AH, "MERRILY"
It has taken me weeks to write about Merrily We Roll Along. So much has been said; so much is still being said. What do I need to say?
I have always loved the show tenderly. And I really liked a lot of what I saw and heard of it lately at the Hudson Theatre in the big new production with the three big names: Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, Lindsay Mendez.
They easily constitute the finest frontline any Merrily has ever had; short of Hal and Steve themselves at the piano. As I’ve written here before, the most moving performance of Merrily I ever heard was a tape of Sondheim and Prince performing their just-barely-written new show for a backers’ audition at Hal Prince's apartment in November 1980. The sound of their trepidatious joy and pride was both heart-stopping and heart-rending — two "old friends" sharing their musical about friendship's end with such hope and expectation, poignantly unaware that Merrily would ultimately crash and burn, taking their friendship with it.
Steve, a notable puzzler, loved tinkering with Merrily, as if fitting and refitting jigsaw pieces. Beginning about three years after the show opened on Broadway in 1981, and shockingly closed sixteen performances later, Steve, and his bookwriter, George Furth, set off to re-fix it. In my own conversations with him over the years about each new iteration thereafter (and there were, of course, many), Steve always was adamant that the latest rewrite was the best yet. He also was conversely (if not contradictorily) adamant that he’d always loved Merrily, the work itself, as is.
Certainly in terms of his score, he was right. Merrily’s music has stood the test of time (and tribulation). It is spectacularly vocalized by this trio. They’ve really got the pipes, also the acting chops and onstage chemistry to voice every note and nuance of their now-famous songs, and infamously sketchy characters. Groff gives the craven composer-mogul, Franklin Shepard, a sympathetic vulnerability that he mostly lacks on the page. Radcliffe plays the nerdy wordsmith, Charley Kringas, as he is always played: a prickly but cuddly man-child, and he does so irresistibly. Lindsay Mendez lends the alcoholic bestie, Mary Flynn, a shot of volition beyond mere self-destruction, though only nominal heartbreak. I still believe no one has ever nailed the heartbreak at the heart of Mary Flynn quite so penetratingly as Ann Morrison did in the misbegotten original production. Mary’s heartbreak, her unrequited love for Frank, has always seemed, to me, to be Merrily’s heartbeat. The less profound her heartbreak, the more Merrily plays like a blueprint of friendship’s dissolution, rather than an epiphany of loss. Then again, even with Ann Morrison, the original Merrily flopped abjectly. So what do I know.
When I first saw this new production down at New York Theatre Workshop a year ago, I was blown away by its energy and its savvy. I also gazed up at the reduced pit band stashed in an upper window of the bland, beach house-suggestive set, and thought: surely they will open that orchestra up to full strength in a proper pit when they move this thing to Broadway. Sadly, I was wrong. Shame on director Maria Friedman and the stingy producers for that. Orchestrator Jonathan Tunick’s legendarily brilliant work on Merrily deserves not just better, but the best.
It is Ms. Friedman’s conceit that Merrily now unfolds entirely in Frank’s head, as a memory. That’s why (I guess) his Bel Air beach house, which now opens the show, never exits the stage throughout the two acts. I found this mono-minimalism distracting, if not confusing, atop Merrily’s already confusing structure, which, as you must know, unfolds backwards in time. Even the gorgeously climactic scene, wherein the three friends meet as kids on a Columbia University neighborhood rooftop, still plays out in front of that beach house; bleeding the moment of its eloquent, skyborne beauty. One set does not fit all.
A fond word about Reg Rogers. I’ve long been a fan of this delightfully singular and eccentric NYC character actor. Here in Merrily he milks every drop of singularity and eccentricity, and humor and pathos, from the first-reigning, then fallen-Broadway producer, Joe Josephson (a character played originally by a young and unknown Jason Alexander). I just think Mr. Rogers is especially terrific here.
What a quixotic issue friendship was for Stephen Sondheim. This occurred to me for the first time, watching this Merrily. In my own very modest experience, he could be a terrific friend — generous with his time and attention, supportive. But he also could be a bit explosive about friendship. As I’ve written before: Once, when I erroneously credited a bit of Company stage business in an article about collaboration in the musical theater to Hal Prince, Steve furiously corrected me by phone, as if betrayed, then stopped speaking to me for a couple of years. Mere footnote, to be sure, but on a far, far more significant friendship level, he disconnected with Hal Prince for a time, after Merrily’s initial Broadway failure. Even his longest and deepest-running friendship, with Mary Flynn’s namesake, the incomparable Mary Rodgers, was at one point suspended by Steve over a song, before they patched things up.
In fact, he seems always to have reconciled with his friends. Still, I can’t help thinking that bruised friendships were a thing with him, and may have been the thing that drew him to the Kaufman and Hart play, Merrily We Roll Along, as a subject for musical exploration.
In the end, all of this mishigas fades, and we are left with a touching work of art, for eternity. Recently, a friend of mine found herself walking past the Sondheim townhouse on East 49th Street, where so many friendships blossomed during Steve’s sixty-some-odd years of residency. Movers were loading the Sondheim furnishings into trucks bound, they readily informed my friend, for an auction house. Inexorably, friendships end. All we can do is savor the memories. And pass them on.