Sondheim Forum

Daniel Radcliffe will appear as Charley -- no other casting has been announced yet -- in the Maria Friedman production this fall:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/theater/daniel-radcliffe-merrily-sondheim.html

I remember enjoying Digital Theatre's live-capture (https://www.filmedlivemusicals.com/merrily-we-roll-along.html) of Friedman's original UK production well enough on the big screen in 2013, mostly for its likable cast.  But I'm baffled as to why the production itself keeps popping back up: first a swift West End (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATAJlK-lUxk) transfer, then Boston's Huntington Theater (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sohv5NvGR-4) in 2017, and now this.  Perhaps seeing it live (assuming I'm able to, which may be optimistic, given Radcliffe's presence) will clarify.

I remember this particular rewrite -- insofar as I remember it at all, which is to say minimally -- as, like most others, more tinkering-with-details than radical revision.  What has most stayed with me, for better or worse, is Soutra Gilmour's serviceable but unexciting set.  I'm secretly hoping her right-of-first-refusal, or Friedman's loyalty to this particular design, will have somehow expired by now.  But, assuming not: again, hopefully it will impress me more in person.

With Groff and Mendez joining Radcliffe at NYTW this fall, I can feel my last few remaining atoms of resistance slipping away:

https://www.vulture.com/2022/08/daniel-radcliffe-merrily-we-roll-along-cast-jonathan-groff-lindsay-mendez.html

Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Aug 18, 2022, 12:40 AMWith Groff and Mendez joining Radcliffe at NYTW this fall, I can feel my last few remaining atoms of resistance slipping away:

https://www.vulture.com/2022/08/daniel-radcliffe-merrily-we-roll-along-cast-jonathan-groff-lindsay-mendez.html

Same for me.  Except tickets are expensive.   :(

Complete casting has been announced:

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/New-York-Theatre-Workshop-MERRILY-WE-ROLL-ALONG-Adds-Krystal-Joy-Brown-Katie-Rose-Clarke-And-More-20220929

Wow, the extension just sold out within about five minutes of going on sale to the general public.

:(

Sigh.  I keep entering the TodayTix lottery, but to no avail.  Once my holiday hiatus from work begins, perhaps I'll camp out in front of the theater for cancellations, but for now this clip of the bows will have to suffice:


Same old Soutra Gilmour set from 2013, looks like.  From up close like this, it looks a little more architecturally interesting than I'd remembered, but I'm still not entirely sold.  What's coming through more clearly than ever is the way this environment places us squarely at the end of the story looking back, from the lofty but airless perspective of Frank's place (Bel Air bungalow or Manhattan penthouse, or perhaps we're splitting the difference) c.1976 or later.  I ought to admire the rigor and simplicity of that solution: heaven knows, unit sets with minimal frills are my jam, sometimes to a fault.  It could be argued that more than half the story takes place after Frank has graduated from Broadway-hopeful grit to the arid tastefulness of residences like this; and that its International-style whitebox blankness all but invites an invasion of vivid memories tracing how he "got there from here" -- though I don't offhand recall it actually doing so in any especially visually-compelling way.  (A few changes of wall art, and chaser-lights embedded in the architecture, are all I can really summon from the Digital Theatre cinemacast a decade ago).  This just feels more reticent than I'd ideally like, in terms of evoking the world of these particular characters and events.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/08/theater/sondheim-merrily-we-roll-along-maria-friedman.html

...I mean, now I feel like a grouch.  But as I'm always saying (about practically everything), nothing would make me happier than to experience a Fun Home-style conversion and come away from this latest iteration of Friedman's production, like Brantley, awash in tears and convinced that the show's depths had at last been plumbed, its glories made manifest and its problems well and truly solved.  (Always assuming, that is, that I get to see it at all, either at NYTW with great good luck, or if it transfers.  This article certainly makes it sound as though the three leads might, schedules permitting, be more than happy to stay with the show should it make the jump to B'way).

If nothing else, it makes me happy to read about how moved SJS was by its original outing at the Menier Chocolate Factory.  ("When Sondheim had attended a run-through, Friedman said: 'He couldn't breathe. I mean, he always cried a lot. But he couldn't move.' Sondheim went on to say that this Merrily was 'the best I've seen,' and 'the classic ideal of the sum being greater than the parts.'").

(reposting from Facebook):

https://www.vogue.com/article/merrily-we-go-along-sondheim-maria-friedman-preview/amp

Also, someone apparently posted Digital Theatre's full video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3gNXy5-lHc) of of the 2013 West End transfer on YouTube a year ago.  I'm surprised it's lasted this long without being taken down, but there it is.

Reviews:  Critics Weigh In on Off-Broadway Merrily We Roll Along Led by Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe (https://playbill.com/article/reviews-critics-weigh-in-on-off-broadway-merrily-we-roll-along-led-by-jonathan-groff-lindsay-mendez-and-daniel-radcliffe)

Jesse Green's NYT review (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/theater/merrily-we-roll-along-review.html) as usual catches a lot of my feelings about Friedman's production (although for now I'm going entirely by the Digital Theatre version, which I watched again last night).  He seems to confirm my sense that its success rests almost entirely on its casting, which in the current instance sounds -- at least in its central trio -- close to perfect.

(To be fair: Mark Umbers, Jenna Russell and Damian Humbley were also very good indeed, in the DT recording (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3gNXy5-lHc); as were Josefina Gabrielle's Gussie, a believable human rather than the usual cartoon femme fatale; and Clare Foster's Beth, goofily unsophisticated but appealingly down-to-earth, rather than a generically sweet ingenue.  Even if the production as a whole doesn't always thrill me, Friedman has drawn remarkable, at times heartbreaking, performances from her UK leads -- and, judging by the current crop of reviews, from her NYC ones as well).

Green also articulates my sense that the memory-play framing (bracketed by Frank, alone in his empty Bel Air house sometime after the disastrous 1976 movie-premiere party, looking back on his life) improves some things, but at a cost to others -- particularly given the mediocre design and staging, which could probably do a lot more to sharpen and enrich this approach.  He seems to hope that more work will be done to finesse these issues before the inevitable B'way transfer (currently rumored for fall 2023 at the earliest, likely due to the stars' schedules, but also handily keeping it out of Tony competition with Sweeney next spring).  But if Friedman's production hasn't changed noticeably in the past decade, while collecting raves all along -- including from SJS himself -- I'm skeptical that any serious improvement will be attempted at this point, as much as I might agree with Green in thinking more work could, and should, be done to make every aspect of the production as great as its lead performances.

I should note that, in rewatching the DT recording, I came to appreciate Furth's book more than ever before.  It may have registered with me when I first saw it in 2013, but much more strongly this time: the jigsaw structure and momentum, with each scene "foreshadowing" some "later" development (and usually several) that we saw play out previously -- often as recently as the directly-preceding scene, each building on the next in a way that's clear and compelling -- such that every stop along the way presents crucial, high-stakes choices whose importance isn't always obvious to the characters in the moment, but whose consequences, as we've already witnessed, are generally far-reaching and unhappy.  The construction is lean, elegant, and (contrary to the show's reputation) easy to follow, without feeling overdetermined or schematic.

Fall 2023 it is. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/theater/merrily-we-roll-along-daniel-radcliffe-broadway.html)  No theater or specific dates yet, but all three leads are onboard.

The show's new website is live, though it currently features only a registration link to join their email list:

https://merrilyonbroadway.com

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This was my Saturday: 7:45am to 7:30pm in 33º weather with occasional wisps of snow, standing (sometimes sitting) around on an East Village sidewalk waiting for a cancellation.  I'm afraid the prolonged discomfort may have jaundiced my view of the show, but the production itself still feels like a rough sketch to me, and something about the performances (or maybe just my mood, who knows) actually made me doubt my earlier opinion, a few weeks ago on this very thread, that the book had finally been solved.  Groff, Mendez and Radcliffe are often as wonderful as you'd hope, and never less than good -- but, surprisingly, they don't always sell Furth's scenes quite as effectively as their London counterparts did (though there are also some moments where the current trio wins handily).  Beth, Gussie and Joe likewise have their high points, and no real lows.  But last night, despite a ton of talent and a lot of intelligent choices, this cast didn't quite cohere for me as an ensemble in the way I feel like it has to in order for Merrily to achieve liftoff.

And I'm still not satisfied with the world Friedman and her team have created: what is this bicoastal-American 1950s-70s in which rock and pop and their respective society-bestriding subcultures simply don't exist?  (To be fair, that's actually SJS's problem if it's anyone's, and no one else has managed to address it very satisfactorily either, but designer Soutra Gilmour's and choreographer Tim Jackson's gestures toward the art and fashion of the time somehow seem only to exacerbate it).  And why does Frank's California home remain such a vague and imaginatively-barren arena in which to improvise/recapitulate his past?

(In all the remounts of this production over the past decade, at least three to date, Gilmour still hasn't addressed the fact that roughly half of her minor unit-set-altering "tricks" can't help announcing themselves from the moment the audience enters the theatre, with visible seams all the more conspicuous in a context of would-be pristine minimalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalism#Design,_architecture,_and_spaces).  I overheard three separate pre-show conversations among different audience members in my immediate vicinity, near the back of the house, speculating as to the eventual function of various such oddities, which read clearly from row H as practical scenic contrivances of some sort, awaiting activation (but awkwardly hard to ignore in the meantime), rather than as recognizable architectural choices serving any imaginable domestic purpose.  (Indeed, diegetically-plausible details are in notably short supply: there's not an electrical outlet, a light switch, or even a stair rail or a doorknob to be seen anywhere in this house).  As pure modernist sculpture, Gilmour's set (https://aviewfrommyseat.com/large-photo/199048/New+York+Theatre+Workshop/row-H/seat-17/) has a certain Hockney (https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/artwork/3656)ish elegance; I'm just not convinced it serves the show all that well, notwithstanding the tricks and the reasonably smoothly-staged juggling of furniture between each and every scene -- though it must be said that in Merrily Sondheim has provided some of the best scene-change music to be found anywhere in the Broadway-musical canon.

After two prior viewings of the West End video, it struck me with renewed force last night just how woefully inadequate Frank's empty L.A. livingroom is as a staging ground for "Our Time" at the show's conclusion. (I spent much of the song fantasizing how Linklater's film version might crosscut between the kids on the NYC rooftop in 1957, and Frank alone atop that of his Hollywood home in 1976: two spectacular views, two starkly-different moods).  But if we must be stuck playing the climactic rooftop scene downstairs and indoors, the barest-minimum requirement would obviously be some strong romantic moonlight though the windows, and a whole shitload of stars and/or city lights above and outside them.  (Or, hell, why not also plant a bunch of "stars" into the walls themselves, lighting up to render the entire set "transparent" for this scene alone?  After the song, these "interior" stars could fade out, leaving only the ones above and outside the window, to bring us back into the room with Frank for the final "merrily" vamp and blackout).  Alas, nothing of the sort materializes here; "Our Time" finds us stuck in the same antiseptically empty room-without-a-view we've been in all night, looking even bleaker than usual under starkly unromantic "nighttime" lighting, with neither a star nor a city light anywhere to be seen.

Anyway, I'll stop.  Ironically, after waiting for twelve hours in the cold for the privilege of paying near-Broadway prices for the hottest Off-B'way ticket in town -- which you'd think might confer some right to criticize, or at least to be in a bad mood -- I feel like an obnoxious ingrate, complaining and spewing unsolicited design advice.  I'll probably still give the show another chance next fall.  But in the meantime, part of me almost wishes I'd given my ticket tonight to the visiting Shakespearian actor, some ways behind me in line all day (too far back, I'm afraid, to have likely scored a ticket himself), whose good-humored gregariousness helped us all pass the long cold hours more pleasantly -- and who might well have enjoyed the show more than I ultimately did.  It was due to his sociability that we all learned a few group facts: a majority of us professed to be Sondheim fans; a few had come largely to see Groffsauce in-the-flesh; and (surprisingly) there wasn't a single Potterhead among us braving the cold solely, or even primarily, for the chance to see Dan Radcliffe live.

After the show, I was able to sit down for a nice late dinner at Paul's, my new favorite downtown burger joint, which I hadn't had a chance to revisit since Curious Incident last September (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2124.msg7307#msg7307).  It's just three blocks from NYTW, on my way home, and I hadn't had a proper meal all day, so it worked out really nicely.

Not to be morbid or triggering, but if one were to mirror the "Our Time" rooftop by placing Frank up on his Bel Air roof(deck) for the framing moments at the beginning and end of the show -- particularly in a movie, where its height and geography could easily be established as perilous, perhaps directly overlooking a ravine or cliff -- then his mood could be framed as potentially suicidal.

The (revised, "Hills of Tomorrow"-less) score's abrupt and inconclusive ending -- a couple of "merrily" vamps followed by a "ta-da!" chord and blackout -- could then become one of those final cuts-to-black where a crucial narrative question is deliberately left unresolved for the audience to chew on afterward.  I know that trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmbiguousEnding) annoys some people to distraction, but its ambiguity seems quintessentially Sondheimian; it gives the frame a dramatic point more compelling than "unhappy rich dude mulls over his checkered past, reaching no real conclusion except that he could've been a better person, or maybe not, because life"; and it embodies Frank's position at midlife (must he keep rolling along, merrily or otherwise?) in the starkest possible terms.  Too stark, perhaps, but stick with me for a sec...

Classical filmmaking logic, at least, tends to favor the (in this case) positive outcome anyway: all else being equal, a potential suicide forestalled by a smash-cut to the final credits is still, in cinematic terms, a suicide averted.*  And, as answers to "what will he do next?" go, living (starting over, muddling through, whatever) obviously provides more interesting, if less immediately dramatic, speculative fodder than dying.  But positioning this framing moment as Frank's "rock-bottom," from which he might potentially rebound, hopefully changed for the better, only after pondering the real rock-bottom alternative, might give the narrative a more satisfying shape.  Since 1981 some people have complained about Merrily's characters being hard to like; even with a Frank as lovable as Jonathan Groff, it may be that caring about a rich white guy who has spent decades wasting his talent and alienating his friends, all in pursuit of a success defined here in the hollowest ego- and greed-driven terms, is too much to ask of audiences -- unless, perhaps, his consequent misery can be seen to extend to at least contemplating literal self-destruction.  If this ideation is hinted-at from the very beginning (an automatic suspense-engine: is this dude gonna jump, and why?), it also gives him a much more urgent motivation for rehashing the past twenty years of his life.  It might help make his "can't you see how much I hate myself?" bid for sympathy, during the marital spat with Gussie in the opening party scene, slightly less of an uphill haul.  And the interpolation of Frank, Jr. singing the final "rolling along"s, just before the Sputnik scene, might likewise feel sharper in this context:  his son, reminding Frank Sr. of his own youthful innocence, is reason enough to step back from the edge.  Think of it as It's A Wonderful Life, minus the magic -- no angel, no alternative history -- except that of the narrative itself running incrementally backward, like a detective (or the elaborately self-deceiving hero of Memento (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/)) painstakingly tracking clues.

I don't know, I'm just spitballing.

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*Art-film logic, on the other hand, might lean more toward the conclusion that, all else being truly equal, a potential suicide forestalled by a smash-cut to the final credits really would be a Schroedinger's-cat situation, perhaps intolerable to many viewers, but kinda the whole point (https://www.vulture.com/article/the-sopranos-ending-explained.html).  Which might sound a little heavy for That Frank, but I could live with it.

I meant to post this the day before yesterday when it was announced, but here it is:  Merrily has set a theater (the Hudson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Theatre)) and a first-preview date (September 19), though no official opening night yet, for its "strictly limited" 18-week Broadway run.

https://deadline.com/2023/03/merrily-we-roll-along-broadway-preview-date-daniel-radcliffe-jonathan-groff-lindsay-mendez-1235300620/

Tickets go on sale beginning next Thursday at 10am ET through the show's website (https://merrilyonbroadway.com):



Fun facts: Originally built in 1903, the Hudson Theatre was renovated (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_qHDZ0Qk04) in 2017 (after a 50-year interim hosting movies, "blue" movies, and business conferences), reopening that year with the Gyllenhaal/Ashford SITPWG (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/theater/review-sunday-in-the-park-with-george-jake-gyllenhaal.html).  It is currently home to Sam Gold's new production of A Doll's House (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/theater/a-dolls-house-review-jessica-chastain.html), starring Jessica Chastain and running through June 10.

FYI, some our friends on Facebook are planning a get together the weekend of Oct 14-15 around seeing this show. People are mostly getting tickets for Saturday night. Chris and I have tickets for that performance. I probably should have posted this earlier as tickets went on sale the morning at 10 ET. It's a presale for which you need the code OLDFRIEND. Here's the link: https://queue.atgtickets.com/?c=atgtickets&e=merrilypresale&t=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thehudsonbroadway.com%2Fevents%2Fmerrily-we-roll-along%2Fcalendar%2F&cid=en-GB&l=ATGBolt%20US%20East%20-%20Hudson

It's just after 9pm, and Merrily's (that is to say, the Friedman revival's) first B'way preview performance should be intermitting pretty soon.

Last week Ben Brantley made one of his occasional NYT reappearances to bless the show with another puff piece (a very effective one, granted -- prepare to be charmed):

Opening next Tuesday...


Looks like we finally have at least a light sprinkling of stars outside the upstage window for "Our Time".  (Or rather, they're back: while I definitely didn't see any at NYTW, a quick check of the Digital Theatre capture confirms they were there in the production's 2013 UK iteration).  I'm still not 100% convinced they're enough: as I said (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=1931.msg7478#msg7478) back in January, a starlit sky is the absolute barest-minimum requirement in this context -- we're still stuck in a rather unprepossessing and placeless indoors, looking out, for the "rooftop" scene -- and as stars go, the handful on offer here are a mere gesture.  But they're better than nothing.

On a bolder scale, I believe the colorful, stage-filling "Musical Husbands" billboard is new, too.  In pure visual terms, it's a notable improvement on the expedient but unsatisfying solutions (curtains, projections) for "It's A Hit!" in previous versions of Gilmour's design -- though, like those solutions, this one still seems to somewhat vitiate the apparent overall premise of building Frank's memoryscape entirely within his LA livingroom.

Nitpicks aside, both these tweaks suggest a willlingness, on the part of the Friedman sisters and their team, to keep improving for B'way.  And for that they have my admiration.

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The 2023 Broadway revival cast album is now available for streaming and preorder (vinyl or CD) here:

https://merrilywerollalong.lnk.to/newcastalbum

The final, post-"Our Time" closing musical sequence, as it appears on the new cast album (https://youtu.be/lMo7szh1eLA?si=eu6RjCg_-b5zzx9R&t=276), strikes me as a long-overdue improvement on previous versions.

Ever since the OBCR (https://youtu.be/MUSR_cwaxVQ?si=jughOOCnB0n_-Rtx&t=102) (where it followed the "Hills of Tomorrow" reprise), this brief sequence has consisted of (https://youtu.be/GEKyJaMhQYA?si=ab4snMWhWWPRNxK6&t=379) a pair of "Merrily" vamps followed by three or four halting, increasingly insistent repetitions of that vamp's unresolved final chord, almost as if prodding a singer who's missed their cue.  Then -- as if in hasty substitution for the "Yesterday is done..." or "Pick yourself a road...", etc., that would normally follow -- the vamp instead resolves in a single final flourish of trumpets, so showbizzily-upbeat that I've only ever been able to hear it as a statement of harsh dramatic irony.  It almost seems to call out for Frank to make his exit a beat early, leaving no one onstage to receive this brassy "ta-da!" -- except perhaps his pointedly-empty spotlight -- before the final blackout.  Regardless of how it's staged, the moment tends to register sonically (and sardonically) as the kind of downbeat, anti-"Broadway" meta-statement pioneered by SJS and others in the '70s (Bobby left partner-less in "Side By Side By Side"; Ben losing his lyrics in "Live, Laugh, Love"; The Leading Player shutting down Pippin; the Chorus Line finale courting our reflexive applause even after we've spent the whole evening witnessing its human cost).  But in the context of Merrily this final-curtain strategy has always felt, to me, strident and a bit tacked-on: our cue, to get up and go home feeling deflated and hopeless.

In the creators' defense, endings are a bitch.  And they've engineered one here, in terms of theme and plot -- whether finishing with "Our Time" or "Hills of Tomorrow" -- about which little can be said or sung, by way of a final sign-off, beyond a shrug of sympathetic dismay.

Nevertheless, speechless sorrow comes in many shades, and even a few smallish adjustments to this brief final sequence make a welcome improvement for Broadway 2023.  (They may have been heard at NYTW when I saw the show there in January, but I don't recall for sure; they definitely weren't in the 2013 London (https://youtu.be/c3gNXy5-lHc?si=uaHHqNBTds-jfWyR&t=7900) capture, though the wise decision to lop off "Our Time"'s applause by running it straight into the final sequence was already in place by then).  The music hasn't changed all that much: most notably, we first begin not with the "Merrily" vamp but with the ghostly lingering strains of "Our Time" -- the same piano-and-triangle intro that, in the original production, brought us back (https://youtu.be/MUSR_cwaxVQ?si=FJufI--T6U3Ux09Q) to the high-school graduation(s).  Thereafter, the differences are mostly a matter of subtle orchestrational and dynamic finesse.  But overall, in place of sullen irony, the new recording's gentler transition and musical attack (crisp but sensitive, with lower horns for the final flourish) somehow lets us live in the cognitive dissonance of "past" and "present" in a more humane way: heartbroken but not depressed, and not altogether without hope.  The Frank who takes a mental "snapshot" in this final moment (by screwing his eyes shut and swallowing, as he confesses to Gussie after their game of "Trading Hostages") might be his younger self or his older one, or somehow both.  More than doubled in overall length -- from the abrupt original 20-second coda to a thankfully less-rushed 45 seconds: just enough to feel, at last, like a meaningful postlude -- the music now allows us to experience this ambiguity in a more freely-emotional way, as compared to the original's flat, verging-on-gimmicky "before and after" queasiness.

A lot of words to explain a fairly simple and probably little-noticed musical adjustment.  It may well have resulted from nothing more poetic than a vague desire to extend Frank's final moment (or from sheer practical consideration, giving the rest of the cast more time to get offstage).  But while the changes may seem minor, I think they do represent a degree of thoughtful improvement to Merrily's ending -- which, while perhaps not at the very top of the list of the show's tricky challenges, was always on that list.

Posted by Eric H-G on the Facebook FTC group...

Broadway Journal:  Dynamic 'Merrily' Rolls Up to $899 (https://mailchi.mp/bwayjournal/sprecher-loses-rights-to-rebecca-15390268?e=a9cf22d0ab&fbclid=IwAR0cpDwDIzVYv1CaC5X231i9W5MhRa0dlTwu8v5Nk-BEks6agF0OKt-dqRo)


...For the holidays, that is, and only for the very-best seats at a handful of performances.  But still.    :o

Extended again, now through July 7. (https://www.playbill.com/article/merrily-we-roll-along-extends-broadway-run)


That'll make it 42 weeks, more than doubling the originally-announced "strictly limited" 18.
No recasting is mentioned, but then neither is there any explicit mention of whether the three leads have extended their contracts (again).

Also, Groff and Radcliffe participated (https://ew.com/daniel-radcliffe-jonathan-groff-take-part-costar-lindsay-mendez-wedding-8637902) in Mendez's wedding to her All Rise costar J. Alex Brinson (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3561773/) this past Monday.  The newlyweds are expecting (https://www.instagram.com/p/C5BS0ItO_ue/) a baby this fall, but in the meantime Mendez will remain with Merrily through July.