When it opened it 1981, "Merrily We Roll Along," the Stephen Sondheim -George Furth musical, had a dazzling score that put stars in your eyes, and a troublesome book that left a sour taste in your mouth.
While the show folded after 16 performances on Broadway, no one was willing to lay it to rest. If the book could be tidied up and some of its sourness tempered, the thinking went, the creators would surely have a full-fledged hit on their hands.
The repair work began with a revival at the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 1985 and continued at Arena Stage in Washington in 1990. Still more adjustments were made two years ago at the Haymarket Theater in Leicester, England.
Now the new and revised "Merrily We Roll Along" can be seen at the Theater at St. Peter's Church in a spirited production by the York Theater Company. The score, having acquired several new numbers over the years, is, if anything, more brilliant than ever. As for the book, half of it, the second half, is moving in a deeply melancholy way. Getting there is the problem. It always was.
"Merrily We Roll Along," you may recall, tells a not-very-merry tale about Franklin Shepard (Malcolm Gets), a gifted young composer who sacrifices his ideals, not to mention his closest friends, in his scramble to the top of the show-business heap. At the crucial moments in his life, he invariably makes a corrupt choice or lets someone make it for him. He wasn't always a Sammy Glick, but you don't find that out until the second act.
Following the blueprints drawn up by Kaufman and Hart for their 1934 play of the same name, the musical begins by showing Franklin as a Hollywood kingpin, savoring the fruits of success and rotting rapidly. Each successive scene then jumps backward in time, working through the professional betrayals, the collapsed marriages and the tawdry affairs, until it's 1957 and a fresh-eyed Franklin is standing on the rooftop of a New York apartment building, waiting for Sputnik to orbit overhead. With him are Charley Kringas (Adam Heller), the aspiring playwright who will become his collaborator, and Mary Flynn (Amy Ryder), the budding novelist who can't hide her love for the promising composer, although she'll have two decades to learn how.
"Our Time," they and their neighbors sing, with untarnished faith in the myriad possibilities of the modern world. The number is an exultant hymn to the future, but since we've already seen what's ahead in the preceding scenes, the uplifting melody and stirring lyrics are shot full of irony.
There's a T-shirt slogan that reads "I'm not getting older. I'm just getting better." "Merrily" operates on a reverse principle. Its characters get better only as they get younger. While the director, Susan H. Schulman, has taken pains to hire players as engaging as possible for the cast, a chilly cynicism still permeates the first act. Members of the ensemble now thread their way in and around the various scenes, like the chorus in "A Little Night Music," asking why dreams collapse, people lose their path and wrong decisions are made. "Merrily" still doesn't have an answer, beyond the unqualified assumptions that success poisons, life corrupts, and youth necessarily decays.
You really can't warm up to the characters until Act II, when they begin to shed their bitterness and self-centered ambitions. What keeps your interest up -- and the adrenaline flowing -- from the start are songs like "Old Friends," "Like It Was," "Growing Up" (one of the new additions) and "Not a Day Goes By." At one point, a hard-bitten producer (Paul Harman) advises the young Franklin to give the audience something to hum. That may be Mr. Sondheim's dig at those critics who say he doesn't write melodies (a complaint aired yet again about "Passion"). In "Merrily," however, it's precisely the melodies -- smart, lilting, achingly plaintive -- that do most of the work, redeeming the morally bankrupt characters who are singing them and keeping a basically downbeat show buoyant.
One of the few unapologetically chipper numbers, "Bobby and Jackie and Jack," pokes fun at the golden members of the Kennedy clan and how they seemed to be everywhere in 1960. It is sung midway through the second act in a Greenwich Village nightclub by Charley, Franklin and Beth, Franklin's soon-to-be-wife (Anne Bobby), all at the outset of their careers and trying to appear bright and sophisticated. In light of the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, however, the joshing number is unbearably sad. Ironically, more than Mr. Furth's book, it authenticates the musical's less than rosy view of life.
By this time, too, the corrosions and the compromises are well in the past (or the future, as it were) and you will have probably grown fond of the leads. Mr. Gets is no longer a slicked-back wheeler-dealer, but gauche and endearingly trusting. Mr. Heller's sense of humor has uncurdled and he has reverted to his goofy, good-natured self, while all the hard, alcoholic edges in Ms. Ryder's performance have disappeared, leaving her soft and shiny and vulnerable.
Ms. Schulman tends to take fairly broad swipes at the characters when they're older and jaded. And Michele Pawk, as a conniving Broadway star and temptress, is allowed to get away with mugging in the first degree. But as the wonder creeps back into the story and the characters' hearts, the direction turns loving and tender, and the production overcomes a bent for brittle caricature.
The choreographer, Michael Lichtefeld, works efficiently within the small space and concocts on one occasion a witty parody of Bob Fosse's socket-wrenching brand of dancin'. The scenery -- walls and doors of scrim by James Morgan; projections by Wendall K. Harrington -- is modest, but when Mr. Harrington blankets the whole stage with pictures of the cosmos or the New York skyline at night, the effect is magical.
The original "Merrily We Roll Along" was cast with teen-agers, a ploy that was meant to underscore the disenchantments of aging but backfired badly. The production seemed to take unfair advantage of its youthful performers. It was rather as if Andy Hardy were being forced to play Iago, or Juliet were being dressed in Gertrude's clothes. The York Theater Company has found a better way to remind us of the child that persists in the adult.
Periodically, baby pictures of the performers are flashed overhead on the proscenium. Some are dimpled and others toothless, but all look gurglingly happy about life's prospects. How merrily they must have crawled along.
Merrily We Roll Along
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by George Furth; based on the original play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Directed by Susan H. Schulman; choreography by Michael Lichtefeld; music direction by Michael Rafter; set by James Morgan; costumes by Beba Shamash; lighting by Mary Jo Dondlinger; projections by Wendall K. Harrington; sound by Jim van Bergen; orchestral adaptation by G. Harrell; production manager, Joseph V. De Michele; production stage manager, Perry Cline. The York Theater Company production presented by the York Theater Company, Janet Hayes Walker, producing director, Molly Pickering Grose, managing director, and One World Arts Foundation Inc., W. Scott Mc Lucas, executive director; George Rondo, artistic director. At the Theater at St. Peter's Church, Lexington Avenue at 54th Street.
Franklin Shepard . . . Malcolm Gets
Beth . . . . . . . . . Anne Bobby
Jerome . . . . . . . . Philip Hoffman
Gussie . . . . . . . . Michele Pawk
Joe Josephson . . . . .Paul Harman
Charley Kringas . . . Adam Heller
Mary Flynn . . . . . . Amy Ryder
Frank Jr. . . . . . . Jonathan Flanagan
WITH: Danny Burstein, Ron Butler, Rick Crom, James Hindman, Adriane Lenox, Cass Morgan, Christine Toy and Amy M. Young.
