I wonder how much time and energy has been put into deconstructing Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim’s infamous problem child. I wouldn’t be surprised if more ink has been spilt over Merrily than any other show in his canon, and I wonder, I do I do, if any show with so short an original run has received as many revivals. The strangest part of all this is that the general consensus remains the same, forty years later: Merrily We Roll Along does not work.
People love a project, though, and that may account for the show’s enduring popularity among theatre types. It’s also about theatre types, which can’t be discounted. Whatever the reason may be, every five or ten years someone has a high-profile production that “fixes” this unfixable show. The current production, under Maria Friedman’s direction, purports to do exactly that, and the general audience response seems to find it successful.
Imagine if I did? How boring would this be to read?
Merrily is an uncomfortable creation, a musical told in reverse. It tracks the dynamics between three friends—Franklin Shephard, composer; Charley Kingas, playwright; and Mary Flynn, journalist and critic—over the course of 25 years, from about 1980 to 1955. The show opens at a party hosted by Frank, who has recently transitioned from successful theatre composer to successful Hollywood producer. As the show unspools, or spools, or respools, or however you want to put it, events from the past make sense of what we’ve already seen in the future.
It’s a clever idea, one that feels like it should work. That may be another reason why Merrily keeps finding new gasps of life: it is easy to convince yourself that it’s only a few small tweaks away from humming along. Given the creative team involved—Hal Prince as original director, George Furth writing the book, and Sondheim on keys—that’s understandable. Nevertheless, every production leads people back to the same conclusion: everyone is so unlikable when the show starts, it’s impossible to care about them by the end.
I don’t know if that’s the problem. It might be a problem, sure, but I don’t think it’s the problem. There are plenty of unlikeable characters littering the aisles of American theatre, and we don’t bandy that criticism around. I think the issue is more complicated than that. I think Merrily, for all the work the writers put into it, feels kind of lazy.
That is, prima face, an absurd statement. If there are negative words to be associated with Stephen Sondheim, “lazy” ain’t one of ‘em. To clarify, I don’t think the show is lazy. I said it feels lazy, which is not the same thing. Because of its structure, Merrily has no choice but to take shortcuts to try and elicit emotional responses it hasn’t earned. That’s what happens when you show the post before the hoc. Structured as it is, the show is asking for the audience to experience the payoff without first having invested.
The entire score is built around reversing song and reprise. Embittered or warped renditions of songs transform back into their original purity, mirroring the journey of the characters. Look at “Not a Day Goes By,” which, chronologically, is first sung at Frank’s wedding. The song appears again when Beth and Frank get divorced, a fairly traditional use of song and reprise. The song they sang to one another at their wedding is now a lament of the fact that she’ll never stop loving him.
The problem? We don’t know Beth yet. Her solo performance of “Not a Day Goes By” is the first time we see the character. That’s a heavy song that requires a lot of audience investment to work, but we don’t get that. Instead, it feels maudlin.
Beth is my favorite character in the show. If the whole thing were presented chronologically, I would probably find her performance of “Not a Day Goes By” devastating. As it is, the best I can give you as an audience member is “I trust that the song currently being sung is motivated by something I will understand later,” which puts me at a remove. Musical theatre is all about feeling. That is its primary motivation as an art form. You cannot separate an audience from what’s on stage emotionally like that and expect it to work in the same way.
Another curious side effect of putting things in reverse order, one I wouldn’t have expected: as the final scene pulls everything together, it feels pat. The show ends with Charley and Frank on the rooftop of their new New York apartment building, watching Sputnik fly overhead. During that scene, a few of the show’s biggest dots are connected. We see Charley and Frank become collaborators, and we watch them meet Mary. We also, finally, see the moment Mary falls in love with Frank.
All of these dots that get connected feel cheap, though. The most tragic moment in the show, discovering that a piece of advice Frank cynically gives a young writer in the first scene was taken from a compliment Charley paid Frank in the moment they decided to become collaborators, elicited a laugh from the audience. Somehow, presenting the whole thing backwards turned everything that’s meaningful into a punchline.
The backwards structure makes the show a puzzle, like the similarly-designed Memento. Instead of living in each moment, we are constantly wondering about what happened next [sic.]. Memento is a thriller. Trying to solve the puzzle is part of the fun. Merrily We Roll Along is a tragedy about three friends, success, and ego. These are not the same. I continually found myself thinking about that joke from the pilot of Mad Men, when Don Draper says “It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.” Mad Men never made a joke like that again, and for good reason.
Merrily We Roll Along fails for reasons the writers never could have predicted. The current production is very good, but the material is too clever by half. Musical theatre is inherently, and I say this as someone who loves it deeply, a medium for dumb-dumbs. Even at its most intelligent, at its most daring, musical theatre needs to be immediate, something you can entirely lose yourself in. Merrily doesn’t give the audience the space to do that. We’re too busy balancing ledgers and keeping track of questions.
You know, before I saw Merrily We Roll Along, I assumed Mary was the bookwriter in a three-way collaboration. I do think the show would be much better if she were. It would raise the stakes around her, make the dramatic triangle into a real triangle…Hm. Maybe I really can fix it.