MERRILY - Fiasco Theater @Roundabout, 2019

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/theater/merrily-we-roll-along-to-be-revived-off-broadway.html

According to Roundabout's website:

"With Fiasco Theater's one-of-a-kind imagination, this audacious musical about a trio of friends in showbiz who fall apart and come together over two decades emerges as newly personal and passionate. The ensemble brings to life a reimagination of George Furth and Stephen Sondheim's creation in an emotionally rich new production that confronts the pains and pleasures of fame, fortune and old friends."

Per the NYT, "Noah Brody, Fiasco's co-artistic director, will direct a cast that includes members of the company."

Music direction and orchestrations by Alexander [sic] Gemignani, choreography by Lorin Latarro.

Previews begin January 12 at the Laura Pels; opening February 19.

[DiveMilw]

Per the NYT, "Noah Brody, Fiasco's co-artistic director, will direct a cast that includes members of the company."

Pretty radical thinking, casting members of the company in one of the company's productions.  

The preview matinee on Feb 9th is predicted to be phenomenal so book your tickets now.  It is also said that the view of the stage and the electricity of the audience from the first row of the mezz will be beyond compare that evening. 

[scenicdesign71]

I just saw the third (or fourth?) preview, and -- sorry if this is becoming a boringly predictable refrain -- was neither overjoyed nor disappointed.  I'm guessing the preview period (opening night isn't until February 19) may be good for the cast, whether or not there are any concrete changes between now and then; tonight they still seemed to be kind of running on nervous energy.

Trimmed to under two hours without an intermission -- but with a few interpolations (according to a program note) from early Furth drafts and from the original Moss Hart play -- this Merrily may or may not make a whole lot of sense to an audience unfamiliar with the material, I can't tell for sure.

Nor can I parse exactly which scenes come from which version, beyond noting that "Growing Up" is included here (which I love), as are "Rich And Happy" and "The Blob" -- while "The Hills of Tomorrow" is not (although there is a spoken commencement-speech prologue from 43-year-old Frank, and an abstract epilogue which pulls him out of "Our Time" to continue murmuring "me and you..." over and over against the insistent "Merrily" vamp and a collage of set-electric visuals from various pivotal scenes earlier in the show, until the final musical button and blackout).

In any case, the evening passes swiftly, enjoyably and with a generous sprinkling of lovely moments, if no really stunning ones.  "Our Time" is duly moving, "Franklin Shepard, Inc." is duly impressive, "Opening Doors" is duly exhilarating, and "Not A Day Goes By" -- the wedding reprise -- achieves the requisite pathos.

On the downside, a few quibbles:

"NADGB"'s initial appearance (not on the courthouse steps, but in the Shepard home, with Beth packing her suitcase to leave Frank) is rendered unduly harsh by being set well below the singer's natural range; for the same reason, "Like It Was" sounds a bit less lovely than it might;

"Now You Know" has a new arrangement which takes far too long to pick up steam: verse after verse tiptoes along at a stubbornly slow, tentative tempo, before finally building to an upbeat finish;

Conversely, the zippy three-way argument in "Old Friends" sounds even faster than usual here, much of it becoming unfollowable mush due to a pointless series of canon-like overlaps apparently added by Gemignani fils; and

Enlisting the audience to supply "It's A Hit!"'s "applause" sound effects is awkward.

Also, despite -- or because of? -- a few cute period tweaks on the "Merrily" interludes ('70s Hustle, '60s bossa nova), I don't recall the title theme ever feeling so much like weightless interstitial filler as it does in this production (though it is given a lovely unadorned, if maybe slightly abbreviated, introductory rendition at the beginning of the evening).

I'm seeing Merrily again on March 5, so I'll be interested to see whether anything changes, or how the performances settle, by then.  Based on the four or five Fiasco productions I've seen, I find them immensely likable as a company, but I've never quite fallen head-over-heels for their work.

[scenicdesign71]

SPOILER ALERT.

One new scene, which I'm guessing is one of the interpolations from either the Moss Hart play or an earlier pre-Broadway draft of Furth's book, provides a welcome twist relatively late in the evening.  I should note here that, despite having seen two other stagings (Encores and West End-via-cinecast), read the original 1981 libretto, and listened to various recordings (OBCR, York, Encores) many times each, I'm still no expert on the ins and outs of Merrily's backward plot, in any version.  But I am 99% sure that the scene described below has never been seen by any of the musical's audiences over the years, unless by chance it was there (and then cut) during previews in 1981.  Stop reading here if you care about spoilers.

It occurs shortly before "Bobby and Jackie and Jack," and takes place early in Frank and Beth's marriage.  Strapped for cash, they're living with Beth's parents; her father, in particular, is not thrilled about this -- and even less so, that his daughter is supporting her new husband (I forget how, though I believe her "day job" is specified).  Charley and Mary stop by to invite Frank out, arriving in the middle of a family argument which becomes all the more heated when it is revealed that Frank has turned down a professional film-scoring gig, insisting that the material is crass, soulless garbage which would leave him no time to work on his "serious" collaboration, Take A Left, with Charley.  (Ironically, given his later Hollywood success, he seems at this point to regard the movie industry with a kind of categorical distrust, convinced -- correctly, it will turn out -- that such easy-money gigs are a slippery slope that would sap not only his time but his creative spark).

I can't even remember for sure exactly how the conflict eventually plays out by the end of the scene.  Earlier (in the show, but later in time), on the opening night of Musical Husbands ("It's A Hit!") we've seen Frank agree -- Beth makes him promise -- to do one more "commercial" show for Joe, in order to provide the financial freedom to get back to Take A Left.  And at some point later on (earlier in his life), the target number was two,  based on Joe's early-career suggestion that more than just a single hit show is needed to establish one's entertainment-industry bona fides.

So the "new" domestic-argument scene may mark an initial turning point at which, after staunchly defending his ideals, Frank winds up reluctantly conceding to some "temporary" re-ordering of priorities in order to mollify Beth and the in-laws.  (He might even call the movie people to get the film-scoring gig back, thus planting the suggestion that his eventual defection to Hollywoodland has its roots not in naked careerism or innate money-lust, but in an early compromise made for others' sake).  But whether or not that concession explicitly occurs here (I believe it does), the genuinely surprising twist is that he's so firmly resistant up to that point: so Charley-like, in fact, in his fierce devotion to their work and his apparently bone-deep disgust at the idea of "selling out".  In previous stagings, I don't seem to recall Frank's supposed idealism making any very persuasive appearance until "Our Time" -- and even there, it's sketched very lightly indeed: a dappled watercolor which, for all we can tell, seems to have begun fading the moment Sputnik passed from view.  ("Opening Doors" establishes a passion for making one's mark in a difficult business, but, Joe's remarks on "hummability" notwithstanding, the song makes no really strong overall case for Frank's "seriousness" -- artistically, politically, or otherwise -- beyond wanting to get noticed).

So it's useful to have these things reiterated (pre-iterated?), in this argument with the in-laws, several years after the trio's rooftop reverie -- in darker colors, under the strain of real financial and familial pressures.  In combination with the clearer tracing of Frank's later career arc -- with Take A Left somehow standing out more clearly than in any other production I've seen as the stark embodiment of what he's letting slip away, and the two-hits ultimatum (or it might even be three, I forget) keeping him kicking that can down the road -- this Merrily manages to plot out, just a bit more convincingly, exactly how he "got there from here" -- without making that journey so streamlined and seamless as to become a tediously foregone conclusion.

[scenicdesign71]

DESIGN-NERD ALERT.

About those set electrics...

(I've been wishing I'd snapped a preshow photo of Derek McLane's intricate, chandelier-festooned prop-storage set: towering utility shelves full of lamps, illuminated signs [including a replica of the Alvin Theatre's original marquee signage, lit letter-by-letter], a few rooftop skylights, etc., among hundreds of other items, all framed by an ornate, chaser-lit gold proscenium sliced into segments.  And then, sometime over the weekend, up pop more than a dozen gorgeous, full-stage shots of the new production, on his website).

Sorry to be a broken record, but while waiting for the show to begin I was helpless to look at Derek's set without vaguely comparing it to my own work on Alternating Currents last year, which likewise -- albeit on a far, far tinier scale, and to different storytelling ends -- collaged lamps, electrified signage and hand props into a static wall of shelving from which each scene was then assembled.  The parallel, while only very rough and general in any case, seemed marginally more pronounced in person than it may in photos; like Merrily, AC was designed to accommodate a six-person cast rarely leaving the stage, but instead remaining seated onstage to observe the action from assigned "home" positions SR and SL.  And Merrily's final moment reminded me, in its overall concept, of the epilogues of both AC and This Time -- which likewise pinned their respective protagonists against a background of various remembered images from earlier in the show, now juxtaposed into a single stage picture.

These kinds of design strategies aren't unique or wildly original per se, so this handful of very-loose resemblances isn't actually especially remarkable.  But while I'm sitting around not-having a real career myself, I sometimes find it comforting to tease out vague similarities between my work and that of the pros -- especially when, as here, the chronology precludes my simply having stolen ideas from them.

Not that I'm above doing so; as an old mentor once put it, everyone steals: the important thing is to steal with discrimination -- only the good stuff -- and toward intelligent/illuminating/worthwhile ends (i.e., don't try to wedge someone else's great idea, out of sheer admiration/covetousness, into a context where it has no discernible relevance).  Over a decade ago I actually "borrowed" one of Derek's ideas -- the aerial view of midtown Manhattan skyscrapers which framed his 2002 Kennedy Center Company to striking effect -- and refashioned it as Art Deco cartoon fantasy for a summer-stock Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2005.  (That said, the idea had already been swimming around in my brain: I had previously, if far less successfully, attempted a similar kind of extreme perspective for a 2003 production of Crazy For You, inspired not by Derek's Company design -- which I encountered only in photos several years after the fact -- but by a 1996 New Yorker cover.  In fact, bits of the idea kept popping up, minus the actual skyscrapers, in other designs of mine in the later aughts with a regularity that looks kind of embarrassing in retrospect; "there are new discoveries to be made, George...").

In the current instance, we can rule out imitation (or direct inspiration of any kind), since AC preceded Derek's Roundabout Merrily by almost a year, and there's no plausible likelihood of him cribbing ideas from me (I'd be pleased, but frankly surprised, if he'd ever seen any of my designs, though I did paint a few of his, Off-Broadway ten-or-so years ago).  But I like to imagine that these things float around amorphously in the zeitgeist, and that the occasional faint echo between my work and that of a much-acclaimed veteran B'way designer might mean I had, after all, been onto something worthwhile. Or at least fashionable.

Come to think of it, there was a vague inspiration that crossed my mind as I was designing AC -- from yet another McLane set, coincidentally (though not relevant to the general similarities I'm noting with his current Merrily design).  While casting about for a visual language to help establish AC as "not your grandparents' Our Town" -- and agreeing with my director, from our first conversation onward, that it would be nice to build our electricians' enclave entirely out of practical luminaires -- I started thinking about Derek's snazzy 2006 update of Threepenny Opera at Studio 54.  Nothing very specific came of it, apart from maybe the idea of many of our practicals being illuminated signs (albeit none of them neon, and all treated  as realistic objects with mass and history and surface detail, as compared to his pointedly abstract Threepenny location-labels).  Like his, our signs lacked any real-world visual context; unlike his, ours didn't float in empty space, but were instead sort of "clipped and pasted" into a gridlike collage of other objects, which had no analogue in his Threepenny (but which do find a later echo, to my biased eye at least, in the cluttered shelving of his current Merrily).  Having decided that our unit set would basically consist, in its entirety, of all the props, furniture, and practical fixtures needed to establish each scene, all hung on a simple stud-wall interlaced with electrical conduit, I remember having brief qualms about making many of those fixtures simply lit signs baldly identifying the various scene locations ("Electchester"; "Fillmore's Tavern"; etc.).  Was I simply stacking one lazy choice on top of another, and passing the pair off as a finished design?  Remembering Derek's neon gloss on Brechtian alienation soothed my nerves and gave me confidence to forge ahead.

This is what I mean about things just kind of "floating around": if anything, my AC looks more like his Merrily (though that still isn't saying much) than either design does like his Threepenny, and yet the order in which they occurred complicates any direct lines of influence.  Electrified signage (neon or otherwise); aerial views; cartoon forced-perspective; collage; unit sets as curated prop-displays... not only are these ideas not unique, or even particularly new, but at one time or another each has enjoyed a minor industry "trend" of sorts.

Tracing such vectors  -- and imagining my own work as being somehow not so far from their epicenter, despite all evidence to the contrary -- may be a silly way to pass the time.  Self-aggrandizing, for sure; perhaps a little pathetic, if I'm being brutally honest.  I remember another of my grad-school profs introducing me to the notion that stage design does in fact go through identifiable trends, and -- notwithstanding my idealistic sense, at the time, that really good design should be utterly unique to each production -- thinking him astoundingly smart for being able to discern such trends apparently effortlessly, rattling off numerous examples off-the-cuff.  (One, which I believe he associated with John Lee Beatty's original Driving Miss Daisy design among various others around that time, was "a tiny handful of exquisitely-selected furniture or prop pieces, carefully placed in an otherwise-featureless grey void").  A quarter-century later, I may be overcompensating in my attempts to identify such patterns myself, and to situate my own surpassingly low-profile efforts within them.  But we all take our satisfactions where we find them, I suppose.

Anyhoo, [/digression], back on topic...

[scenicdesign71]

Yikes: Jesse Green's review, while interesting and not unsympathetic, is nevertheless a flat-out pan:

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, running nothing but reworked versions in perpetuity.  Even 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.

Ouch.

[scenicdesign71]

I finally watched the original 1981 production all the way through on YouTube -- it's been up there for five years now, but the video quality makes it not-so-easy to watch for two straight hours: faces are hard to make out, or, by the end, even to recognize as faces; fuzzy and blown-out from the beginning, it seems to get worse as the show progresses.  Audio could be worse, but it certainly doesn't sound great, and I missed a fair number of lines and/or lyrics even with headphones and multiple rewinds to try to catch them.  And there are VHS-tracking issues, again worsening over the course of the show, which sometimes distort both image and sound beyond recognition.

So, not an ideal exposure to the production; but even so, trying to set those technical issues aside as much as possible, I'm still not sure about Green's insistence that he "found [the original 1981] Merrily more coherent and moving than any I've seen since" (which appears to include all the major "revisals" thus far).  I'm glad I watched it;  there were a number of things -- in the first act especially -- that were new to me, and that I was sorry had been cut from subsequent versions.  But by the end, I could kind of see why the original critics found it a semi-incomprehensible mess.

Still, I'm glad this video exists, and my main frustration is just that the recording itself is in such bad shape.

There are a few slightly (but only slightly) better-quality clips -- including some audio, taken during previews, from sequences that were later cut.  The same caveats apply; deciphering the majority of the lyrics, while perhaps doable, would take considerable time and effort.

And finally: I posted this on the old FTC (probably not too long before Mark took the site offline), but it's worth revisiting -- a Forbidden Broadway-worthy parody of "Like It Was" written by Jason Alexander and David Shine, and sung by the irreplaceable Ann Morrison:

(Audio only):  http://fuckyeahstephensondheim.tumblr.com/post/69038409298/this-parody-of-like-it-was-was-written-by-jason

Some setup: in Merrily, "Like It Was" takes place at the Polo Lounge, with Mary and Charley seated at a booth facing the audience.  Frank, Gussie and and an interviewer enter and sit at another booth, and, with Frank and Charley no longer speaking to each other, there's a certain amount of tense cross-cutting between the conversations at their respective tables -- which left Morrison and Lonny Price plenty of time, facing directly downstage while silently nursing their (prop) "drinks", to gauge the audience's growing confusion and displeasure.  This was the scene about which Morrison, in Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, reports the agony of having to sit there helplessly watching "waves" of walkouts each night.  Awful as that must have been, this ruefully funny parody lyric is a gem:

CHARLEY,
NOBODY KNOWS WHO WE ARE.
JUST KIDS, HANGING OUT IN A BAR:
CHARLEY, YOU AND ME,
WE'RE CONFUSING THEM.

THE LAST SCENE,
I WAS DRUNK AND THEN I WAS MEAN.
YOU, UNSEEN.
THEY DON'T KNOW WHO WE ARE ANYMORE,
AND THEY'RE STARTING NOT TO CARE.

LOOK AT THEM, CHARLEY,
ALL OF THEM STARTING TO SNOOZE.
I'M STARTING TO WANT SOME REAL BOOZE.
CHARLEY, RUN AND SAY WHO WE ARE!

WHY DON'T THEY GET IT?
IT'S NOT HARD, IT'S NOT REALLY HARD.
I KNOW WHAT, CHARLEY:
WRITE IT ON THE WALL!

CHARLEY,
WHY CAN'T THEY SEE?  CAN'T THEY READ?
RIGHT HERE ON MY SHIRT, IT SAYS: "LEAD".
CHARLEY, I'M SICK OF SINGING YOUR NAME!

WHAT'S WRONG WITH "MARY"?
I'M IMPORTANT LIKE YOU!
NINE TIMES I SING "CHARLEY"...
WELL, NOW THEY KNOW YOU'RE CHARLEY.
NOW THEY'RE SAYING, "CHARLEY?
CHARLEY WHO?"

[scenicdesign71]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/04/stephen-sondheim-and-lynn-nottage-revivals-time-travel-through-artists-lives

In my first too-quick glimpse of the headline, just seeing His name linked with Nottage's gave me the intriguing, but false, impression that this might be a feature article somehow comparing their work more broadly (or perhaps -- my eye having skipped over the word "revivals" -- providing some news about Buñuel at last)...

Nope.  It's just a double review of Merrily and ...Meet Vera Stark, with a shared headline linking the two shows as retrospective accounts of their protagonists' fictional 20th-century showbiz careers.

Which, come to think of it, could be as serviceable a theme as any for a compare-and-contrast essay, or at least something more than an innocuous segue:

A fascinating counterpoint to Merrily We Roll Along, if you're looking to reëvaluate a life in the arts, is the vibrant revival of Lynn Nottage's satirical 2011 play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (directed by Kamilah Forbes, at the Pershing Square Signature Center).  Like Merrily, it's contemplative and structurally bold; unlike Merrily, it conveys no wistfulness for the way it was.

"Fascinating" perhaps, but evidently not worth more than two sentences in a piece that already has plenty to tackle, what with two "structurally bold" plays to consider on their own differently-complicated terms, and only about a thousand words in which to do so.  It's actually to Larson's credit that she at least manages to nod to the idea of looking at them in "counterpoint."

But you know me:  I've rarely encountered a comparison I wasn't eager to flog to death -- and I have no space limitations (and very little common sense) whatsoever.  As it happens, I'm seeing both shows next week (Merrily for a second time, Vera Stark for my first ever, having missed its original production at Second Stage in 2011); so if the juxtaposition is interesting, maybe I'll post a bit about it here.

[FIG]

And finally: I posted this on the old FTC (probably not too long before Mark took the site offline), but it's worth revisiting -- a Forbidden Broadway-worthy parody of "Like It Was" written by Jason Alexander and David Shine, and sung by the irreplaceable Ann Morrison:

(Audio only):  http://fuckyeahstephensondheim.tumblr.com/post/69038409298/this-parody-of-like-it-was-was-written-by-jason

Thanks for posting this. Such a hilarious and affectionate parody.
Fernando