“Merrily We Roll Along”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - May 2011

There are two important reasons to go see Merrily We Roll Along at Hubbard Hall:
1. It’s very good
2. If you are a theatre geek like me, you can carve another notch on your belt for having seen a full production of an obscure Sondheim musical. Serious bragging rights are involved here!

I am such a &$#% geek that I can tell you this is the SECOND full production of Merrily We Roll Along that I have seen, but no, I did not see the original blink-and-you-missed-it 1981 Broadway production. I had just gotten married but I suspect that I would have thrown bridegroom and bouquet aside and hightailed it to the Dover Plains train station in a heartbeat if the opportunity to see the new Sondheim show had presented itself, except that I was the thick of directing H.M.S. Pinafore at the time.

Sandwiched between the Tony Award winning Sweeney Todd (1979) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince collaborated on a musical adaptation of a 1934 comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Merrily We Roll Along. That the original had been a comparative flop for that hit-making team of the 1930’s perhaps should have been a sign to the hit-making team of the 1970’s. The original Broadway production ran a scant 16 performances, and its failure prompted Sondheim to announce he was leaving the theatre to write video games.

I saw a student production at Williams College in 1996, and it was very good. Sondheim and librettist George Furth intended this show for young performers, and so Merrily… is an ideal choice for an ambitious college theatre. Of course, Sondheim is a Williams alumnus (class of 1950), but by the late 1990’s there was increased interested in Merrily We Roll Along with several major regional revivals, and the composer has continued to tweak the work throughout the intervening years. So while I obviously did not see the award-winning 2000 London version being presented at Hubbard Hall, I saw something much closer to it than to the 1981 original.

The score of Merrily We Roll Along has never gone out of favor. Despite the original productions “failure” a cast album was released and I think you will find some of the songs quite familiar as the have entered the Sondheim Cabaret oeuvre and frequently performed. At Hubbard Hall they are most ably performed by a lively cast and a four piece band led by Richard Cherry, who are perched above the action in the balcony. (The audience is seated in tiers in front of the stage, facing the back of the hall, and the performance is on the floor.)

Merrily We Roll Along has a happy ending only because it ends at the beginning.

The show chronicles two decades in the life of Franklin Shephard (Josh Gray) and his friends, only it plays them backwards. We meet Frank in 1976 at a miserable, drink-sodden forty. He is at the pinnacle of worldly success as a Hollywood producer, but his personal life is a shambles as his second marriage, to Gussie Carnegie (Amy Northup), is disintegrating. He is not speaking to his closest friend Charey Kringas (Frankie Kraft) nor his first wife Beth (Kara Cornell) and their son Frank, Jr. (Cole Boggan). Mary Flynn (Med Ward), the only friend to have stood by him, is literally drowning in drink and unrequited love. Once a best-selling author, she is now a washed-up has-been.

The trouble with this show is that it starts with such a cacophony of misery amidst young actors stretching to play a nebulous middle-age that generally eludes them. It is no surprise that, as the show takes us back through their lives to the day in 1957 when Frank and Charley meet Mary on the rooftop of a Columbia dorm (or a building which rents to students) as they scan the skies for Sputnik and dream of their futures, that the emotional load lightens and the actors become more comfortable in their younger roles.

Director Kevin McGuire has assembled a fairly young cast, although not the teenagers that Sondheim and Furth first envisioned – a mixture of NYC-based actors and local folks. Sadly, Gray as Franklin is the weakest of the leads. His look is too pale and boyish (no make-up tricks are used to age the actors here) and his voice is thin in the upper registers. McGuire has him spend a lot of time staring soulfully at the audience, which got old fast.

On the other hand Kraft, Ward, Cornell, and Northup are delightful. Kraft captures attention early on with a strong delivery of Franklin Shephard, Inc. one of those numbers in which Sondheim captures so perfectly the vibratory energy of human anger.

Ward is the clear star of the show, riveting attention from the very start. Her looks hit the perfect balance between beauty (she has a wonderful, crinkly smile!) and quirkiness, and are a fine counterpoint to Northup’s blonde bombshell curves and Cornell’s cool preppy order. Northup does the best job of transforming herself from a forty-something star clinging to her golden youth to a twenty-something secretary on the make. Cornell, whose character is introduced late in the first act in an angry moment during Frank and Beth’s divorce proceedings, quickly catches us up on Beth’s story arc and makes her a winning and sympathetic addition to the team by the show’s end.

Peter Delocis is perfectly cast as Gussie’s first husband Joe Josephson, who produces Frank and Charley’s shows and then loses both his wife and his success to his protégés.

The rest of the company play a variety of supporting roles and assist with the scene changes. Karen Koziol has designed an interesting non-set, backed by two huge photographic drops depicting the area around the Manhattan Bridge* in New York City. The Hollywood sign twinkles from the balcony rim during the first scene. And moveable scenery pieces notably include both an upright and a grand piano.

Koziol has also designed the costumes and here she is much less successful. Granted there are a LOT of costume changes and TCHH is not a big budget operation, but the costumes are mostly street clothes and the 1976-1957 time period contains some signature fashion looks that could have been affordably incorporated by borrowing judiciously from a vintage clothing collection or having an able seamstress (why this that word so gender specific?) whip up a few key pieces. So where the costumes could have helped tell the story, they merely befuddled those hoping for visual cues to the era.

I wasted a whole lot of time during the first act carefully doing mental math to make sure I knew how old the central characters were supposed to be in each scene. Then at intermission I discovered that they have kindly put all that in the program for you. So don’t distract yourself the way I did!

I am always amazed and eternally grateful that I live in a region where a 40-60 minute drive over majestic mountains or through scenic cornfields brings me to some place where I can see exciting theatre, up close and personal, for a very reasonable ticket price. Don’t let the original “failure” of this piece put you off. Having seen it twice, I feel pretty strongly that the New York theatre community was just out to knock Sondheim down a peg in 1981 and this show came along in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is nothing wrong with this property and almost everything right with this production. Go see it!

The Theatre Company at Hubbard Hall’s production of Merrily We Roll Along runs from May 12-June 4 at Hubbard Hall, 25 East Main Street in Cambridge, NY. The show runs two and a half hours with one intermission and is suitable for mature teens and adults. Performances are scheduled for: May 12 (Pay What You Will / Open Rehearsal) at 8 p.m., May 13, 14, 20, 21, 27 28, and June 3 and 4 at 8 p.m.; May 15, 22, and 29 at 3 p.m.; and June 4 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $22 for Hubbard Hall members, $25 for non-members and $15 for students and children. Tickets are available at www.hubbardhall.org or by calling 518-677-2495.

* As a native New Yorker who grew up by the turbid waters of Hell’s Gate, I pride myself on knowing my City bridges, and the identity of the bridge on the backdrop was a matter of considerable debate between me and my companion before the start of the show. The bridge most visible from the Columbia area at 110th street would, of course, by the George Washington.

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