Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ on Broadway has a cast that’s wonderful to watch
NEW YORK — Broadway never saw a better triple-act than Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, the triumphant triumvirate at the heart of the gorgeous new revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” directed by the famed British musical theater star Maria Friedman. What a delight they are to watch as life kicks their ever-hopeful characters in the teeth.
Life severely batters these old pals in this brilliant, backward-moving musical about showbiz types by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, as based on an old 1934 play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart. It’s a device that sharpens the pain of what this sardonic musical wants to say.
How? Conventional chronology induces complacency. Rolling along backward blows everything up.
Here’s one perfect example: We hear the Sondheim masterpiece “Not a Day Goes By” sung in the bitter aftermath of a divorce case. Later, we see its origin as a sweet love song exemplifying the greatest of all great Sondheim themes: we must love in order to exist.
For anyone who has loved and lost and wondered why, the song is just devastating. In all the right ways. Shivers will blow through your aisle.
The year 1957, the setting of the final scene of “Merrily,” is all about possibility. But we already know friends have disappointed friends. Shared idealism has been wrecked on the cliffs of commercial compromise. A marriage has failed. Depression has lurked.
Yet there they all still are, right at the beginning, as at all of our beginnings, merrily hanging on to the shards of what we hoped would be, even as we failed to make it happen. If you can’t find yourself somewhere in “Merrily,” which was first seen on Broadway in 1981, you’ve got no pulse.
And if going to see this show doesn’t make you reach out to your alienated old friends and at least say, “hey old friend, are you OK, old friend?” Then you should be passing on your seat to someone who listens more carefully.
But I’ll wager most everyone does. As Sondheim says in one lyric, “Who’s like us, damn few!”
The late, great one could have been talking about these performances. Friedman unlocked many previously problematic aspects of this show, but one of the main keys was to understanding that Mary (Mendez), the sidekick to the aspiring writer-composer team of Franklin Shepard (Groff) and Charley Kringas (Radcliffe) is not the third wheel but the lead.
Mendez has every shade of Mary down cold: the charm, the drinking, the talent, the self-destructive tendencies. But the biggest achievement here is how this fine actress telegraphs how differently humans cope, or fail to cope, with disappointment. Some roll merrily along. Some, like Mary, fall off the carousel. Or jump. It’s a stunner of a performance.
But then Groff, whose singing and energy drive the show, is also superb: his character refuses to see plenty of stuff, but the denials clearly show on Groff’s face, and in his voice. Radcliffe is similarly complicated: his Charley is quiet, sweet, sad, modest of expectation, always fighting off cynicism, still trying to believe in the face of whatever evidence to the contrary life is delivering. This is the best thing I have ever seen this actor do.
But it’s the clearly warm relationship between the three stars that make this show, their palpable, present-tense enjoyment of each other when performing Tim Jackson’s very human choreography, a manifestation of fun and fear. Friedman’s direction and approach to the show seems to have freed these three stars to reveal more of themselves than before.
Elsewhere in the piece, you inevitably have more type-bound characters, such as the producer Joe (Reg Rogers, who has the genre down). I wish Friedman had been able to elevate Charley’s partner Beth (Katie Rose Clark) so that we feel more of her inner life but the piece’s structure makes that hard. The two of them get some of the way there. And, as Gussie, one of the forces driving the trio apart, Krystal Joy Brown is impeccable; it is as if she decided that whatever might not be there on the page to make us understand this woman, she would add. To the words and the notes.
“Merrily” is even better than it was at the New York Theater Workshop. Its essential intimacy has been retained and it has deepened considerably, as shows that so depend on the relationship of the actors often do.
The physical production features a seemingly simple mid-century design from Soutra Gilmour, an inestimably clever piece of scenic and costume design that (for me anyway), collectively makes the point that while we can and do bring back styles and accouterments, especially if we’re rich, there is no do-over for hearts.
Except at magnificent revivals of great Broadway musicals, of course.
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At the Hudson Theatre 141 W. 44th St., New York; merrilyonbroadway.com.
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