Merrily We Roll Along (musical)

Background and original production[edit]

The idea for Merrily originated from a suggestion by Hal Prince's wife, Judy, that he do a show about teenagers; he decided that a musical version of the 1934 George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart play Merrily We Roll Along would be a good fit, and when he called Sondheim about the idea, Sondheim "said yes on the phone."^[1]


The original play tells the story of "Richard Niles, who is revealed on the opening night of his latest play [in 1934] to be a pretentious playwright of successful but forgettable light comedies", and over the course of the play, gradually moves backward in time until reaching "his college graduation [in 1916], quoting with all the fervor of idealistic youth the words of Polonius: 'This above all, to thine own self be true'." The play concerned, overall, "three friends, their artistic ambitions, the price of fame, and the changes in American society from World War I to the Depression".^[2]


For the musical adaptation, the story was revised to take place between 1955 and 1980, and the characters were changed: "Richard Niles", a playwright, was now Franklin Shepard, a composer; "Jonathan Crale", a painter, was now Charley Kringas, a lyricist and playwright; and "Julia Glenn", a novelist, was now Mary Flynn, a journalist and eventually a critic.


George Furth was brought on to write the musical's book, making Merrily a reunion for Sondheim, Furth, and Prince, who had all worked together on the landmark 1970 musical Company. Merrily premiered at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway, where Company had premiered.


As part of the original idea of doing a show about teenagers, and in order to, as theater historian Ken Mandelbaum put it, "enhance the ironies of the story",^[3] Prince cast the show entirely with teenagers and young adults, who played their characters in both youth and middle age. Prince and Sondheim had conceived of the show as "a vehicle for young performers",^[4] and Prince was also charmed by, as he said at the time, "the beginnings of [the cast's] artistry, the roughness of their craft, their inexperience. I was charmed as hell by that[.]"^[5]


The show's production design was also informed by this notion: the set consisted of a group of movable bleachers lined with lockers and a screen on which projections were shown "to set the mood and period." Prince's original idea for the staging had been to "have no scenery", but rather "racks of clothes and these kids would come in looking like little kids, and they would pretend to be their parents as they see them", but this was discarded due to Prince's perception of what Broadway audiences, paying Broadway prices, would accept from a show (as he later put it, "[G]uess what? I lacked the courage.")^[6]


Sondheim's score was a mix of the traditional and the unconventional. In basic form and sound, the songs were written in the style of traditional Broadway show music of the 1950s (where Merrily's story "began") and earlier, a clear departure from the musical complexity of his previous work. But the score was also written to embody the show's backward structure in its use and repetition of certain sections of music. For example, "Not a Day Goes By" is first heard in its "reprise", sung bitterly by Frank after his divorce from Beth, before being heard in its "original" form late in the second act, sung by Frank (as he gets married) and Mary (longingly watching Frank get married). Additionally, "Good Thing Going" is gradually deconstructed throughout the musical before reaching its final—but "initial"—form near the end of the show, as "Who Wants to Live in New York?". This technique was at times used, Sondheim said, to show how "the songs that had been important in the lives of the characters when they were younger would have different resonances as they aged"; he also used some of these musical repetitions to represent "undercurrents of memory" in the characters in their later years. Because of the strictures Sondheim applied to his writing, Merrily's score was one of the most difficult of his career to write.^[4]


For budgetary reasons, Merrily did not get an out-of-town tryout production,^[7] and instead the production put on over 40 tryout performances^[8]—which were actually previews—on Broadway before the opening.^[9] The tryouts, beginning on October 8, 1981, had a poor reception, with audiences walking out. By October 21, The New York Times reported that original leading man James Weissenbach had been replaced by Jim Walton (who appeared in the role beginning October 19)^[10] and the Broadway opening had been postponed.^[11] Rehearsal choreographer Ron Field was replaced with Larry Fuller.^[12][13][14] The opening was delayed a second time, from November 9 to November 16, 1981.^[15] Looking back on that "painful month", Sondheim recalled, "that month of fervent hysterical activity was the most fun I've ever had on a single show." By opening night, the production team "thought we'd fixed the show," but in retrospect, they had only "bettered it, not fixed it," and the critical response was "merciless."^[7]


The Broadway production, directed by Prince and choreographed by Fuller, opened on November 16, 1981, at the Alvin Theatre. It received mostly negative reviews. While the score was widely praised, critics and audiences alike felt that the book was problematic and the themes left a sour taste in their mouths. Hampered by several critical reviews published before its official opening, as well as more negative ones published afterward, it ran for 16 performances and 44 previews.^[16]


In his New York Times review, Frank Rich wrote, "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."^[17] Clive Barnes wrote, "Whatever you may have heard about it—go and see it for yourselves. It is far too good a musical to be judged by those twin kangaroo courts of word of mouth and critical consensus."^[18]


The cast included Jim Walton (Franklin Shepard), Lonny Price (Charley Kringas), Ann Morrison (Mary), Terry Finn (Gussie), Jason Alexander (Joe), Sally Klein (Beth), Geoffrey Horne (Franklin Shepard age 43), David Loud (Ted), Daisy Prince (Meg), Liz Callaway (Nightclub Waitress), Tonya Pinkins (Gwen), Abby Pogrebin (Evelyn), and Giancarlo Esposito (valedictorian).^[19] Judith Dolan designed costumes for the production.^[20]


The audience had trouble following the story. Consequently, the actors all ended up wearing sweatshirts with their characters' names. According to Meryle Secrest, "Prince ... dressed everyone in identical sweatshirts and pants. Then he had to add names emblazoned across the sweatshirts because the audience had difficulty telling the actors apart".^{[21][22][23][24]} Sondheim later remembered: "I rather liked it; the paying audience did not." The failure of Merrily meant the "glory days" of the Sondheim-Prince collaboration were over, and the two did not work together again until Bounce (2003).^[7]