‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Breaks The Heart (And Fills It Up) On Broadway

Run the story of your life in reverse — things might look a little different. Scars heal. Cynicism and bitterness melts away. Splintered smithereens of ideals reform. Faded hopes rematerialize. Disintegrated or discarded friendships come back to the fore. The thorny thicket of complexities and confusions untangle and fall away to reveal something pure and simple. A luster returns to the eyes.

That’s one takeaway from the 1981 Stephen Sondheim musical, “Merrily We Roll Along,” the first Broadway revival of which opens today at the Hudson Theatre under the direction of Maria Friedman.

“Merrily” is the story of Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff, bearing the gravitational pull of a small planet), a promising composer turned successful hack producer. Franklin’s ascent, or descent, is told in reverse-chronological order, from 1976 to 1957.

It’s also the story of the three-way friendship between Franklin and artistic kindred spirits Charley Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe, feverishly attacking the role) and Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez, channeling the sharpness and sadness of Dorothy Parker beautifully). Fortunately for the show, the three stars are plainly made for one other. Their chemistry, particularly in the symbiotic movements of “Old Friends” (the choreography is by Tim Jackson) suggest decades’ worth of familiarity and backstory. You find yourself barracking for a friendship that, as you’ve already seen, ends up in pain and recrimination.

Speaking of pain, for many theater lovers, the experience of seeing “Merrily” is inextricable from its tortured history. Originally a flop on Broadway, the show has notoriously confounded theater-makers and audiences. (The director Hal Prince concluded it was “too damn complicated.”) The resounding success of this “Merrily” feels like a thrilling culmination of more than four decades of work, not just by Sondheim and book writer George Furth and the director James Lapine, but by the legions of artists who have wrestled with the material since.

Though “Merrily” has nothing to offer in terms of dazzling scenic design or special effects — in that way, the show remains true to its Off Broadway origins at the New York Theatre Workshop — what the show offers, instead, is an utter inundation of overwhelming human feeling. Moment for moment, it is the most intensely emotional show on a Broadway stage in recent memory. It reaches a point where a flip remark on a rooftop, for example, utterly devastates.

Being a Sondheim musical, the music is also stunning. “Merrily” features some of the composer’s most immediate and irresistible tunes (that overture!) within an overall musical architecture that is, frankly, genius.

It’s easy to read “Merrily” as essentially pessimistic: “Why can’t it be like it was?” It’s the paradox of the show that the happiest scenes are also the saddest.

In there somewhere, though, there’s a generous embrace, I think, of life’s multitudes. Maybe the way things turned out doesn’t necessarily diminish the beauty of the way that it was. Either way, it’s a profoundly special piece of theater that prompts audiences to contemplate nothing less than the trajectory of their friendships, their dreams, their whole lives.

“Merrily” breaks the heart; it fills it up. I left the theater utterly spent; I can’t wait to see it again.