How did Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” one of the most infamous flops on Broadway, become one of the biggest hits of the 2023-2024 Broadway season, four decades later? This first Broadway revival has seven 2024 Tony Award nominations, with many people predicting – and me hoping (2024 Tony Awards: Who SHOULD win, and why) – that it will snag the majority of them this Sunday at the 77th annual Tony Awards.
I was able to ask the question of director Maria Friedman, who has been nominated for her Broadway directorial debut. She answers in the video below.
I found her answer surprising, for several reasons.
As mentioned in the video, she sees it as beginning some thirty years ago when she was cast as “Mary,” one of the three friends at the center of the story, in a production of the musical in England.
But something that’s only alluded to in the video is my surprise at her apparent assumption that the problems with the musical were all in the original 1981 production, and fixed long ago, each new production having steadily improved it.
In a pan of a 2019 Off-Broadway production, Jesse Green wrote in the New York Times: “A show with one of the richest scores of the 1980s, by Stephen Sondheim — but one of the most problematic books, by George Furth — it has spent the 38 years since its flop Broadway opening [trying] to find its best self. On the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal…I’m sorry to say that it’s still not “Merrily”’s time. Maybe it never will be….”
His was not an outlier opinion, at least not in New York. (My reaction to the current production might in certain ways be outlier, since I still find the book problematic, although I joined in praising the show.)
That it took so long for “Merrily” to find its time makes the story even more compelling.
Still, Maria Friedman has much of interest to say, even in my off-the-cuff interview on the red carpet of the Theatre World Awards, where Friedman, a TWA winner in 2006 for her Broadway debut as an actress in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Woman in White,” was back to present an award to a newcomer.
What’s left out of the video are things I learned from other interviews:
She has never seen a production of “Merrily” that she hasn’t herself directed, except the one she starred in.
She and Sondheim had an almost forty-year professional collaboration that developed into a long and close relationship. “I didn’t have a dad, and he took that role for me,” she said tearfully to Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour
Her younger sister Sonia Friedman has considerably more experience on Broadway, having won 14 Tonys as a producer; she is nominated for two more this year, both “Merrily” and “Stereophonic”
“We get asked all the time why this production is a success,” Jonathan Groff has said. “There are two words that are the reason for that success. Those two words are: Maria Friedman…She has painstakingly crafted every single microbeat of our show.”
