The news that the hottest recent ticket on Broadway – Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Maria Friedman and led by the powerhouse trio of Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez from September 2023 to July 2024 – would be professionally filmed and released internationally in cinemas was met with jubilation. For one, theatre is only accessible for audiences physically near the performance. For another, Broadway shows are notoriously expensive – notably ones starring such a talented and beloved cast. Single tickets were selling for almost four figures during the nearly year-long run at New York’s Hudson Theatre.
True, theatre is an inherently ephemeral medium and a proshot does not replace the live experience, but it does open doors and allow wider audiences to laugh, cry, and cheer as they encounter Merrily We Roll Along in their own way. With a multicamera, high-definition film production, thousands of people who could not attend or afford the show on Broadway can now see these award-winning performances animating a famous Sondheim flop-turned-hit on the big screen near them (it is hard to believe a home video release will not be forthcoming). Merrily We Roll Along, and the smaller-scale proshoot releases of Heathers and Six The Musical over the past couple years, hopefully marks a turning point in the commercial filming and release of stage musicals, one that places the practice alongside live productions and movie musical adaptations as another way to experience the art form.
Unfortunately, Merrily We Roll Along is treated almost too much like a film in its cinematography and editing. The camera relishes a close-up, cutting between faces with speed rather than absorbing lines sung in full. The chorus thus becomes a collection of disjoined individual faces rather than a coherent whole of humanity that moves the plot forward (or rather, backwards – more on this later). This is a performance for the stage and should give some idea of the stage action and choreography; sadly, it only does this on rare occasions. Live theatrical broadcasts and proshot releases are not new – the Metropolitan Opera has been live-streaming their productions into cinemas across the world since 2006, all filmed unobtrusively and completely – so this reliance on quick cutting and close-ups feels more like a deliberate “cinematic” choice rather than a learning curve. The cast, stage direction, and production as a whole would have been better served by more conventional live filming techniques: wider angles, longer shots, and the enjoyment and appreciation that this is a musical performed live on stage rather than a made-for-TV experience.
While this is a major qualm, it is the only one. In all other aspects, Merrily We Roll Along is superb. The orchestrations are clear and zippy, the clean lines of a set (when it’s seen) move easily between times and places, and the cast is phenomenal. While the relationship between the central trio – composer Franklin Shepard (Groff), playwright Charley Kringas (Radcliffe), and writer-turned-critic Mary Flynn (Mendez) – catalyses the story, the other recurring figures who appear and reappear throughout their lives are richly written and wonderfully performed. Frank is one of Sondheim’s great cipher heroes like Company’s Bobby, and Groff naturally captures the charm and amorality that propels him from scrappy idealist to jaded mogul. Watching him forget gifts for his son yet also mourn his loss in a nasty divorce battle hurts, because it is clear how much Frank’s slow selling-out is equally slowly strangling his relationships. Charley – the man of unimpeachable familial and artistic standards – gets the show’s biggest number, “Franklin Shepard Inc”, and Radcliffe’s performance of a nervous breakdown is fearless yet delicately calibrated. Mary, long-suffering in love and disillusioned with commercial prospects, is played by Mendez with an open-heartedness and vulnerability that all professions of cynicism cannot mask (indeed, if this cynicism were real, it might protect her). Sondheim was an expert at the ambivalent, often-hard-to-like characters, and here they are given three interpretations for the history books.
The story of Merrily We Roll Along is told in reverse over twenty years. Frank, Charley, and Mary are introduced in 1977 and close the show in 1957. As the chorus sings out each year, turning the clock backwards, the film projects the year over the start of each scene (a handy device for filmgoers who do not know every word of Sondheim’s lyrics already). The trio of “old friends”, as they sing, weather all sorts of personal and professional ups and downs, but what leads to the highs, lows, and breaking points comes after each seismic event. The result does not neatly map onto a Campbellian’s Hero’s Journey or conventional rising action-climax-denouement structures (indeed, “Franklin Shepard, Inc” is an eleven o’clock number appearing in the second scene), but the result is something subtler that gets under the skin. With every new scene, years are lost, eyes widen in possibility, and as Frank and Charley and Mary take each new road they cannot know what they will gain – and lose – in the scenes they previously performed. For the audience, every revelation hits right in the heart.
Merrily We Roll Along famously flopped on Broadway when it premiered in 1981, playing 44 previews and a mere 16 performances. Sondheim and Furth revised the show slightly before another production in 1994, which is the version now seen as standard. Through these revisions and the kindness of time, Merrily We Roll Along has found a devoted following, though its challenges remain. This might be Sondheim’s most bitter show, excoriating the artistic life – composers in particular – but without any performative humility or cheap metatheatrical laughs to wink and nod and soften the blows. This proshot, despite its over-fondness for close-ups, is a tremendous document to a monumental production of a tricky masterpiece that shows Groff, Radcliffe, Mendez, Sondheim, Furth, and company in the best possible light. Here’s to them, who’s like them – damn few.
Merrily We Roll Along is now in theaters.
Learn more about the ProShot of the musical at the IMDB site for the title.
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