NEW YORK, NY.- In the beginning, everybody cried. A lot.
“I’d say the entire cast spent the first two weeks of rehearsals in tears, in tears, and they had no idea why,” said Maria Friedman, director of the new, hotly anticipated revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” That’s the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical from 1981, which opened Dec. 12 at the New York Theater Workshop, and all but sold out its limited run the day tickets became available.
In a season plump with Sondheim revivals (“Into the Woods,” next year’s “Sweeney Todd”) and literature, this one carries an especially heavy cargo of expectation: the hope that its creator’s most notorious flop might finally be rehabilitated.
A British star of musicals and a peerless interpreter (and friend) of Sondheim, who died a year ago, Friedman, 62, tends to talk in breathless, boldfaced italics. This means that even speaking the unvarnished truth, she often sounds hyperbolic.
“I’d love to be able to say that Maria was lying, but that was very true,” film and stage star Daniel Radcliffe said of the high tear quotient during rehearsals. “I would be practicing some of the songs at home on my own and would just cry suddenly. And I’m not a person who cries a lot, as a rule.”
During previews, when I spoke to Radcliffe and the show’s other two stars — Jonathan Groff (“Spring Awakening,” “Hamilton”) and Lindsay Mendez (a Tony winner for “Carousel”) — on the phone, they said they were still having trouble staying dry-eyed in performance.
“Now the thing that’s challenging,” Groff said, “now that we’ve kind of got the material where we can do it without weeping, is hearing the audience react to it.” Radcliffe and Groff agreed that Mendez was the strongest in that regard.
“That bar is very low,” said Mendez, adding, “This show, it hits in you in the gut every second.” Moving backward in time, from the 1970s to the 1950s, the musical traces the fracturing friendship of three people, from disenchanted present to idealistic past: a charismatic composer who becomes a movie producer, Franklin Shepard (Groff); his collaborator, a playwright, Charley Kringas (Radcliffe); and a novelist, Mary Flynn (Mendez), who is hopelessly in love with Frank.
Mendez tried to explain the emotional toll of coming to terms with these characters.
“I think that the love that these people have for each other, and all the near-misses they have when they don’t say what they need to say, it’s just so heart-wrenching and difficult to experience. And with every day that passed, we all just felt closer and closer. It just got really palpable.”
Friedman, whose changeling face looks custom-made for expressions of both delight and dismay, said she thinks “Merrily” forces actors to get in touch “with this infinite pool of sadness that we all possess that’s also so close to joy.” She was on a dinner break at La Palapa, a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the theater, where she had arrived in an energizing bolt of high bohemian style: orange patterned winter coat, bright tweed newsboy cap, peasant blouse.
“What I wanted to do, and what Steve wanted to do, is to grab that inner humanity that even as actors we’re often covering up,” Friedman said.
Those are grand emotions to summon in connection with a show that has regularly been dismissed as sour and superficial.
Adapted from the 1934 play of the same title by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, “Merrily” was described by Frank Rich in The New York Times as “a shambles” when it opened on Broadway 41 years ago. It had been cast with teenage and young adult actors. (The heartbreak of its failure for these eager, mostly untried performers was captured in the 2016 documentary “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.”)
The show ran a measly 16 performances after a protracted preview period and — with a certain cruel symmetry, given that its story featured the angry breakup of a long partnership — brought an end to the close, fruitful collaboration of Sondheim and its director, Harold Prince (which had included “Company,” “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd”). It has since been retooled and rejected through many incarnations, nearly always evoking the same complaints.
“Merrily,” the consensus went, was a terminally imbalanced show, with a great score sabotaged by a lousy book and characters as flat as figures in a morality play. As recently as 2019, when the inventive Fiasco Theater brought its scaled-down version to New York, the verdict stood that “Merrily” was probably beyond salvation.
That had once been my feeling, too. Then I caught Friedman’s earlier production of “Merrily,” her professional directorial debut, at London’s tiny, hit-incubating Menier Chocolate Factory in 2013. Having been left cold by a starry concert revival of “Merrily” in New York the previous year, I arrived a skeptic.
I departed surprised, shaken and, yes, drenched in tears, while puzzling over such an improbable metamorphosis. Nothing had been changed in the script or score, yet each character seemed to vibrate with specific, personal depths I hadn’t previously sensed.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. When Sondheim had attended a run-through, Friedman said: “He couldn’t breathe. I mean, he always cried a lot. But he couldn’t move.” Sondheim went on to say that this “Merrily” was “the best I’ve seen,” and “the classic ideal of the sum being greater than the parts.”
Friedman has had a long time to perfect that equation.
After starring in the 1990 London premiere of “Sunday in the Park With George,” Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Friedman was cast two years later in “Merrily” as the acerbic, alcoholic Mary.
That production occurred away from the spotlight of the West End, at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, allowing Sondheim and Furth, still grappling to fix a failure, to do rewrites during rehearsals. (The revised script that would emerge is the one Friedman has used for her own productions.)
“I was convinced the entire show was about me,” Friedman remembered. It was only years later, when she approached it as a director, that she realized, “This is about Frank! What a very big shock!” Sondheim, who liked her performance, also delivered a warning: “Steve said to me, ‘I’m really, really worried for you. This comes too easily to you.’ It was after the first scene, where she screams and shouts and goes flying around.”
Friedman would go on to portray the romantically obsessed Fosca in Sondheim’s “Passion” and frequently perform his work in concert. Her relationship with the composer deepened. (He was the godfather to one of her two sons.) Professionally, she said, she came increasingly to understand what Sondheim wanted from a performer.
“The brilliance of Stephen Sondheim, why he’s always reinterpreted, is that he writes as an actor,” she said. “He sets in his head the scene, the place. And it’s always character-driven, it’s always got an emotional pulse.”
Her first try at staging “Merrily” was a student production at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She saw firsthand that actors that young could never do justice to a show that began with its characters on the cusp of middle age.
“It’s like they’re playing dress-up.” (She had not seen the Broadway original.) But after her sister, London power producer Sonia Friedman, and David Babani, artistic director of the Menier Chocolate Factory, sneaked in to watch it, they urged her to do a professional version.
Thus began the long road from the Menier to the West End to an equally fine 2017 incarnation in Boston, featuring two of the original London stars. Friedman had hoped to bring that production into New York. But the Fiasco Theater show preempted that possibility. Then on Nov. 26, 2021, Sondheim died.
“I was only doing it for him,” she said, “as a love letter for him, to bring it to his city, where it’s failed so badly. And I wanted him to actually get that accolade — not of me discovering it, but me showing what he’d written.”
That remains her objective.
Friedman has altered neither book nor lyrics. She has reframed “Merrily” in the sense that it is now staged, subtly, as a memory play, told from the perspective of Groff’s 40-year-old Franklin. (The set, by Soutra Gilmour, remains that of the older Frank’s Los Angeles home, where the play begins.) It is an adjustment that gives Frank something he lacked before: a glimmer of rueful, retrospective self-awareness.
Otherwise, her mission has been to keep digging for layers of character within each line and each song, with a lot of generosity, no judgment and as little melodrama and sentimentality as possible. And, oh yes, to keep striving for a sense of hope, of possibility.
“I’m very, very disciplined with the cast about pushing for the light all the way through. The dark takes place on its own.
“The thing about Steve is he’s always the smartest person in the room wherever you are,” she said. “So as a director, you can either go into battle with that cleverness. Or you know it’s there, you understand it, you respect it, and then as the actor or the director, you put in the humanity, and the complexity in the humanity, beneath the cleverness.”
On a Friday in mid-November, I watched Friedman applying that sensibility during the penultimate tech rehearsal for “Merrily.” With its endless repetition of words and movements, as lighting and scenery cues are readjusted again and again, a tech rehearsal is a soul-sapping process.
Yet a giddy, nigh ecstatic energy coursed through the room. There was a lot of hugging going on, in the aisles and on the stage, an activity Friedman said was not inappropriate for a show by Sondheim.
“He loved a hug, loved a hug. Loved a laugh. He’d always hold my hands when we were walking. He was not this cold man that people think.”
Dressed like an animated op art display in a dizzying combination of oversized checks, Friedman issued directives — and laughed and cheered — to her 20-odd-strong cast through a microphone, her bright throaty voice illuminating the dark.
“Is Danny in the wings?” she asked. Radcliffe flew out of the shadows as if propelled by catapult. Groff was marking time by slowly twirling, again and again, with a seraphic smile.
Directing a show as an actor, Friedman would say later, means “I can feel it, see it, breathe it.” While she will never give another actor a line reading to imitate, she said it is mandatory that she makes sure they understand why they’re saying what they’re saying.
“Then they’re never off the tune. Because for me it’s all a rhythm, the whole thing — the scenery, the words. It’s all about this extraordinary rhythmic dance.”
The big set-piece on the schedule that afternoon was “Opening Doors,” a second act number that covers two years and effervesces with a youthful excitement. In it, Frank, Charley and Mary, all in their early 20s, are seen trying to make a living (and chase their artistic dreams) in New York.
Friedman kept stopping the number to ask the actors to consider the particular, often ambivalent thoughts behind each lyric. How does Radcliffe’s Charley feel about the nightclub revue they’re working on being named for Frank? When does Mary first notice that Frank “quite likes” the young actress named Beth (Katie Rose Clarke) for the revue?
She wanted them to “personalize” a dance move that has them jumping from one level to another; nothing could be generic. And when Frank tells his cohorts that their still-unfinished nightclub act is opening immediately, Friedman shouted, “Jonathan, enjoy the chaos you’ve put into the room!”
A man ultimately consumed by the pursuit of success at the expense of his deepest friendships, Franklin has usually been regarded as the show’s biggest problem. Friedman doesn’t think of him that way and has imagined an elaborate backstory.
“I see him as floating, without an anchor, looking to please people, looking to make a mark in the world,” she said.
Casting the radiantly likable Groff, who “still has wonder all over him,” was essential, Friedman said, in keeping an audience on the character’s side.
“I have rarely met a man so capable of joy and love — offstage,” she said. “He’s taught me to dare to be happy now and again. I’m not good at it.”
While rehearsing the cast in the show’s climactic anthem of hope, “Our Time,” Friedman paused to ask the actors when their characters were happiest, and to hold on to that memory during the song. So it seemed fair to ask her the same question.
Mostly, she said, she’s happiest in the midst of the familial “safe space” that’s created in rehearsal.
“I never feel quite well when I’m not working.”
Friedman went through a period of more than a decade when she was working very little. She had cancer twice, she said, and two children to raise.
“I had to give up my own career, totally. Which was not hard at the time. But now, looking back at all the things I could’ve done, it really hurts. It makes me cry,” she said.
It was during that drought she agreed to work on the student production of “Merrily,” which opened its own new set of doors for Friedman. There may well be another chapter for her “Merrily,” if it moves to Broadway, as is widely expected.
“It’s my time now,” she said, her eyes welling. “It is my time. I’ve waited 15 years.”
And how sweet it would be if it also turned out, after four decades, to be at long last the time for her much-loved friend’s failed show.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
