For every production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” there is always a question.
Ever since the ignominious failure of its Broadway premiere, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 musical has carried the reputation of being too flawed, too facile, too conceptual ever to satisfy — while at the same time, a cult of creatives and fans have remained steadfastly convinced the show’s a masterpiece, needing only the right staging to reveal it. The same question, then, haunts every revival: Is this the version that finally fulfills the promise of “Merrily We Roll Along”?
Judging from critical and audience response, the latest New York production may be the one that achieves it. When director Maria Friedman’s staging, anchored by the starry trio of Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Tony winner Lindsay Mendez, opened Off Broadway last year at New York Theatre Workshop, critics raved. The 41-year- old Sondheim musical became the hottest ticket in town for the entirety of its sold-out run.
Now, with “Merrily We Roll Along” previewing on Broadway, the question becomes: How’d they do it? There’s the alchemy of casting three Broadway favorites who, over the course of working on “Merrily,” seem to have developed a bond as tightknit as the fictional friendship mourned by the show. And then there’s a directorial approach that sustains it empathy, optimism and humor even as it leans into some of its characters’ ugliest behavior. There’s also the insistence that although it’s set on Broadway and in Hollywood, “Merrily” isn’t about show business at all, or about the potentially confusing details of its backwards chronology.
“For Maria, it’s a love story,” says Mendez.
Based on the 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, “Merrily We Roll Along” chronicles the fracturing friendship of composer-producer Frank; his sometime collaborator, the lyricist and playwright Charley; and the journalist-critic Mary. Like the play, the musical tells its story in reverse, beginning at a disastrous 1976 party at Frank’s L.A. mansion and winding all the way back to an uptown Manhattan rooftop in 1957, when Frank, Charley and Mary, all bursting with big dreams and youthful optimism, first connect.
In addition to the chronological flip, original director Harold Prince laid one more conceptual layer onto “Merrily” by casting the show entirely with teenagers and young adults (including a youthful Jason Alexander), whose real-life ages would sync up with their characters’ as the story moved backward. It all proved too much for critics, who deemed the show a flop. The production folded after 16 performances and caused a split between longtime collaborators Sondheim and Prince.
Since then, “Merrily” has become the intractable problem, the unsolvable riddle, that artists have repeatedly tried — and failed — to crack.
An Olivier-winning performer who’d played Mary in a 1992 production in Leicester, England, Friedman took her first shot at staging “Merrily” when she directed a cast of students in the show at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 2010. She decided then that young adult actors could never do the show justice, but that pro-duction nonetheless showed enough promise that soon after she was tapped to helm a revival with adult actors at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2012.
That “Merrily” was a critical smash, transferred to the West End and eventually provided the basis for Friedman’s similarly acclaimed 2017 staging at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Her interpretation found one of its biggest fans in Sondheim himself, with whom Friedman formed a close working relationship over the years. “It was his dream and mine that we get this show to New York,” she says.
Along the way the cast has changed, but every time Friedman seems to have found actors with the charisma and rapport to make audiences care about Frank, Charley and Mary. “Every one of my actors has humanity, and I’m not just being soppy about it,” she says. “You can cast this show a million different ways and it will work, but you do need good hearts at the center of it.”
In casting, Friedman follows her instincts. She banked on the chemistry between Radcliffe, Groff and Mendez even though she’d never seen the three of them in a room together. “You just know,” she says.
As Broadway regulars, Groff and Mendez knew each other, but not well; neither had met Radcliffe. The three leads got acquainted over Zoom before meeting in the rehearsal room, where they discovered they had a lot in common — including big, unironic theater-kid energy.
Groff and Mendez both recall an early rehearsal when, left to themselves as the ensemble worked on a separate sequence, the trio clustered in the back of the room to talk exhaustively through the lyrics of “Old Friends,” the deceptively jaunty song that’s both a celebration of and an argument about what friendship truly means. “That was the moment I thought, ‘Oh, we’ve reached it,’” Mendez remembers. “‘We’re an actual team.’”
Radcliffe isn’t a Broadway baby to the same degree as Groff or Mendez, who launched their careers there. But the former “Harry Potter” star nonetheless feels a special connection to Broadway as “Merrily” brings him back after credits including “Equus” and a yearlong stint in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
“It’s always been such an important part of my life and career,” he says. “This was the first place that I felt like I could become an actor and not just Harry Potter.” He adds, “Also, we listened to a lot of Sondheim as a family in the car — I thought everybody did! The idea that I’m now doing one of those shows is mind-blowing and incredibly cool.”
Of the three leads, Groff has perhaps the hardest job as Frank, who abandons his friends and his art in favor of empty success in Hollywood. Like so many of the characters in “Merrily,” Frank starts the show at his most vile. “I’d never felt so hated, for so long, by the audience,” Groff recalls of his early Off Broadway performances. “Trusting the complexity of the character and detaching from the need to feel liked was a big learning curve for me. Now I live for it.”
At the same time, Friedman’s production grants Frank uncommon grace. With a light touch, the director positions “Merrily” as one man’s memory play as he looks back at the mistakes he has made. “I don’t see Frank as guilty,” Friedman says. “I absolutely believe none of these characters are cunning or premeditated. Everything they do comes from loneliness and the need for love. They’re beautifully naive in their hopes for themselves.”
But what gives any production of “Merrily” its power is how effectively it dramatizes how those ambitions can curdle and those bonds can fray with the relentless passage of time. Radcliffe says, “One of the truest things Maria said about the show is, ‘The happier you guys are at the end, the more absolutely devastating it is for an audience. And I do think that’s true. I mean, hopefully not totally devastating.”
For Friedman, the specifics of the entertainment industry and the minutiae of the chronology carry far less weight than the emotion at the show’s core. “I know that if you push into the toxicity, or push into the timeline or the show business, you don’t leave us understanding who anybody is,” she says. “But it’s all of us. These people are us.”
The show’s creatives see the Broadway run as the final step in the redemption of “Merrily We Roll Along.” “The hope and the dream for us is to launch it as another incredible work in the Sondheim canon, without it having this stigma around it,” Mendez notes.
Though saddened that her old friend Sondheim isn’t around to see it happen, Friedman says she’s heartened by the knowledge of his affection for her take on it.
“Many people will do ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ again, and do it beautifully,” she says. “But this is the one that he liked.”
