Theater Review: Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ From the Roundabout Theatre Co.

When I heard that Merrily We Roll Along, Stephen Sondheim’s flop-turned-cult favorite, was being trimmed for a production by the Roundabout Theatre Co., I feared for the worst. 

Hadn’t the musical been through enough already, with all its various versions—not just the 1981 Broadway originals, but revivals in LaJolla Playhouse, New York’s York Theater, and in Leicester, England that saw overhauls of the songs and "book"?

I needn’t have worried, though. Sure, there is no longer an overture in the show, nor “The Hills of Tomorrow,” the high-school graduation song that bookended the original production. 

But still intact are the other tunes that Sondheim aficionados like me embraced: “Not a Day Goes By,” “Old Friends,” “Good Thing Going,” “Our Time”—among the finest lyrics and melodies created by the most influential American musical theater figure of the last half century. And other tunes have been added that clarify the motives among the principals, such as “Growing Up” and “He’s Only a Boy.” 

Collaborating with the composer-lyricist himself, the Roundabout’s company-in-residence, The Fiasco Theater, has not so much downsized the material as reimagined it for this production (which closes, after a slightly extended run, this weekend, at the Roundabout’s small-scale Laura Pels Theatre). In addition to changes made in the La Jolla and London productions, it has mined earlier drafts among Sondheim’s archives, even the original 1934 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play.

With this troupe, the accent is on minimalism—six actors (with three assuming multiple roles), especially rapid costume changes, and just enough props to suggest changes in geography. (The set by Derek McLane tips its hat to the original production—there’s a sign for the Alvin Theater, where the 1981 show premiered and died.) It’s a tribute to their imagination and verve that they succeed so well this time.

The result is a more cohesive, tighter—even intermission-less—show. For all its warnings about the trappings of success, it’s easier to see than ever—even without conventionally sympathetic leads, even going back in time (like Harold Pinter’s Betrayal) to find out how the trio at the heart of this “got off the track” from each other—that this is a show about friendship, filled with a quality that Sondheim detractors have wrongly accused him of lacking: heart. 

The reversion-in-time device—admittedly dangerous because it risks losing audience sympathy for the characters at the start—pays off, as it did not at the time of the premiere, because Sondheim reprises the same songs under different circumstances, with the lyrics remaining the same but their meaning changing.

Following its well-received version of a later Sondheim musical, Into the Woods, a few years ago, The Fiasco group chose, in Merrily, far riskier fare. But clearly, it saw this work not merely as a labor of love but a common bond with the evolution of its own artistic mission: Like the two men and one woman at the heart of Merrily, the co-artistic directors of Fiasco—Noah Brody, Ben Steinfeld, and Jessie Austrian—have had to balance creative daring with the compromises needed to assure the company’s survival.

To be sure, even this time, not all the critics thought that the production’s creators had a “Good Thing Going,” either. But, though the “book” by George Furth has long been identified as the problem with this musical, after the several attempts at a rewrite, it’s only right to say that those difficulties have been exaggerated. Jokes from the original show that fell flat (e.g., about aging film actresses returning to Broadway to revive their careers, thought way back when as a dig at Elizabeth Taylor) have been excised, and the leads are middle-aged actors going back to their early 20s rather than kids asked to age into their mid-40s.

In this revamped version, Mary Flynn, the female friend with a single novel to her credit, comes in for the most noticeable character reshaping. (Literally so: midway through the proceedings, Jessie Austrian spits out olives and stage liquor while shedding Mary's frowzy costumes, revealing the svelte young woman there before booze and bitterness got the best of her.)

As Franklin Shepard, the talented composer who loses his way, Ben Steinfeld can’t get much beyond the bland compromiser who sacrifices marriage and friendship on the altar of his lust and ambition. But he’s helped by a change in the late stages of the script that makes Frank’s conduct more understandable.

Of the main trio of actors, Manu Narayan needs the least help from script changes in making his character sympathetic. Narayan, who appeared in the Lincoln Center production of My Fair Lady last fall, makes the most of his solo number here, “Franklin Shepard Inc.”—an on-air nervous breakdown in which his Charlie Kringas vents frustration with old buddy Frank for his obsession with business and his increasingly dilatory work habits.

The other, subordinate acting trio also acquits itself well. As Frank’s wronged first wife Beth, Brittany Bradford turns “Not a Day Goes By,” often interpreted as a torch song, into a cry of hurt and fury. Emily Young invests considerable intelligence into her glamorous man-trap Gussie Carmichael. And Paul C. Coffey brings varying measures of Broadway bonhomie and desperation to the role of producer Joe Joseph (a role, incidentally, played in the 1981 show by a very young, pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander).

The plot of Merrily, involving family connections among the makers of a musical (both of Frank’s wives are involved, at one stage or another, in his shows), is mirrored by the creators of this production. Jessie Austrian, for instance, is married to director Noah Brody, and music director Alexander Gemignani has created the new musical arrangements for the small band, as his father Paul was with a large orchestra for the original show.

The real-life creation of Merrily We Roll Along was filled with abundant passion and pain (all chronicled in the 2016 documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, which I reviewed here.) But the multiple attempts to revive it derive from the even more considerable passion and pain in the music and lyrics themselves. 

Have the Roundabout and Fiasco created a Merrily that won’t change anymore? Probably not. But what does it matter in an age when even shows with what are considered the most solid “books,” such as Oklahoma and My Fair Lady, end up reinterpreted quite differently? More important, a new set of theatergoers will get to hear Sondheim songs that are uncommonly witty, wise and warm.

Film Review: ‘Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened’

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am an aficionado of Stephen Sondheim. The first original-cast album of his that I ever bought—and took to heart—was not one of his Broadway successes (e.g., A Little Night Music), but instead Merrily We Roll Along. In prior posts, I considered this 1981 musical’s disastrous initial Broadway run (so bad that the lyricist-composer did not work again with longtime producer-director Harold Prince for another 20 years), and reviewed a wonderful revival of this work, four years ago, by the New York musical series Encores.

Even for those like me who are at least somewhat familiar with this decidedly mixed history, however, the 96-minute documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened yielded many surprising insights. I missed a performance at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village a few weeks ago that featured several members—or, I should say, survivors—of the 1981 run. But I was fortunate enough to catch up on it at an afternoon showing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center last week.

One of those survivors was Lonny Price, one of the three original leads, narrates and directs this retrospective in a spirit that, like an earlier Sondheim song, might be termed “sorry-grateful.” Several years into making the film, he learned that footage long since believed lost—tapes for a “making-of” TV documentary that was shelved after the musical’s failure—had been rediscovered. That, together with some private footage (including a priceless scene where Sondheim, at a birthday party, previews a song that will appear in the show) allows for a contrast that mirrors the perspective of the musical itself: the sunlit hopes of theater-mad youth versus middle-aged disappointment and disillusionment.

Although both Sondheim and Prince open up about why they believe the show closed after only 16 performances (critics could not abide the two collaborators being both mavericks and successes, Sondheim says), it is fellow cast members who offer Price the most fascinating insights.

Some went on to prominent careers in entertainment, including “Seinfeld”s Jason Alexander, Tony Award-winning actress Tonya Pinkins, singer Liz Callaway, actor Giancarlo Esposito, and Jim Walton, a longtime Broadway fixture. Others struggled on the margins of the industry or even dropped out altogether, such as Ann Morrison, the principal female cast member; Jim Weissenbach, the show’s original Franklin Shepard, who now runs a talent agency; and Abby Pogrebin, who became a CBS producer and successful author. No matter how they turned out, a sense of acrid failure over the show’s failure clings, to one extent or another, to virtually everyone.

While Weissenbach reacts, with quiet bewilderment, to his firing and replacement in the principal role by Walton (claiming that neither Prince nor Sondheim gave him any sense he was doing anything wrong beforehand), the dominant note throughout is poignant, sometimes painful or even teary-eyed, particularly in the cases of Morrison, Pogrebin, and Price.

The musical’s previews—so disastrous that actors were sometimes singing to the backs of audience members heading for the exits—necessitated a blizzard of major last-minute changes unusual even for a major Broadway opening. Partly because of the decision to take the show straight to Broadway without an out-of-town tryout, rumors of problems multiplied, and critics pounced at the opening, ignoring larger facts in front of them: the brilliance of Sondheim’s score and the marvelous young talents in front of them.

Against all odds, the musical has gone on to a wondrous afterlife, continually performed around the world—including,  the film’s postscript notes, by children of the original cast members. But it’s hard to see how any of these performances could have topped the 2002 concert revival that reunited the original cast members. The exhilaration from that event, still palpable onscreen here, was such that Sondheim and Prince even reunited for a new musical (alas, also not successful), Bounce.

Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened has been out a couple of months already and therefore likely to appear on DVD, public television or cable station soon. If you have a chance, I strongly urge you to see this look at a musical that became famous for its spectacularly public death, only to enjoy an unexpectedly triumphant afterlife.

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.

This Day in Theater History (Sondheim Musical Opens Anything But ‘Merrily’)

November 16, 1981—If there was any justice in the world, Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along would have been as successful as the trio of musicals that finally established him as Broadway’s great creator of musical theater at the start of the 1970s: Company, Follies and A Little Night Music. 

The composer-lyricist and his longtime producer-collaborator, Harold Prince, had set much of the show in the Fifties, an era when they came to maturity; they were working from a script by their Company playwright, George Furth; and the songs answered resoundingly those critics always carping that Sondheim never wrote a tuneful show.

But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to Broadway success. The critics called the show a mess, audiences stayed away (or often left without returning at intermission), and the production closed after only 16 performances.

Worse, the tensions created by the show created a fissure in the professional and personal association of Sondheim and Prince. Their friendship was strained for awhile, and it would be another 20 years before they worked together on another musical: Bounce.

In a way, the fate of Merrily might have been foretold by its source material. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote in what many theater aficionados (myself included) regard as the zenith of American theater comedy, the 1930s, a kind of American Restoration period.

But Merrily We Roll Along turned off audiences who quickly embraced two other works by these collaborators, You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. The 1934 show wasn’t merely challenging because of its unconventional structure--a “reverse narrative” that goes back in time, a la Harold Pinter’s Betrayal--but also its unsympathetic narrator, a jaded 40-year-old playwright who has sold out his artistic vision, broken with his best friend and betrayed his wife. The show only lasted 155 performances and has never been revived on Broadway.

The same negative fallout was even more pronounced in the musical adaptation nearly 50 years later. Merrily was hardly the first musical about a heel, but the fate of that earlier landmark show, Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey, might have given Sondheim and Prince pause: It, too, became a success d’estime long after the original show tanked.

An unsympathetic lead was hardly the only problem facing Sondheim and Prince:

* The costumes turned out to be so inappropriate that Prince simply threw them out. Instead, he had characters wear T-shirts identifying themselves through their relationship to the main character, Franklin Shepard (e.g., “Best Friend,” “ex-wife”). That solution might at first have seemed cute. But it looked amateurish to Broadway audiences, who undoubtedly asked themselves why they were paying premium prices for a production whose value they couldn’t see as well as hear.

* Unlike the cast in the Kaufman-Hart play, who were largely 20-and-30-year-olds who played slightly younger and older than their real ages, Prince used actors in middle-aged makeup who, by play’s end, were revealed in their mostly teenage incarnations. But, as Sondheim noted in his collected-lyrics-with-memoirs, Finishing the Hat, such actors, no matter how talented, still find it hard to play characters considerably older than themselves.

* Instead of mounting the show out of town, Prince held tryouts on Broadway. Working the show's problems away from the Great White Way had become, by this time, too expensive. But word quickly spread, even before the production’s premiere, that there were problems.

* Both the show’s lead male actor and its choreographer ended up getting replaced.

* Sondheim and Prince faced a critical establishment ready to take them down a peg. Nearly three decades after the painful events, Sondheim chalked much of this up to jealousy: "Part of the reason for the virulent overreaction, I suspect, was that at the time Hal and I were resented as having become successful despite our maverick ventures....To have done shows like Follies, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd and still be living well was not our best revenge, it was theirs."

(One shining light in the production debacle: the casting of 21-year-old Jason Alexander as Broadway producer Joe Josephson. Yes, the man who later embodied George Costanza can be heard warbling quite well on the original-cast album about the two male songwriting friends’ need to come up with a “hummable melody.” Sondheim, noting that someone so young could be “an old pro,” marveled, “It was as if he had been born middle-aged.” It’s enough to make me wish Alexander had spent more of the last decade on musical comedy than on his misbegotten follow-ups to Seinfeld.)

All of this was unfortunate. Problems with the show's book aside, Merrily featured a number of Sondheim's most memorable songs, frequently covered by pop and jazz artists, including "Not a Day Goes By," ""Old Friends," "Like It Was," "Now You Know," "Good Thing Going," "Opening Doors," and "Our Time." These thirty-two-bar songs featured structures that created "hooks,"  yet, in their reprises, could include numerous subtle, often ironic changes.

My first prolonged exposure to Sondheim, in fact, came through a cover version of "Not a Day Goes By," featured on Carly Simon's underrated Torch LP. Curious about the song, and about the history of this failed show, I went out and bought the original-cast soundtrack, and quickly became part of the Sondheim cult.

Despite the bad taste left by the production, Sondheim was determined that the show would endure in some fashion. 

Four years later, James Lapine—now taking on Prince’s role as the author’s theatrical partner—directed another version of Merrily at La Jolla Playhouse featuring a revised book and some new (and some deleted) songs. Seven years later, in Leicester, England, Furth and Sondheim made changes they felt finally made the show workable, and a couple of years later, a London production won that year’s Olivier Award as Best Musical.

For some time, even as late as last summer, rumors circulated that the Roundabout Theatre Co. would stage a revival of the work. As so often happens with that illustrious company, it all has proven a tease, at least so far. Instead, it looks as if next year will bring a Lapine production in February as part of the Encores! Series in Manhattan, and, out in Cincinnati a month later, one of those John Doyle productions in which the actors not only act and sing but also play instruments. (Great for the resume, I suppose, but quite exhausting, wouldn’t you say?)

There are two reasons, I think, why Sondheim refuses to write off this property. Its production insanity aside, the show reflects a crucial period in his life: 1957, when he first won acclaim for the lyrics to West Side Story on Broadway. The adventures of Franklin Shepard, Charlie Kringas and Mary Flynn represent his musical answer to Moss Hart’s Act One: the serio-comic ordeal and triumph of a theatrical neophyte.

Second, the show became his declaration of independence as a music-man maverick. As his idealistic high-school characters sing in the show’s closing hymn, “The Hills of Tomorrow,” the way ahead may be “steep,” “But for those who dare/The world is there/To change!”

 
Three years after Merrily ended—temporarily—in disaster, Sondheim won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with the first show he did with Lapine, Sunday in the Park With George.