Merrily We Roll Along

[edjames]

I gave this revival several considerations and finally decided to pass. I've seen my fair share of productions of this flawed Sondheim show. The "best" I ever saw was a London revival a few years ago. It came closest to having a cohesive book. Still, the score is fabulous. Perhaps I'll go if it crops up on a deeply discounted seat.

 

Alas, this latest revival from the Roundabout Theater Co suffers from the same flaws .

 

Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ the Way It Never, Ever Was

 

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” —

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. E

ven 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,” 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

.

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 “

,” 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. the gender-switched “Company,”now in London,One day someone may even get “Merrily” right 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.”

[+ WilliamM]

I saw an early preview of the original production. Even at my introduction to the songs, I was enchanted.

[body2body]

@edjames, thank you for the info on this production. A friend and I were considering a trip to New York to see it. I may have already seen the best production this troubled work has received. The La Jolla Playhouse mounted a revival in 1985. Sondheim, Furth, and James Lapine (who directed) all massaged the work. They assembled a stellar cast ( John Rubinstein, Chip Zein, Heather MacRae, Marin Mazzie) cut the opening and closing graduation numbers, added some new songs, cut a few others, and gave “Not a Day Goes By” back to Beth who sang it on the steps of the courthouse after divorcing a man who she loved, but could no longer live with. This production was great, but like Follies the show will always be flawed because the concept is too complex.

[bostonman]

he "best" I ever saw was a London revival a few years ago. It came closest to having a cohesive book.

 

I saw the Boston incarnation of the London production last season. With the exception of the actor playing the central character (Frank), I thought it was a terrific cast, and though I didn't agree with some of Maria Friedman's directing choices, I thought on the whole the show worked quite well. The main problem was the set, which featured this huge distracting vacuous white wall in the middle of the playing space - one of the worst, most boring set designs I've ever seen. A colleague of mine in the know told me that the design was never actually finished (no joke) - and what they were left with was that awful white wall.