On a chilly day in early February, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez are huddled on a couch in a photo studio in Queens. Not three weeks after Merrily We Roll Along ended its off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop, gathering again for a photo shoot has made all of the actors cry. (An amused publicist thinks it was the sight of their old costumes, by Soutra Gilmour, that set everyone off.) “It’s just really settling in that we’re taking this to Broadway,” offers Mendez, a Tony winner for Jack O’Brien’s 2018 revival of Carousel. “It’s a big dream for us to get to shepherd this piece, which means so much to so many people, and yet has never gotten its proper due.”
“To hear the overture on Broadway…?” Groff adds. “I’m gonna die.”
Forty-two years ago this fall, Merrily We Roll Along—a musical adaptation of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s somewhat obscure 1934 play of the same name—opened at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on West 52nd Street. Directed by Hal Prince, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, it represented the triad’s first collaboration since Company a decade earlier; a work that, after its own premiere at the Alvin, racked up 14 Tony nominations and became an era-defining hit.
Merrily follows three friends—Frank, a composer turned film producer; Charley, a lyricist and playwright; and Mary, the journalist and critic gluing them together—over roughly 20 years, working backward from their jaded, fractious 40s to their first meeting as bright-eyed 20-somethings, full of wonder as they spot Sputnik from a rooftop. Keen to make the piece a showcase for young performers, Prince cast actors very early in their careers (among them a 22-year-old Jason Alexander, long before he became Seinfeld’s George Costanza, and, in the chorus, a 20-year-old Liz Callaway) and commissioned a set made up of moving bleachers and gym lockers.
The repeated motifs of Sondheim’s score—inspired by brassy Broadway musicals of the 1950s—riffed on the story’s reverse chronology. (“How did you get to be here?” is the title song’s loaded refrain.) And Merrily made good sense in the composer‑lyricist’s oeuvre, both throwing a doleful glance at dreams of the past as his Follies—about a reunion of former showgirls—had done years earlier, and anticipating Sunday in the Park with George’s preoccupation with the troubles of being an artist. Yet Merrily was a giant flop, lasting only 16 performances. In The New Yorker, Brendan Gill knocked its underdeveloped script, “negligible” choreography, and dusty source material. “Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful,” observed Frank Rich in The New York Times. “But the show that contains them is a shambles….We keep waiting for some insight into these people—that might make us understand, if not care, about them.” The challenge of Merrily is that its structure plunges you into dynamics and conflicts that have been decades in the making. However lovely the songs, can the characters’ hurt and resentment really resonate when you’ve only just met them—and they’re played by people barely out of high school? At the following year’s Tonys, Merrily eked out a single nomination for Sondheim’s score, made up of now beloved numbers like “Old Friends” and “Not a Day Goes By,” but didn’t win.
The rewriting and reworking began immediately. With input from James Lapine, who would replace Prince as Sondheim’s principal collaborator for the next decade, Merrily was workshopped in regional theaters across America until 1992, when it went to the Leicester Haymarket Theatre in England. There, Sondheim would later say, “we finally got the show we wanted.”
Some iteration of that script would guide revivals of Merrily for the next 30 years, including an Encores! presentation led by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Celia Keenan-Bolger in 2012 and an ambitious movie adaptation from Richard Linklater, announced in 2019, that stars Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein and is being filmed over 20 years. While those versions were greeted with various degrees of warmth or anticipation, it’s safe to say that none had the rapturous reception of the sold-out production at the New York Theatre Workshop last winter. “Is this production finally, forty years later, the definitive ‘Merrily’?” asked The New Yorker, while the Times’ glowing review announced: “ ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Returns, the Way It Never Was.”
In the Broadway production, which begins previews this September at the Hudson Theatre, Groff stars as Frank, in turns slickly handsome, roiled with conflict, and sparky as a golden retriever; Radcliffe as an endearingly neurotic Charley; and Mendez as Mary, whose wide smile conceals great depths of longing (namely, for Frank). It arrived amid a wave of Sondheim revivals, developed shortly before his death in November 2021, from a gender-swapped Company, brought over from the West End, to pared-back stagings of Assassins and Into the Woods, to a no-holds-barred production of Sweeney Todd, complete with a 26-piece orchestra. (His final musical, Here We Are, a long-gestating collaboration with playwright David Ives, will premiere at The Shed this fall.)
But Merrily was a special case. Sondheim had never forgotten the sting of its early reception, nor had he ever stopped rooting for new versions to succeed. “I keep wanting people not only to like it, but to appreciate George [Furth]’s work,” he told the writer D. T. Max in a series of conversations published in 2022 as the book Finale. “It’s the Dickensian child in the corner.”
This version of Merrily is directed by Maria Friedman, who has had a long history with the work, playing Mary in that all-important production in Leicester back in 1992. It proved a formative experience in every way, not least because of Sondheim’s presence in the rehearsal room. “It was very stimulating—incredibly exacting—but my goodness, they laughed,” Friedman says of Sondheim and Furth. “I think it was one of the great things that tipped me in the right direction with this piece. It’s funny. I’m always looking for the lights, looking for the chinks, looking for the cracks where you can breathe hope.”
Friedman leaned into those instincts at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was invited to direct students in a little production of Merrily years later, in 2010. Other important takeaways followed. “I was so shocked that the whole show wasn’t about Mary,” she says with a laugh. “And the second thing I realized: It cannot be done by people in their 20s. It just can’t. The first half is all about people who have arrived, done things, lost things, missed things, made mistakes. And you’ve gotta know that in your guts.”
Still, her show found an enthusiastic audience. After one run-through, Friedman spotted two people sobbing in the theater when the lights came up; they were, to her surprise, her younger sister, producer Sonia Friedman, and David Babani, artistic director of the Menier Chocolate Factory, who had sneaked in together. Over coffee the next day, Sonia urged Friedman to try her hand at a professional production (it would be her directorial debut) at the Chocolate Factory, an off–West End incubator in central south London. “She said, ‘David wants to do this.’ So I just said yes.”
Audiences thrilled to what they saw when Merrily opened in 2012. (So did Sondheim. After attending a rehearsal, he was overcome: “He always cried a lot,” Friedman said in an interview last year, “but he couldn’t move.”) Radcliffe saw Friedman’s production after its transfer to the West End in 2013, where it won best musical at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and the Olivier for best musical revival. Unaware of its troubled history, he was captivated by Damian Humbley’s performance as Charley. “I didn’t have any of that baggage with it. I just thought, Oh, this is really good, and I would love to play that part,” Radcliffe says. Friedman would take the production to Boston’s Huntington Theatre, where it ran during the 2017–2018 season, before finally staging it in New York.
For Groff, doing Merrily felt fated. “I had just reached this point in my life where I was really looking back and reflecting on relationships that I suddenly realized were almost two decades old,” he explains. He later learned that Radcliffe and Mendez had done their own “first big New York shows” (revivals of Equus and Grease, respectively) at around the same time. This was no small thing, as they approached a story as concerned with the vicissitudes of a career in the performing arts as anything else. “The people that start young and then stay in it well into adulthood tend to love it,” Radcliffe says. “They tend to be doing it because there is something in their bones that makes them want to do this. And I think we all have that.” Adds Mendez, “There’s an unspoken-ness between us. There’s a lot of trust, and a lot of teamwork.” (When I ask Friedman about her stars’ touching natural chemistry, she tells me that in Merrily, Sondheim has “written love songs. He’s written about losing love, wanting love, missing love, despair, all the things, but it’s all around love.” So, in the year that she spent building her New York cast, “I looked for loving people.”)
For all intents and purposes, the Broadway revival is the same show that ran at the New York Theatre Workshop. Not only do both productions share the same actors—including Katie Rose Clarke as Frank’s estranged first wife, Beth; Hamilton alumna Krystal Joy Brown as his glamorous second wife, Gussie; and Reg Rogers as Joe, the producer behind the first hit show that Frank and Charley write together—but the same creative and production team, too. “We had a big break between the New York Theatre Workshop and going to Broadway, and every single person has come with it. They all took other jobs in order to be able to do this job,” Friedman says. “It just cast a spell over us all.”
As they move into the Hudson—which Friedman selected for its intimate-feeling scale (of Broadway’s 41 active theaters, it’s one of only nine that seats under 1,000 people)—she is keen to protect that enchantment. “I am absolutely determined not to do anything different,” Friedman says. “The piece is the piece; it speaks for itself. And as long as we keep the integrity of that and the joy and the warmth and the love and the storytelling—it should sing.” This has more or less been her line from the beginning. “One of the things that Maria has said from day one is, ‘I have not changed a lyric of this show or a word of the script. I am doing this show as written,’ ” Groff says. “It’s not like she’s doing a take on Merrily. She really believes in the piece itself without adding any sort of flashy concept.”
It’s material that tends to meet people where they’re at, yielding a new interpretation every time. Is Frank a smug sellout, or is Charley just a snob? Is the drunken, brittle Mary that we meet at the top of the show a terror or a truth-teller? Will the three friends ever be friends again? “Six people in the audience will have six different reactions,” Friedman says. But in her view, Merrily is far from the bleak show business send-up that critics excoriated in 1981. To Friedman, it is “funny and fragile and delicate.” Its greatest lesson is that “we must very, very gently remind ourselves to stay present in the moment, and don’t pretend we’ve got the answers to life, because we haven’t.”
In an interview with The New York Times shortly before he died, Sondheim broke the news of Merrily’s coming off-Broadway production, possibly to “make sure it happened,” Friedman suggests. Yet once he was gone, she was stricken; it took the urging of Sondheim’s friends and family, including his widower, Jeff Romley, to persuade her to go on with the show. That it finally became one of the hottest tickets in town is not an irony lost on Friedman: “When he first did it, you could have given away buckets.”
Then as now, her deepest regret is that Sondheim is not alive to see the production, but she knows that he would have delighted in Merrily’s return to Broadway. Her only hope is that after all these years, audiences are ready to receive it. “It’s a profound piece,” Friedman says. “If it gets you, it stays with you and makes you ask questions. And if it doesn’t get you, it’s got some great tunes.”
In this story: hair, Ilker Akyol; makeup, Francelle Daly for Love+Craft+Beauty. Produced by The Canvas Agency. Set Design: Viki Rutsch.