Merrily we roll along (1981)
Book: George Furth
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In short: Merrily takes audiences on a reverse chronological journey, tracing the unraveling of ambition, friendship, and lost ideals. The show has its own comeback story: initially a flop, later a cult classic, and finally a Broadway triumph in 2023.
Steve wrote a masterpiece, and I have given everything I had to it. It’s about a lifetime, and Merrily morphs with us. It asks us, ‘How did I get to be here?’
maria Friedman (director Broadway production 2023)
Overview Merrily We Roll Along - background and excerpts
Merrily We Roll Along has transformed from a flop to a triumph in the nearly fifty years since its creation. With its reverse chronological structure, the musical explores the impact of choices, ambition, and the inevitable changes that life brings. Its traditional musical theater style is elevated by the remarkable way past and present are intertwined musically.
Plot Summary
The story follows successful filmmaker and composer Frank and his old friends Charley and Mary, who once dreamed of making it as writers and composers. The show begins with Frank basking in commercial success but grappling with personal failure. It then moves backward in time, step by step, tracing how youthful enthusiasm, idealism, ambition, and friendship unraveled. From 1981 to 1957, the musical reveals how bright beginnings gave way to regret, estrangement, and disillusionment. Themes of wasted potential, friendship, acceptance, and change run throughout.
Development
Merrily We Roll Along is an adaptation of the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. At the initiative of director-producer Hal Prince, Sondheim teamed up with writer George Furth — his collaborator on Company — to create this musical version.
Music and Lyrics
Sondheim’s score is a blend of traditional and unconventional forms. The songs are composed in the style of 1950s Broadway music, reflecting the starting point of the story’s reverse chronological timeline. This approach marks a notable departure from the musical complexity of Sondheim’s earlier works.
Solving dreams, not just trusting them.
Taking dreams, readjusting them.
It’s called letting
go your illusions,
and don’t confuse |them with dreams
He flies off
to California.
I discuss him
with my shrink.
That’s the story of
the way we work,
Me and Franklin Shepard, Inc.
It could have
kept on growing,
instead of just kept on.
We had a good thing going.
Going.
Gone.
Sondheim uses the reverse chronological structure as a foundation for the score, blending the past and present through recurring themes and evolving motifs. Musical sections are repeated and transformed, mirroring how memories shift in meaning over time. The same passages take on new emotional resonance depending on where they fall in the timeline, while certain repetitions represent lingering memories in the characters’ later years. Writing the score with these self-imposed rules made the score of Merrily We Roll Along one of the most challenging of Sondheim’s career.
A notable example is “Not a Day Goes By,” first sung by Frank with bitterness after his divorce from Beth, and later reprised during their wedding, carrying a completely different emotional tone. Similarly, “Good Thing Going” is slowly broken apart throughout the show before returning in its original form as “Who Wants to Live in New York?”
Initial Reception
Merrily We Roll Along Merrily We Roll Along was initially met with poor reviews and quickly closed after just 16 performances. Audiences struggled to connect with characters who were introduced at their most cynical and disillusioned, and much of the blame was placed on the script and casting. Sondheim later remarked that the backlash may have been partly driven by resentment toward him and director Hal Prince: “Hal and I were resented as having become successful despite our maverick ventures. We had done eccentric shows and yet were not living in garrets. In commercial theater, this was not only an anomaly, it was an irritation.”
The failure of Merrily also marked the end of Sondheim’s collaboration with Prince, who had directed many of his most iconic works, including West Side Story, A Funny Thing, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd . They would not work together again until Road Show.
A Second Life: Broadway Triumph and Film Adaptation
Over the years, Sondheim and Furth continued to rework the show, giving the musical a second life in its revised form. Although the musical saw multiple revivals, it finally broke free of its “cult flop” status with a highly successful Broadway revival in 2023. Directed by Maria Friedman and starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez, the production won four Tony Awards, including Best Revival. The production’s success was in large part due to its charismatic and talented cast. Merrily is also currently being adapted into a film, which is being shot over a 20-year period, starring Blake Jenner, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein in the lead roles.
Video excerpts (in show's order)
- “Old friends” reflects the lifelong bond between Frank, Charley, and Mary, even as their relationship begins to fracture. It first appears briefly in reprise form and later in its full version. The clip here is a freeform interpretation from the musical revue Putting it together.
- “Franklin Shepard Inc” is Charley’s searing critique of Frank’s choices during a television interview, where he accuses Frank of betraying their friendship and ideals.
- “Growing up” is a later addition by Sondheim, in which Frank reflects on his life choices. The song was intended to show Frank’s inner dialogue, softening his unsympathetic behavior and inviting the audience to connect with him.
- “Not a day goes by” appears twice in the show. The first version is Beth’s response to Frank’s plea to stop their divorce after his infidelity, where he insists she still loves him. This version, performed by Bernadette Peters, is featured here. Later, the song reappears as a duet on their wedding day, offering a bittersweet contrast.
- In “Now you know” features Beth speaking to Frank after their divorce, delivering a dose of realism and pragmatism in a story otherwise steeped in dreams and ideals.
- “Good thing going” is performed by Charley and Frank as part of their new show, presented to an audience that only half-listens. The song has been famously covered by artists such as Frank Sinatra.
- In “Opening doors” captures the three friends as young artists striving for their first big break. The song includes autobiographical elements; for instance, the line about Stravinsky paraphrases a producer’s rejection of West Side Story . In the clip, Stephen Sondheim himself plays the producer. The melody the producer misquotes is “Some Enchanted Evening” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.
- The final number, “Our time”, brims with ambition and hope but carries a bittersweet undertone, as the audience knows what lies ahead for the friends.
- Also featured is “Rich and happy” from Putting it Together. This song was replaced in later versions of Merrily by “That Frank” and served as an introduction to Frank’s decision to prioritize financial success over artistic fulfillment.
What’s wrong with letting them
tap their toes a bit?
I’ll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit –
give me some melody!
It’s our time,
breathe it in.
Worlds to change and worlds to win.
Our turn,
we’re what’s new,
Me and you, pal,
Me and you!
Stephen Sondheim about Merrily We Roll Along
“The show gave me the chance to revert to the sharp urban feeling of the songs in Company and Follies, the kind of ‘smart’ lyric style typical of so many theater songs of the preceding decades that, at its best, restricted by its thirty-two-bar straitjacket, had the precision and concentration of a sonnet. The simplicity of such a form might make it seem easy to write, but it isn’t, and it’s harder still to tell a story in a sequence of such rigid patterns. The constraints of repeated refrain lines and frugal concision in all but the patter songs in Merrily We Roll Along was in uncomfortable contrast to the free and easy flow of the arioso writing which had characterized Sweeney Todd. That challenge, of course, is what exhilarated me. Of all the shows I’ve worked on, Merrily We Roll Along was, with the possible exception of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (and for similar reasons), the most difficult score to write. With Forum, however, I didn’t have to worry about holding the score together—the piece didn’t require cohesion, only variety.
Indeed, the score of Merrily turned out to be what I wanted it to be, and eventually the show did, too. In its initial incarnation it was deplored by the critics and ignored by the public, and it took a number of revisions over the years for George Furth and me to make it the show we had hoped for. The turning point took place in La Jolla in 1985 in a production supervised and directed by James Lapine. He suggested some structural changes, particularly in Act One […], which were crucial. Encouraged, George and I kept tinkering until, in 1992, for a production in Leicester, England, we finally succeeded in fixing the show to our satisfaction, and when years later it was produced in London, others agreed: it won the Laurence Olivier Award as Best Musical of the Year.”
More Merrily We Roll Along: audio and video
Cast albums
Full shows/concerts
Go to More Sondheim for our Sondheim Archives.
Merrily We Roll Along in the Netherlands
Most recent large production
KONINKLIJK BALLET VAN VLAANDEREN
Opening: February 1, 2004, Theater aan de Parade, ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Cast: Jan Schepens (Frank), Ellen Pieters (Mary), Ara Halici (Charlie), and others
Translation: Allard Blom
Director: Martin Michel
Awards: Four Musical Award nominations for cast members; Ara Harici winner.
Reviews of Merrily We Roll Along
Original Broadway production (1981)
“As we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals. Usually the heartbreak comes from Mr. Sondheim’s songs -for his music can tear through us with an emotional force as moving as Gershwin’s. And sometimes the pain is compounded by another factor – for some of Mr. Sondheim’s most powerful work turns up in shows (Anyone Can Whistle, Pacific Overtures) that fail. Suffice it to say that both kinds of pain are abundant in Merrily We Roll Along, the new Sondheim-Harold Prince-George Furth musical that opened at the Alvin last night. Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful – that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles.” – Frank Rich, The New York Times (1981)
Broadway revival (2023)
“[Director Maria] Friedman’s great insight — perhaps owing to her own long career onstage — is to have sought out actors she, and we, can entirely trust, and to trust them. (It sounds simple. It’s not.) She locates the play’s potential to be caring rather than callous not on the page but in the specific human beings who are here, doing this thing, right now. A central trio as sensitive and superb as this one doesn’t just make Merrily more moving; it makes it much more fun. It even adds a faint glimmer of something resembling hope. If Frank can reconsider, then he may yet change. Or he may not. But either way, an actor must show us, as Groff does, a true encounter with the mirror. With their irresistible energy and chemistry, Mendez, Groff, and Radcliffe lift Merrily up, yet keep it grounded with real, apparent affection and emotional heft. They are the ones reviving the play, by revealing and jump-starting its heart.” – Sara Holdren, Vulture (2023).
“But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, Merrily is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, Merrily has been found in the dark.” – Jesse Green, The New York Times (2023)
