Goodbye, Old Friends
Thanks to the best production of Merrily We Roll Along I'll probably ever see
Today is the final performance of Maria Friedman’s celebrated revival of Merrily We Roll Along. Written by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim in 1981 and directed by Hal Prince, Merrily was until now the show that famously got away, lasting only 16 performances after 44 previews initially, and having been revived over and over since in endless attempts to find the great show everyone believed was in there somewhere.
In a way the history of the show has always felt like a reflection of its story. Even though it’s told in reverse, ending on the most bright-eyed and optimistic version of its characters, Merrily has always been about the terrible fragility of our dreams and our relationships, how the endless effluence of life batters away at the ark of dreams and ideals that we build to carry ourselves through, until we’re each left on some desolate shore, alienated and alone.
Friedman—seen above with cast and crew on opening night—gave the show new life by in a sense refusing to accept that interpretation. Merrily in her hands was not just or ultimately about the fragility of friendship, but its enduring redemptive power. What Franklin has lost—his family, his dreams, and above all Charley and Mary, he still retains in memory. And they continue to have the power to point the way for him, even moreso, really, than they have been able to in real life.
The play as Friedman conceived it becomes a kind of sibling to Furth and Sondheim’s earlier play Company, in which the friends and relationships of a man turning 35 become like spirits conjured up to challenge his inertia and push him to risk more in life. Having returned to the rooftop where he and Charley and Mary first shared their dreams and became friends, his life now in tatters, each successive scene farther back into Franklin’s life becomes one step deeper into his own investigation into where he went wrong, and a further effort at recovery. In a sense Friedman has just provided a justification for what was always there, including the unusual choral interludes that bridge the scenes and years. But the difference that her intervention made has been profound.
So, too, has been the cast she gathered. Merrily has always demanded tremendous chemistry amongst its leads. We have to feel both the care and the delight that they have for each other, both to leaven their loss and to give us something to look forward to in the midst of their collapse. There’s no staying for a second act of Merrily if you don’t sense the love and the playfulness within their relationships.
And Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe have been lightning in a bottle, their friendship on-stage and off so clear and abundant they’ve become like a latter-day Friends, constantly interviewed, photographed, and asked to do silly things, simply because seeing the three of them together is such a joy. It’s a loss to see Merrily closing. But it’s nearly impossible to conceive of the idea that come next week there is not going be a place where we can find the three of them performing together.
In their hands and those of their cast mates (especially Krystal Joy Brown, Katie Rose Clark and Reg Rogers—who somehow transformed what initially looked like a Kramer impression into a utterly unique performance that was surprising and delightful every night), the show finally found the hope to balance its pain, and gained that patina of possibility it needed as it travels backwards to the beginning of these characters’ stories and that tiny light in the sky which signaled to them like an ancient portent that all things were indeed possible and the future would be filled with riches. When Groff’s Franklin is finally left all alone there, having been given by Charley and Mary the red script that has floated through the whole show, the story they always said they were going to do but never did, Friedman’s wonderful ongoing Easter egg, there is that glimmer, that sense that something new is finally stirring.
Dammit, I don’t want yesterday to be done. But here’s to the ones who made it possible. Who’s like them? Damn few.