used, rented from Music Theatre International, the rights-holder, was the one developed for the London première, which ran 21 July 1987-4 February 1989 (644 performances) at the Shaftesbury Theatre in the West End, London’s theater district.

[Goldman rewrote his Broadway libretto extensively for producer Cameron Mackintosh (b. 1946), and Sondheim also wrote some new numbers and rewrote some others.  The London production was directed by Mike Ockrent (1946-99) and choreographed by Bob Avian (1937-2021).

[According to Wikipedia, “‘. . . The (London) Times described the evening as “a wonderful idea for a show which has failed to grow into a story.”’  The Times critic Irving Wardle stated ‘It is not much of a story, and whatever possibilities it may have had in theory are scuppered by James Goldman’s book . . . a blend of lifeless small-talk, bitching and dreadful gags.’” (‘Scupper’ is a mostly British synonym for ‘thwart,’ ‘destroy,’ or ‘scuttle.’)

[Glen Ridge, a bedroom community of New York City, is in New Jersey’s Essex County, about 60 miles and an hour-and-a-quarter drive or train ride—west of the city.  From my experience and observation, Essex County has an exceptional number of performance venues and theater companies, both professional and community-oriented.  One might even say that it’s a little theater-mad, so there’s a lot of theater activity and interest thereabouts.  In addition to the adult shows it produces, Gas Lamp also has many other programs and activities for its supporters. 

[The troupe’s Follies was presented at the Women’s Club of Glen Ridge on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 22, 23, and 24 November (with two shows on Saturday).  Auditions for the production, as you’ll read, were held at the auditorium of Glen Ridge’s Ridgewood Avenue School on the evening of Monday, 23 September, with callbacks for teens on the 27th and adults on the 25th and 27th. 

[The company rehearsed on Monday through Thursday evenings, starting with the first meeting of the cast on Monday, 30 September.  The final dress rehearsal was on Thursday, 21 November, with the opening performance on the 22nd.  Kirk takes us through the whole proceedings, from audition to rehearsals to performance, making observations along the way, all drawn from his years of experience as an actor, director, composer-lyricist, dramatist, and teacher.]

Recently on this blog I posted an account of several events in the arts in which I participated (see “Performance Diary, Part 1” and “Performance Diary, Part 2”). My hope is that readers not in the arts might find an inside look into theater work to be interesting, and that those in the arts – well, we love telling each other what we’ve been through. In that spirit, here’s an account of an event that followed those in the previous articles.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – Walking through an arts exhibit with two friends, one of them, Susan Knight Carlin, mentioned that she was about to direct a production of the musical Follies for a local theater group, the Gas Lamp Players of Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She asked if I might be interested in auditioning for a small role, and I said I was.

Follies, for those not familiar with it, is a 1971 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) and a book by James Goldman (1927-1998) about a reunion of former members of a series of revues like the famous Ziegfeld Follies of the first part of the Twentieth Century.

The theater building that housed the show’s Follies in the years between World Wars One and Two is about to be torn down, and the reunion brings together many of the stars of those years. In the course of the musical we learn what has happened to those stars since the Follies ended, and see them face revelations about themselves.

Follies first opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971 (the year in which the show is set), and ran until July 1,1972 for a total of 12 previews and 522 performances, a significant number, but its enormous expenses meant it wound up losing all its investment. Its score is generally considered a treasure, with Sondheim capturing the flavor of many styles of songs from the Twenties and Thirties in brilliant fashion. (Among other awards and nominations, the premiere won the Tony for Best Original Score in 1972 and the 1971 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics.)

The “book” or script of the musical, on the other hand, has frequently been considered problematic, and Goldman tinkered with it for several revivals of the show. Its central concept, regardless, is remarkable: each of the “original” Follies characters is shadowed by a version of their younger selves, who contrast and eventually interact with them. The show has been revived in major productions several times, often with rewrites to the book. (Despite the book’s problems, Goldman was nominated for 1972’s Tony for Best Book of a Musical.)

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – As it turned out, the audition Susan described was the following night, and I couldn’t go, so using my phone I taped a video of myself singing the Gershwin song “Love Is Here To Stay” to my own piano accompaniment, and emailed it to the theater, attaching my acting resume, which I hadn’t looked at in a while and which was much shorter than I’d remembered.

I was invited to a callback night, and I was available for it, so I went to the school auditorium where the company customarily works. I knew a few people there; most were strangers. Susan spoke briefly, but the evening was primarily led by the pianist for the evening, a woman named Kristy Graves, and I wondered if there was some kind of competition between the two, since Susan had told me she was the director.

I read for two characters, in very short scenes – the musical is mostly music, with relatively few extended spoken sections. I was pleased not to be too anxious about the audition – “audition nerves” are common – and I actually got a laugh on one line reading, which pleased me no end.

A day or so later I was offered the role of Dimitri Weismann, the producer of the long-gone Follies and organizer of the reunion that makes up the show. It’s a small part and a well-written one. I accepted the offer by email and was impressed by the efficiency and organization shown by Gas Lamp’s communications. They left few questions to ask; mailings included a contract and a first week rehearsal schedule, all professionally presented. A good sign.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – First rehearsal. Some productions of musicals begin with a read-through of the script, but the script of Follies is hardly the focus of the show, so we didn’t. The school auditorium where we’ll usually be rehearsing is enormous, something like 800 seats, and I felt intimidated as I entered. Once more I knew only a few people in the room, and I got the feeling that others were in the same shape.

We began with an introductory talk, mostly details about organization. I realized the answer to my curiosity about direction – Kristy introduced herself and Susan as co-directors, because Kristy was also going to play an important role in the show, and it’s difficult (and usually not a good idea) to direct oneself. Susan, a professional actor herself (as was Kristy), would work mostly on acting issues. (Kristy was not the musical director for the show, despite her playing piano for the auditions, and very well too.)

As we got started, I thought to myself, “I haven’t done a big musical like this for a long time.” (That was in fact a major reason I’d been interested in auditioning for the show.) Then I realized that I had never been in a big musical like this before! All my experience in musicals had been on small stages with minimal sets and small cast sizes, none of it recent.

I couldn’t help laughing at myself. I also began to realize how out of practice I was as an actor. For example, most musicals, and certainly one on this scale, rent scripts and scores (sometimes contained in one book) from a publishing company, in this case Music Theatre International, which understandably doesn’t want to get its scripts back with writings in pen all over them. Actors learn to bring pencils. I had forgotten.

I decided I had better pay increased attention to what was going on. (A good thing too, because before I was supposed to enter a scene I found my zipper was down.)  

After the opening talk, the group divided in two, with dancers on the stage and singers in a music room, where we began to learn the parts the chorus would sing. (Unlike many musicals, this one doesn’t have a separate singing-and-dancing chorus; the whole company sings the group music, and there isn’t much of it – most of the songs are for small groups.) Another “big musical” feeling – I had flashbacks to Army training, where a number of us would sit in a classroom while a colonel lectured to us.

Actually it wasn’t really much like that – the choral teacher was quiet and very nice. She familiarized us with some of the tricky bits of the vocal lines – since Sondheim wrote the songs, it makes sense that there’d be tricky bits, because his melodies and harmonies are often complex, but as I said the chorus parts are mostly unison, so we’re all in it together.

At exactly the scheduled time, we reassembled on stage to begin work on the opening scene, the most complicated in the show, in which most of the characters come onstage in small groups and have a moment to identify themselves, both in the scene and for the audience’s benefit. Kristy staged this scene; she talked it through, arranged the actors in their opening places, walked them through the music slowly, repeated the process until it was secure, and by the end of the rehearsal the scene was staged. Presto!

I watched this from behind the upstage curtain (at the back of the stage) – my character comes on late in the opening, and we didn’t quite get there. No problem, I’m sure.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1 – The stage manager sent me an email in the morning that refined the time I’d be expected for rehearsal – another sign of efficiency. I have been trying to figure out what time to leave for rehearsal. Last night I barely got there on time; tonight I was half an hour early.

Susan directed the two short opening scenes in which I have lines and did fine; she has a good eye for staging details. I got almost no direction, but then my two speeches have a total of nine words in them. One actor asked Susan a lot of questions about costumes, on the “Have you considered this?” angle. Susan was polite, but I had the impression she was thinking, “My friend, you have no idea how competent this group is.” Of course it will have considered the costumes, and will have a plan for them too.

Susan had originally said the show might be double-cast, with two actors for each role, but as it turns out only one role has two actors, and they both worked with me on the scene with Solange, so when we were finished I asked, just making small talk, “Is it weird to have a double?” One of the performers said, very frankly, “I have epilepsy and it makes me feel much better to know that someone else can do the role.” So interesting – we often don’t know what someone’s story is.

One more sign of the group’s organization: the stage manager, in the auditorium, sat at a table with someone next to him. I don’t know what his function is, but I’ll bet he has one. That theater means business.

Besides my two short lines, I have one longish opening speech. It’s lovely, and I’m working on memorizing it by reading it aloud over and over, relishing every word.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 7 – I was unsure whether I was called for rehearsal tonight – the schedule said “Adult Male Ensemble,” and I didn’t know whether I was included in that group, and couldn’t get clarification. However, I showed up, and it was my worst nightmare – a two-hour dance rehearsal for a big dance number!

I don’t know that I’ve ever done any extended show dancing. I’m certainly not a dancer – very much the opposite. I’m also anything but young and anything but limber, and I have a weak right ankle. No matter. Nothing ventured, nothing gained . . . it’s always darkest just before the dawn . . . to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield . . . Insert your favorite motivational saying here.

Actually I could have used a motivational saying or two – my main difficulty was the voice in my head saying, “You can’t dance worth anything,” followed immediately by my brain, my legs, and my arms shouting, “You’re right!”

There were six of us (there will be eight in the number altogether), none of us young and no more than one or two of us in good shape, but I felt that everyone picked up the steps faster than I did – there are a couple of sequences I never did correctly all night. I have none of what dancers call “muscle memory,” when the body makes the correct moves automatically, and I didn’t demonstrate for certain that I have memory of any kind, actually.

Emily, the choreographer, was cheerful, positive, and has the gift of paying no attention to anything people say along the lines of, “I’m awful with this.” She occasionally corrected but never criticized. She had worked out choreography in advance, but she said to us, “If you don’t like it or it looks silly, we’ll change it,” and I’d say she made up between twenty and thirty percent of the dance (as far as we got tonight) on the fly.

The saving grace is that at the end of the rehearsal she led us in making a video recording so we can work on the steps for next time, which will be next week. No more rehearsals for me this week, but plenty of work to do.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15 – We got the following email today:

We are writing to let you know about some changes made to our Follies production team effective Monday, October 14^th.

Susan Knight has agreed to become sole Director, and Kristy Graves has agreed to step down as co-Director. Kristy will continue to be a member of the cast and the costumer of the show. This change was made to address logistical concerns and potential conflicts of interest.

We expect that these changes will not cause any disruptions to production, but we wanted you all to be aware.

I’ll probably never know what this is all about, but it doesn’t seem to me to have been written in a spirit of joy. A friend of mine ribbed me, “They were doing fine until you got there!”

I’ve since heard that the email was the result of conflict in the theater group’s board. Not surprising, but not great either. NOTE: As things turned out, Kristy and Susan, who had worked on shows together successfully for years, pretty much worked on Follies the way they’d planned to, despite the ultimately meaningless change in titles.

Meanwhile my friend Annie wrote me:

DANCE REHEARSAL!  Still laughing at the panic emanating from those typed words.   It makes me think of something an acting teacher said when assigning some seemingly impossible scene work . . . . you know, one of those things that you think you could NEVER pull off . . way beyond your capability. The student says, “I can’t.” The teacher respectfully accepts that and asks, “Can you try?”

I didn’t like that teacher, but that teaching has stuck with me all these years and it’s gotten me through so many times when I thought I could never do something.  Because it gives me something beside “can I or can’t I.” It gives me “I can try.” Heck, I can always try - that much I can commit to.

And then, of course, the shock is finding out I can do so much more than I thought. Even if not perfectly so . . . . the main key to even a dance performance is the feelings and energy you bring to it. So try to conjure fun and joy and that will translate accordingly.  It’s called a play for a reason . . . . so give yourself permission to play!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 – Second dance rehearsal, quite different this time: we were in a cafeteria rather than on stage; most of the rehearsal was spent on cleaning up what we’d learned last time; and the atmosphere was more informal than previously.

I had always thought that basically a choreographer was an unchallenged leader, at least when choreographing. At this rehearsal there was a great deal of back and forth (not with me!), even at moments when Emily was actually working out choreography (she revised some steps when necessary).

I had worked literally for hours on the dance as seen in the video of it, and although I doubt if I looked much like a dancer tonight, at least I looked like I’d been to the previous rehearsal. A couple of the men in our group told me they didn’t watch the video at all during the week; I can’t imagine that, but I never looked, or tried to look, at how anyone else was doing – I had my own problems.

By the end of the rehearsal we had at least seen all the steps that will make up the routine, and we’ll have new videos, or I hope so. All in all, I didn’t have too much of that going-down-with-the-ship feeling I had last week. A great relief.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21 – After Susan made a speech telling us it was all right that Kristy was still doing the staging, Kristy dictated to us the remaining moves we made in Act 1. It turned out that I have more lines in the act than I had realized – good grief!

Also I did a spectacularly poor job of writing down the blocking as she gave it, because I found it hard to locate myself in the script, which of course alternates between dialogue and song lyrics (with the music in a separate section at the back of the book). I got some of it clearer in my mind when we walked the scenes, although I had to be coached a great deal; I asked a question afterwards, to clarify one bit; and my next job at home is to work it all out in a form that makes sense for me. Busy busy busy!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 – As I was cramming for tonight’s dance rehearsal, my son Craig said to me, “Each time you do it, it’ll be better.” That was exactly what I needed to hear, and it’s true, although I forget it when trying desperately to keep up.

Actually I’m hardly alone in this – none of us in the number are trained dancers as far as I know or can see. I know I look like a guy trying to dance. But it’ll get better, and it did tonight, too.

Emily had to leave for a while in the middle of the rehearsal for a family errand, and while we waited for her to get back, the eight of us worked on the number very slowly, and when she got back she seemed to be pleased with what she saw.

Susan, our director, watched the last run-through of the number and seemed delighted, but when I talked to her I was surprised to learn why. “Usually you’d expect this number to be performed by young professional dancers. It’s so much fun to see a group of older men doing it!”

Not exactly high praise, and I wouldn’t want to use her comment as an excuse not to at least try to do a good job . . . but she’s got a point. My friend Colleen, a choreographer, has also pointed out that an audience almost always cheers a group of men trying to dance, pretty much no matter how they do.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 – I wasn’t sure why I was at tonight’s rehearsal, and neither was anyone else. Susan staged a scene in which I had one line, at the end of the scene, and then everybody decided I could go home.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31 – Halloween, and driving to the theater in the dark was a perilous adventure, with children all over the place. This was a dance rehearsal, and my advice to myself for the evening was to think, not about what I knew at the start of the rehearsal, but of how much more I’d know at the end.

As it turned out, we started with four of the eight men in the dance, a number that later swelled to six. Emily wasn’t there, and Kristy led the rehearsal, moving slowly through the sections of the dance and “cleaning up” bit after bit. It was two hours of steady work. At first I was mildly irritated that Kristy was working the number instead of Emily – what if she told us things Emily didn’t want? – but she did an excellent job. Is there anything she can’t do?

Midway through the rehearsal I decided to imagine that I was Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948), the great dancer. I have no idea if I moved any better as a result, but I felt more comfortable and had more fun.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – The best laid plans . . . tonight’s rehearsal was supposed to start at 6:30, but a school age production by the same company rehearses in the same space and ran late, so we didn’t get all the way through Act 1 tonight. The creative staff didn’t seem stressed, though.

The movement in Act 1 is complex, lots of people on stage for substantial parts of it, and although I had notes on my movements, tonight was the first time I’d actually done them. The directors, again, were patient. I’d been told that I enter with my (character’s) granddaughter; I met her tonight, a lovely, personable woman. Weismann (my character) must have been quite a charmer in his youth.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – The day after the election, and Kristy brought in about six different chocolate desserts, which went fast. Yesterday the non-musical scenes with the eight principals rehearsed; tonight was for big group numbers, and for those of us who haven’t seen them practicing, the effect was like a magic act – suddenly there are all these people on the stage doing intricate dance steps and singing like crazy.

Eventually we men (we call ourselves the “Poor Lost Souls” after a line in our song) got to do our dance number – not that we’d expected to – and then we went into the hall, worked our way through it bit by bit, and I’d say got pretty sharp with it. Emily, when she came out to watch, seemed pleased. A relief – I no longer feel I’m hopeless.

My discovery tonight was what a difference a wig makes. The two women in the “Buddy’s Blues” number wore wigs with long curly brown hair tonight, and both seemed utterly transformed. Ah, theater!

The junior show (“Singing in the Rain,” it turns out) has the auditorium tomorrow night, so we were going to meet at Kristy’s house, but at the end of tonight’s rehearsal Kevin, the stage manager, announced we’d be off until Monday. Okay! More time to get things solid. I almost have the group songs memorized, and I noticed that a number of people were still reading them from the script, so that felt good.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – Kevin, the stage manager, sent out a request for hands to help move pieces of the set into the theater (the Glen Ridge Women’s Club) where we’ll be performing, so I went over to help. Most of the dozen or so people there are old hands with the theater – a real ”community” theater. It was fun to hang out with the “in group.”

A note on my character in the show and how I approached it: the script suggests that Dimitri Weismann is 80, and I’m close to that age. I started with an image of him – authoritarian, maybe with an accent acquired from his immigrant family, a real boss.

Eventually I remembered that beginning an acting role with an image is a terrible idea; it channels you into working for effects rather than working from the inside of a character. I couldn’t think of any reason Weismann shouldn’t be like me – I’ve led theater companies, I’ve put on numerous productions over the years, I’ve directed.

So I allowed Dimitri to behave as I’d naturally behave, rather than the reverse, and apparently that’s fine. I did buy black-rimmed glasses (with clear glass lenses); letting my hair go grey, I looked a bit like a Cary Grant (1904-1986) imitator. Nothing wrong with that.

[Since it covers the entire preparation and performance period of Gas Lamp’s Follies, Kirk Woodward’s “Performance Diary” is too detailed and comprehensive to be accommodated in a single post.  Therefore, Kirk and I have agreed to split it into two installments for publication on Rick On Theater.  “Performance Diary: Follies, Part 2” will be published on Wednesday, 18 December 2024.  Please return then for the account of the final days of the Gas Lamp Players’ Follies.]

'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.]