“Merrily We Roll Along” and “Some Like It Hot” Bring Blockbuster Energy to the Stage
“It’s our time, breathe it in,” the friends Frank (Jonathan Groff), Charley (Daniel Radcliffe), and Mary (Lindsay Mendez) sing ecstatically at the end of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Stephen Sondheim’s much beleaguered musical about three artists and their deteriorating relationships and ambitions. Time in the musical goes backward: we first meet the trio during their lowest point (basically, their forties), so the youthful optimism of those last, hopeful lines is meant to sound false. In this “Merrily,” though, it rings sincere, as if claiming a long-delayed triumph on the musical’s behalf. Anticipation for the new production has been frantic. “I heard the whole run sold out in eight minutes,” someone whispered behind me at the New York Theatre Workshop, as we waited for the show to begin.
“Merrily” has traditionally been painted as not just a minor work but a clunker in Sondheim’s catalogue. Opening on Broadway in 1981 to a disastrous reception, it closed after only sixteen performances, and, in the decades that followed, both the book writer, George Furth, and Sondheim kept tinkering with it. Versions abound. The critical shellacking temporarily wrecked the composer’s relationship with the director Hal Prince, rupturing an incredible streak of collaboration that included “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” and altering everything that came after. But yesterday’s flop is today’s juggernaut: we’re already on the third high-profile New York revival of “Merrily” in ten years; a documentary, Lonny Price’s “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened,” came out in 2016; and there’s a Richard Linklater movie in the works. The “Dickensian child in the corner” (as Sondheim called the musical) has grown into the colossus in the doorway.
Frank, Charley, and Mary’s story starts in 1976, with the disappointments of middle age—material success but a broken friendship for Frank and Charley, destructive alcoholism for Mary—and finishes on the day the three met, on a rooftop, in 1957. Scene by scene, moving in reverse chronologically, we see first the betrayals and humiliations, then the innocence that preceded them. Frank and Charley write musicals, but Frank’s attention is too easy to divert: he’s left his first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke), for the glamorous Broadway star Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown) and ditched the ambitious artistic plans he had with Charley for the suntanned sheen of Hollywood. Mary, too, is a creative person, though her unrequited passion for Frank has vaguely stymied her. (Her underwritten story line is one of the show’s entrenched flaws.) Of course, every hopeful moment we see in the three friends’ twenty years together, from a wedding to a reunion to a jubilant opening night, has already had its promise extinguished by the time it rolls merrily around. We know how everything ends.
The music tries to make this bleakness bearable. Sondheim’s songs for “Merrily,” including “Not a Day Goes By,” “Good Thing Going,” and “Opening Doors,” are some of his lushest and most richly colored. Gussie’s puzzle of a character is a repository for some rather nasty prejudices about actresses, but at least she gets to sing your socks off, which Brown absolutely does. Frank and Charley’s spiky exchanges with their commercially minded producer, Joe (a scene-stealing, vowel-purring Reg Rogers), hint at Sondheim’s own irritation about being told by critics and lazy-eared listeners that “There’s not a tune you can hum / There’s not a tune you / go bum-bum-bum-di-dum.” To show those philistines, Sondheim wrote a score that bum-di-dums you into next week.
Sondheim’s contagious, compelling music alone has never quite sufficed, though, and directors have often been tempted to cut or carve the musical into a more pleasing shape. Here, the director, Maria Friedman, barely touches the text. Has her production made Furth’s plot (loosely borrowed from a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play about a callous playwright of boulevard comedies) suddenly logical—that is, do we ever believe that a Broadway composer has somehow turned into a ritzy L.A. movie producer? No. Has the musical grown softer in the years since audiences rejected it for its bitterness and unlikability? Certainly not. Instead, Friedman bypasses narrative logic for what’s deeply true.
Her hyper-energetic staging, based on a 2013 “Merrily” staged for the tiny Menier Chocolate Factory, in London, imagines the musical as a flashback for Frank. A callow jerk is now a conflicted jerk, who has a whole choir of regret singing inside him. (The gifted ensemble, more than a dozen strong, haunts him at every turn.) Soutra Gilmour’s set design places the show inside his bland Los Angeles mansion, where a nine-piece mini-orchestra is ensconced on the second floor; this is a “home” so personality-free it can also stand in for a television studio, an alleyway, and that final (first) rooftop. How can we blame Frank for his shallowness? He’s a product of his future environment.
Friedman unearths the potential that Sondheim-heads have always suspected was in “Merrily” by infusing it with enthusiasm, sympathy, and (not to be cheesy about it) love. The show’s three central performers are emotional fire hoses who all palpably adore one another. Radcliffe has a common or garden voice, but he fizzes like a cartoon fuse: any time he moves, he ricochets, and his past as the boy wizard Harry Potter helps the audience fill in the outlines of his boy-genius character. Groff’s silky tenor and angelic face elevate a part that can sometimes be contemptible—for the first time, I could see Frank as both the dreamer who believes in greatness and the glib charmer who believes every lie he tells. And the Tony-winning Mendez, whose staggering, trumpetlike mezzo could be used on battlefields, becomes the heart of the show, even when the lines betray her or scenes exclude her. “Beware! Retreat! Save yourselves!” Mendez’s clarion call peals forth, when the script says she’s just asking for another drink.
Friedman and her cast are attuned to the ways in which Sondheim and Furth were trying to frame the hapless tenderness we feel for our present selves, not just our past ones. The pair lit their dark project with lightning bolt after lightning bolt—compromise, responsibility, human frailty, the desire to make a living—any one of which can vaporize an ideal on impact. So is this production finally, forty years later, the definitive “Merrily”? It wouldn’t be the first time that a triumphant story started in middle age.
Uptown at the Shubert Theatre, another nostalgic musical—this one set during jazzy, woozy Prohibition—looks backward, too. “Some Like It Hot,” though, likes what it sees. The elegant, frequently wonderful production is a frothy adaptation of Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic film about two jobbing musicians (here, Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee) who, after witnessing a gangland shooting, hide out with an all-girl band.
Adaptations of movies about cross-dressing have been like buses lately: if you missed “Tootsie,” in 2019, “Mrs. Doubtfire” was right behind it, waiting in line. It’s odd, isn’t it, that Broadway producers keep picking source material that operates by the same core equation: men + dresses = gags. What a choice to keep making! As much as the original movies pushed boundaries and tweaked prejudices, we now hear in them various notes of misogyny and transphobia. Muting these has led to some uncomfortable creative pretzel-twisting—which is the shape you make when you’re covering your ass.
Although those earlier two musicals accepted their source materials’ basic premises, “Hot” ’s many creators—the composer, Marc Shaiman, who also co-wrote the lyrics; his fellow-lyricist, Scott Wittman; and the book writers, Matthew López and Amber Ruffin—have dislodged the beloved Wilder treasure from its sprockets. There’s a multiracial cast, for one thing, including the Black bandleader Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams, driving her astounding voice through songs like a fist through paper) and her lead chanteuse, Sugar Kane (Adrianna Hicks, the powerhouse from “Six”), who here is based more on Lena Horne than on the film’s Marilyn Monroe. And, instead of the original’s winking attitude toward gay panic (“Why would a guy marry a guy?” “Security!”), the rewriters take a new tack. The nonbinary Ghee plays Jerry, and, as Jack Lemmon did in the film version, blossoms when assuming the Daphne identity. But in this version Daphne emerges as a true self, and Jerry is forgotten. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Ghee sings in one of the show’s finest numbers (while wearing one of the costume designer Gregg Barnes’s finest numbers), because “that lady that I’m loving is me.”
Too much comparison with the fleet Wilder staging in the film will get you nowhere—in this sumptuous, everything’s-a-showstopper version, the director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, and company have chosen mass over velocity. Nicholaw goes big, but he isn’t quite as inventive as we have seen him before (a slamming-doors chase scene wastes several opportunities for farce), and the throwback musical pastiche by the songwriters, Shaiman and Wittman—songs trying to sound like standards from long ago, but written yesterday—suffers from overamplification, which drowns out the lyrics. (Thankfully, we can hear all the details in Sugar’s stunning rendition of “At the Old Majestic Nickel Matinee,” the show’s wisest, quietest song.) Borle, usually full of demonic energies, keeps his manic light under a bushel. But Ghee soars and soars, glowing every time the show’s follow spots pivot around to Daphne. Who says you shouldn’t go back? Perhaps there was someone beautiful you missed the first time around, and you want a chance to look again. ♦
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“Merrily We Roll Along” and “Some Like It Hot” Bring Blockbuster Energy to the Stage - The New Yorker
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