Despite a savage reception and a disappointingly
brief sixteen-performance run, Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We
Roll Along has proven its worth and merrily rolled along to
a happy and acclaimed afterlife.
Merrily We Roll Along was based on George S. Kaufman and
Moss Hart's 1934 play of the same title, which itself was an unwieldy
and unsuccessful attempt to break new ground. "A puzzling
but interesting novelty," said critic Bruns Mantle at the
time. The play examines eighteen years in the life of playwright
Richard Niles, who achieves professional success but personal
failure by continually compromising his principles. The other
two main characters are his old friends, who grow with and apart
from him: A principled painter named Jonathan Crale, and an alcoholic
writer named Julia Glenn. (The latter was patterned on writer
Dorothy
Parker, who was apparently not amused by the portrait. There
was also a self-absorbed composer of musical comedies and concertos
named Sam Frankl, modeled after Kaufman's frequent collaborator
George
Gershwin. 
SYNOPSIS
Sondheim's musical adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart
play transforms the story of three successful people looking
back on their lost friendship. Frank, Mary, and Charley
grew up to realize their dreams and goals, but may have
paid a greater price than they anticipated. Frank's anguished
question"Why?"begins the journey
backwards in time, recalling rivalries, jealousies, triumphs,
failures, and loves both unrequited and reciprocal, as
the three seek to discover how they got from "there"
to "here." Merrily We Roll Along tells
a masterful tale of three remarkable people reflecting
on years of aspiration and reality, and dreams both fulfilled
and lost.
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While this tale was already timeworn, Kaufman and Hart had a
trick up their sleeves. Rather than proceeding in linear fashion,
or by using a flashbackeven then a familiar deviceauthors
chose to work backward. The play opened in 1934 with Niles at
forty, his life in turmoil. The plot proceeded in reverse, showing
various key moments in his life (set in nine different years);
and ended at the beginning, with his idealistic high school valedictory
speech in 1916. "To thine own self be true," is his
motto, a creed he broke again and again over the course of the
play."
In 1981, the Kaufman and Hart play, this almost fifty-year-old
failure, seemed unlikely source material for the next Stephen
Sondheim musical. The composer/lyricist and his director/producer,
Harold Prince, had collaborated on five ground-breaking (if not
necessarily lucrative) musicals since 1970: Company, Follies,
A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney
Todd. Prince, at fifty-three, wanted to do a musical about
young people. Searching for a suitable property, Prince came up
with Merrily, which had opened and closed when he was only
six.
Prince fixed on Merrily to serve as his "youth"
show, fashioning the material to suit actors at the young end
of the twenty-year age spectrum. Thus, Prince, Sondheim, and librettist
George Furth fell into the trap of fitting the material to the
concept, rather than finding a concept to fit the material. This
turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. Sondheim addressed the
situation in a 1995 interview: "I think the major problem
was the production and the casting, and we were all responsible
for itthat wasn't just Hal." Merrily quickly
shuttered, effectively ending the Sondheim-Prince years.
A new and revised version opened under James Lapine's direction
in June 1985 at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. Several
important changes were made to the show; still more alterations
were made for subsequent productions, until Merrily was
finally "set" with the York Theatre production in 1994.
The last production at London's Donmar Warehouse (2000), directed
by Michael Grandage, won the Olivier Award for Best Musicala
far cry from the original Merrily's ignominious demise.
The Kennedy Center's new production marks the show's first major
large-scale mountingin a Broadway-sized theater, with a
full setsince the original. Merrily We Roll Along
has come full circle, revealing itself as a provocative modern-day
musical of enormous strength, intricate theatricality, andin
Sondheim's soaring melodiesgreat beauty.
Excerpted from: Suskin, Steven. "Merrily We Roll Along:
Full Circle." The Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration.
Washington, DC: The Kennedy Center Education Department. 2002.
(Publication may be purchased at the Kennedy Center Gift
Shop.)
Find out about the Kennedy Center's production of Merrily
We Roll Along.
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