Theater Review: Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ at Encores!

“How can you get so far off the track?/Why don't you turn around and go back?” the chorus asks in Merrily We Roll Along—and for three decades, that question has bedeviled the show’s creators. For Stephen Sondheim, the most significant influence in musical theater in the last half-century, the challenge has always been how to get back on track a musical that, by the end of its original 16-performance Broadway run, had provoked the execration of critics and the desertion of audiences, not to mention a two-decade professional split from longtime friend and director Harold Prince. (See a prior post of mine on this.)

This past Sunday, I attended a matinee at the tail end of a two-week revision of the show at City Center, where it ran as part of its “Encores!” series of neglected musicals. This series has, since 1994, presented concert versions of old shows in which singers will often appear with scripts in hands. But this show felt far more like a finished, polished production.

In the past, a couple of Encores presentations--the Anne Reinking-Bebe Neuwirth production of Chicago and the Patti Lupone-led Gypsy--resulted in Broadway runs. Predictably, Ben Brantley of The New York Times put the kibbosh on that idea for Sondheim‘s show: “By the end you felt that same old mixture of exhilaration and deflation that ‘Merrily’ — beautiful and damned ‘Merrily’ — always inspires.”

Reactions of past (and, in Brantley’s case, present) critical naysayers haven’t meant the end of Merrily, though. Longtime New York deejay Jonathan Schwartz has a phrase for this type of show: “a distinguished failure,” a musical that might not have proved popular but had much merit. (Think Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro, or Jerry Herman’s Mack and Mabel.) Others—myself very much included—would call this genre “the cult musical,” underscoring the level of devotion many feel for an underdog property.

The original-cast album of Merrily was the first Sondheim soundtrack I ever purchased, and, like Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, it made me a fan of the artist for the duration. I was drawn to its magnificent, if uncharacteristic, brassy sound, and with the passage of time its themes—of friendship and the compromises along the path of life—have only deepened its meaning for me.

Thankfully, not only fans have refused to lie the show die, but also Sondheim, the late writer of its book, George Furth, and James Lapine, who has functioned as Sondheim’s principal collaborator since the end of the association with Prince. Before this latest production, they had worked on three different permutations of the show over the years: at LaJolla Playhouse, New York’s York Theater, and in Leicester, England.

The show needed all this attention because of its challenges. It was based on source material--George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play of the same name--that itself bombed on Broadway in 1934. Sondheim, Prince and libretto writer George Furth kept the same reverse-chronological narrative technique of that show. Recent critics have likened that approach to the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but the much more relevant similarity is to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal—where, like this, not only a wife is sacrificed but friendship.

Additionally, Sondheim and his collaborators tested audience sympathies through the story of three friends that, we learn from the opening scene, have gone their separate ways: Franklin Shepard (played in this production by Colin Donnell), Broadway composer turned sellout Hollywood producer; his nerdy lyricist partner Charlie Kringas (Lin-Manuel Miranda), who on his own has written a Pulitzer Prize-winning play; and Mary Flynn (Celia Keenan-Bolger), an alcoholic novelist whose one bestseller is years behind her. It’s hard to sympathize with successful people who are miserable, critics sniffed--ignoring the fact that Rodgers and Hart’s classic Pal Joey has an out-and-out heel for its protagonist.

Thankfully, Lapine has gone back to basics with the show. Gone are the tacky sweaters (e.g., BEST FRIEND, EX-WIFE) that sent everyone into conniptions on the unwisely-spent money of the original; in its place are video montages that give a sense of what the three friends meant to each other through the years. Gone are actors barely out of their teens, attempting (unsuccessfully, by most accounts) to portray convincingly characters across a quarter-century span; instead, the plot action has been shortened to 19 years, making it easier for actors in their late 20s or early 30s to act both ends of the musical’s age spectrum.

More important, the emphasis is back where it belongs: on the music.

How do all these changes add up? From a stagecraft viewpoint—Lapine’s specialty—the changes are more noticeable, and welcome. From the viewpoint of music—Sondheim’s bailiwick—it’s more or less a wash.

The best songs from the original stay in this version: “Not a Day Goes By,” “Old Friends,” “Good Thing Going,” and a witty send-up of the extravagant hopes engendered after Kennedy’s election, “Bobby and Jackie and Jack.” One “new” song, “That Frank,” is a slightly reworked version of “Rich and Famous.” The truly “new” songs here—“It’s a Hit!”, “The Blob,” “Growing Up,” and “Musical Husbands,” the kind of sassy, massive production number that Jerry Herman and Cy Coleman mastered in 1960s Broadway smashes—advance character and plot, but are unlikely to be taken to heart by Sondheim aficionados.

Unlike other Sondheim shows such as Sweeney Todd, Company and Follies, Merrily features younger characters, attracting performers who tend not to be marquee names. That diminishes its box-office potential and highlights the need for skillful performances in the lead roles.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, himself a composer and lyricist (In the Heights, Bring It On: The Musical), shines the brightest among the three leads, delivering the show’s most sustained (if uncomfortable) comic highlights in his bravura interpretation of a nationally broadcast nervous breakdown, “Franklin Shepard Inc.”

Celia Keenan-Bolger’s voice, while not classically powerful or beautiful, is steady and audible over the full orchestra, and she manages to wring every emotional note out of Mary’s Dorothy Parker-ish, guys-don’t-make-passes-at-girls-who-wear glasses lovelorn cynic.

The blandness of Colin Donnell (most recently, the heartthrob male lead of the Roundabout production of Anything Goes) actually works in favor of this production—the problematic protagonist becomes not so much the heel of prior incarnations but a man too weak to withstand temptation.

Vocally, the most gifted cast members are two supporting actresses: Betsy Wolfe, as Frank's good-hearted first wife Beth, and Elizabeth Stanley, as her successful, a musical comedy star-mantrap, both of whom perform magnificently in their solos ("Not a Day Goes By" and "Musical Husbands," respectively).

It’s not enough to ask whether the flaws of Merrily We Roll Along remain ineradicable. The more important question is, are they disabling? The answer is: Not at all. Those of us who caught this most recent production count ourselves blessed that we finally saw, in New York, a production of the show that minimized its faults and offered some of the most thrilling songs in the entire Sondheim catalogue the way they were meant to be played: with a full orchestra. This production’s creators really did have a “Good Thing Going” this time.