bursting with dreams: stephen sondheim

Andrew Melendez2/25/15

Merrily We Roll Along essay

“Bursting With Dreams:” Sondheim and Merrily We Roll Along

It’s a hit! is every artist’s dream: to produce work from the very depths of their

talents that goes on to receive critical acclaim and make them money—without selling out.

What price do artists pay to maintain their artistic integrity? Their friendships? How much

is a person willing to give up to become successful? These questions are examined and

answered in the 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along, with music and lyrics by Stephen

Sondheim and book by George Furth, based on the 1934 play of the same name by George

S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The original production was directed by Broadway magnate

Harold Prince.

Prior to Merrily, Prince and Sondheim worked together and collaborated on six

musicals: West Side Story (1957, with Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome

Robbins), Company (with George Furth, 1970), Follies (with James Goldman, 1971), A Little

Night Music (with Hugh Wheeler, 1973), Pacific Overtures (with John Weidman, 1976), and

Sweeney Todd (with Hugh Wheeler, 1979). Merrily was conceived as an experiment with

genre conventions: it is a musical about writing musicals, and the story, like its source

material, is told backwards through time, starting in 1976 and ending in 1957.

The show has a long history of failures and revisions: by 1994, Sondheim assessed

that “Merilly [had] gone through four revisions over a period of thirteen years” (Buchman

119). Tryouts for the musical began October 8, 1981, to poor reception. Larry Fuller

replaced Ron Field as the choreographer, and the Broadway run opened November 16,



1981. Audiences responded negatively to the show: the original Broadway run had only 16

performances and 52 previews, Sondheim’s least successful musical since 1964’s Anyone

Can Whistle. Critics and audiences argued that the truncated plot was confusing, the

protagonist was unlikable, and the themes were too cynical for a Broadway audience. The

structural concept of the musical and the stage designs were poorly compared to those of

Company and Follies and critic Frank Rich wrote that for all his cleverness, “While Mr.

Prince often finds brilliant unifying concepts for his shows, even the ones that don't work,

he's come up with a flat one here – school” (Rich).

For all its defeats, Merrily did win the 1982 Tony Award for Outstanding Lyrics.

Since it’s Broadway flop, Merrily has been revived in various settings. In 2000, a London

revival at the Donmar Warehouse received the 2001 Laurence Olivier award for Best New

Musical. Maria Friedman, who previously played Mary in a 1992 London revival, directed

the show at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory in 2012. This revival received more 5-star

reviews than any musical in the history of West End theatre, and won the 2012 Peter

Hepple Award for Best Musical (Youtube).

The protagonist (or perhaps antihero) of Merrily We Roll Along is Franklin Shepard,

who, at the beginning of the musical, set in 1976, is a powerful and successful Hollywood

producer. He is also bitter and cynical about his youthful dreams of being a successful

musician. At a high school commencement ceremony, Frank openly defies idealism and

encourages the young graduates to “compromise” and be “practical” (Buchman 121). The



opening number of the show, which shares its title, introduces the theme of examining the

past and how we become the people we are: “Dreams don’t die, so keep an eye on your

dream. / And before you know where you are, there you are” (Score 11). This motif is

repeated in transitions as the musical rolls back in time, serving as a guidepost to help the

audience through time.

The structure of the show is episodic, similar to the vignette structure in Company.

In Act I, we are introduced to Frank’s best friends, Charley Kringas and Mary Flynn, a

lyricist and novelist respectively. At the beginning of the show, Frank becomes alienated

from them, choosing commercial success over their friendship. In “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,”

Charley laments the state of their relationship and begs Frank on live television to return to

doing what he loves: writing music. He begs the audience to “tell that man to get back to his

piano” (Score 69). But Frank storms out and disowns Charley. As the musical progresses,

we discover that Frank had an affair with Gussie, wife of Broadway producer Joe

Stephenson who gave Frank and Charley their first big Broadway break, and eventually

marries her. Frank suffers a divorce from his wife Beth, with whom he has a son.

In Act II, Charley and Frank celebrate their first big hit. By this point in the show,

there is a sense of sadness that accompanies the celebration of their success, as the

audience already knows where that success will take these young upstarts. As the

transitions continue moving the audience back in time, Franklin, Charley, and Mary’s

bushy-tailed idealism continues to grow, finally culminating in the climax of the musical,



and one of Sondheim’s most well-known songs, “Opening Doors.” The three young artists

celebrate the endless possibilities in front of them, singing:

We’re opening doors, singing, ‘Here we are!’ / We’re filling up days on a dime. / That far-a-way shore’s looking not to far. / We’re following every star… / There’s not enough time! (Score 254)

In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim writes about his intentions in writing an

unconventional musical with conventional, thirty-two bar songs. Since the story was told in

reverse chronological order, he wanted to invert the concept of reprises and repeated vocal

melodies to be “undercurrents of memory, but the audience would hear the

accompaniments first” (Sondheim 381). Sondheim has said of this score that it was the

hardest score he ever had to write (Buchman 128). Sondheim confesses that for all the

“fervent hysterical activity” that accompanied revising the show for its Broadway debut, it

was the most fun he ever had on a single show—he and Harold Prince, however, would not

reunite for another 20 years, until 2003’s Bounce (or Road Show).

Merrily We Roll Along has received a cast recording four times, and numerous songs

from the score have been recorded by popular artists such as Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews,

Patti LuPone, and Liza Minnelli, among others. In 2013, HBO aired Six by Sondheim, a

documentary which explores six backstories of some of Sondheim’s most seminal works,

including “Opening Doors.” A short film of “Opening Doors” was directed by James Lapine

for Six by Sondheim, and starred Jeremy Jordan, Darren Criss, America Ferrera, and Laura



Osnes. Sondheim has explicitly stated that “Opening Doors” is autobiographical: “That’s my

big autobiographical number; everything in that number is me…” (Buchman 128).

I will admit that as much as I appreciate Sondheim’s experiment with conventions,

there is something almost duplicitous about Merrily We Roll Along, and this is perhaps what

audiences were so taken aback by when it first premiered: it feels like the audience is

almost cheated out of a real ending, and in spite of how fanciful and inspired the end of the

musical is, when the audience looks back they are only left with the knowledge that the

friendships of these young people will be ruined, their hearts broken, and most of all, their

dreams crushed. It is a sad story: in the end, there isn’t any kind of hope for the characters

that you disliked in the first place and only come to pity later on. For me, this musical is less

entertainment and more an exercise in examining genre conventions and how they can be

broken, rearranged, and then put back together. Merrily We Roll Along is an excellent

ensemble show, with a great score and lyrics, and a bold attempt by Sondheim to continue

exploring his aesthetic, which would culminate in another critical success in Sunday in the

Park with George in 1984.



Sources

Buchman, Andrew. "Growing Pains." The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies. Ed. Robert

Gordon. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 117-131. Print.

Merrily We Roll Along - Behind The Scenes With Jonathan Ross (LONG VERSION). Perf.

Jonathan Ross. YouTube. Merrily WestEnd, 26 June 2013. Web.

<http://youtu.be/QidhhLPtb_A>.

Rich, Frank. "A New Sondheim: "Merrily We Roll Along"" The New York Times 17 Nov. 1981,

Stage sec. Print.

Sondheim, Stephen. "Merrily We Roll Along." Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981)

with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and

Anecdotes. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 379-421. Print.

Sondheim, Stephan. Merrily We Roll Along Piano Conductor Score. Revelation Music, 1981.

Print.

bursting with dreams: stephen sondheim

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