In case you don’t know The Overture to Merrily We Roll Along, here’s the link to it on YouTube, (it can’t be embedded) though you might have to endure a 15 second commercial. It’s the Original Broadway Cast with the original orchestration including the tuba.
Or here it is on Apple Music:
The tuba has a really prominent part in the song “Opening Doors”, which also happens to be the only song that Sondheim wrote that was autobiographical. The situation is the late 1950s and the three friends Frank, Charley, and Mary are trying to find their way. Mary is a writer; she wants to write novels but she’ll take jobs at magazines in the meantime. Charley and Frank are trying to write a musical that means something, but they are having trouble finding a producer who takes them seriously.
Musically and lyrically there are lots of allusions to other songs and themes in the show, most prominently the motif that Frank keeps doodling on the piano ends up in “Good Thing Going” (the opening line “It started out like a song”) but in the meantime it forms the basis of their song “Who Wants to Live in New York?”, and that in turn is a parody of a song that Sondheim wrote for his first show, Saturday Night, which didn’t get produced until decades later. The song that it parodies is “What More Do I Need?”, which is about how crummy life is in New York but now that the singer has found love, that makes it all bearable.
Then there is a reference in “Opening Doors” to the show My Fair Lady. As it happens Sondheim saw that show and thought it was one of the most entertaining evenings he spent in the theater, but even so he didn’t think the creators had really solved the problem of how to turn Bernard Shaw’s play into a musical. Hence, in “Opening Doors” there are the lines “I saw My Fair Lady” and “I sort of enjoyed it.”
When Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins were trying to get backing for their innovative musical based on the Romeo and Juliet story, one of the producers that they approached was George Abbott. They played some of the score for him, but Abbott turned down the chance to produce the show that would eventually be called West Side Story on the grounds that the music had “too mush Stravinsky” [sic] (according to Sondheim’s account). So in the song “Opening Doors” when Charley and Frank play their music for a producer, his comment is that they need to make their tunes more hummable, “I’ll let you know when Stravinsky has a hit.” The producer goes on to give them an example of a hummable melody by humming a snippet of “Some Enchanted Evening” or rather trying to, because he gets the notes wrong.
I’m linking to the recording of the Original Broadway Cast of “Opening Doors” where the producer is played by the then unknown Jason Alexander. When I saw a preview performance of that production in 1981 (the preview period was extended a couple times because it was such troubled show), I took note of the name Jason Alexander as I thought he would have a big future on Broadway. I was sort of right.
I’ve watched a bunch of videos with interviews of the cast of the current Broadway revival, and one question that keeps coming up is if the show is so good, why did it flop back in 1981. That’s an easy question to answer if you’ve read even one book about Sondheim or his collection of lyrics where he spells it out.
So I’ll try to answer, even though nobody reads this blog.
There are four reasons that the original production flopped, and each of those has since been fixed: the cast, the audience, the director, and the script.
The first two can easily be dealt with. The cast was very talented, but alas, they were all very young, early 20s or teens. That, in fact, was the impetus for the show, to do a project about young people. But although the cast was talented, in the opening scenes they had to play jaded, cynical 40-somethings, and they just weren’t up to the task. They gave the impression of a high school production, and this was Broadway. Still there were a couple of musical highlights in the first act, Lonny Price singing and having a breakdown during “Franklin Shepard, Inc” and the can’t miss “Old Friends”, and as the characters got younger in the second act the performers became more credible as well, but it was too late.
Then there was the audience, which although it had been warned, and although there were so many signposts along the way as the chorus sang the years out loud, just didn’t seem to comprehend that the show was moving backwards in time. As I’ve said many times, people are really stupid. Even supposedly sophisticated Broadway audiences. I mean look at how many people still believe in— But that’s another story, never mind.
Then there was Hal Prince, the most overrated director on Broadway, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, he was talented. But he only seemed to be able to do spectacles, and this show didn’t have any falling chandeliers. He dressed the actors in t-shirts and sweatshirts with labels to let the audience know who they were. The labels had things like “Wife”, “Ex-Wife”, and “Next Wife”. It just contributed to the feel of a high school production. When audiences didn’t respond, Prince had no idea what to do. The problem was the concept, and as it was Prince’s concept to begin with, he really couldn’t change it and start over in the middle of the preview period. The best thing that ever could have happened was that this show led to the breakup of Sondheim and Prince so that Sondheim could finally find a better collaborator in James Lapine.
And then there was the script, which was based on the play Merrily We Roll Along by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
Here is Sondheim from his book Finishing the Hat:
Whatever the flaws the show may have had to begin with, the original production compounded the felonies. Hal and I had conceived the treatment of the Kaufman and Hart play as a vehicle for young performers. In 1934 the play had been cast with actors in their twenties and thirties who played slightly older than themselves at the start and slightly younger at the finish. What we envisioned was a cautionary tale in which actors in their late teens and early twenties would begin disguised as middle-aged sophisticates and gradually become their innocent young selves as the evening progressed. Unfortunately, we got caught in a paradox we should have foreseen: actors that young, no matter how talented, rarely have the experience or skills to play anything but themselves, and in this case even that caused them difficulties. (The singular exception was a remarkable performer named Jason Alexander, who at twenty-one seemed like an old pro: it was as if he had been born middle-aged.) The last twenty minutes of the show, when the cast reverted to their true ages, was undeniably touching, but the rest of the evening had an amateur feeling—which, ironically, had been what we wanted. If the show had played in an off-Broadway house at off Broadway prices, it would have stood a better chance of fulfilling our intentions; as it was, at Broadway’s Alvin Theatre and at Broadway prices, it turned the audiences off. The theatergoers who didn’t leave at intermission did a lot of squirming, and with reason: they felt cheated. There were severe problems with the sets and costumes as well, the former being cluttered and charmless, the latter so confusing that Hal threw them all out at dress rehearsal and replaced them with T-shirts lettered with a description of each wearer’s relationship to Frank: “Best Friend,” “Ex-Wife,” etc. I rather liked it; the paying audience did not.
I was a member of that paying audience. I saw a preview performance, which, when I purchased the tickets, was supposed to be a regular performance, but the preview period kept getting extended. And you might think that if the show ended with the uplifting “Our Time”, that might have been enough to send the audience home with a warm glow. But it didn’t end that way.
The original production was framed with Franklin Shepard returning to his high school to give a speech at a graduation ceremony and the chorus singing a song, “The Hills of Tomorrow”, which Shepard had written as a student (and which contains the embryonic motif of “Good Thing Going”). At the beginning of the show when his speech to the young graduating class is filled with self pity and disillusion, the students rebel and begin singing the title song, asking “How did you get to be you, Mr. Shepard?”, and that leads into the song “Rich and Happy” which is supposed to be the high school students’ idea of a Hollywood party with the two-faced guests singing things like “When you see a movie that bad, What on earth can you say? [To Frank] Congratulations!” In fact the whole musical is supposedly the high school students putting on a show of what they imagine Frank’s life was like.
So after “Our Time” the musical snaps back to the present at the graduation ceremony and the audience leaves the theater reminded of just what a self pitying idiot Frank has become, because in the party scene he had a line where he said he would only go to the graduation ceremony if the movie failed.
Curtain.
Now with the exit of Hal Prince, whose idea it was to use inexperienced young people, and the entrance of James Lapine, Sondheim and Furth rewrote the script and two or three songs, dropped the framing device of the high school graduation, and basically had everything fixed by 1991 or so. The copyright on the Revised score that I have is 1991. I saw a terrific performance that used the revised script and score in 1999 at the Arden Theatre here in Philadelphia.
So while Maria Friedman deserves plenty of credit for directing a wonderful production, I want to make it clear that the actual problems with the script were all fixed by the 90s. And it has received many fine regional productions over the years. It was just waiting for the right person or persons to bring it back to Broadway.
So now it is always cast with experienced actors, in the intervening years audiences have gotten used to stories that move backwards in time, Hal Prince has long since been removed, and the script has been revised to fix what needed to be fixed.
By the way, in the revised script Furth went back to the Kaufman and Hart play, and there are some lines from that play that are in the current version. Also, he included an incident with iodine from the original play which he didn’t have in the 1981 version. As tincture of iodine is no longer to be found in many people’s medicine cabinets, they may not be aware that getting splashed with tincture of iodine in the eyes can be quite hazardous.
I’ll leave the final words to Sondheim. He mentions Allegro, which was a failed musical of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers and for which the teenage Sondheim served as a gopher.
Two realizations about the show have occurred to me as I was writing this chapter, and I’m surprised that they hadn’t before. The first is that Merrily We Roll Along is nothing more nor less than an updated version of Allegro. Instead of the story of an idealistic, corrupted and disillusioned doctor, we have an idealistic, corrupted and disillusioned composer, both of them helped to their doom by grasping, ambitious wives, each betraying their best friends. The only, and crucial, difference is that Hammerstein redeems his hero, whereas Kaufman, Hart, Furth and Sondheim leave him sinking into the hell he has created. Still, both tales have a happy ending, ours because it is told backward. Perhaps that’s why the idea for the show, even though it was Hal’s, appealed to me in the first place—I was trying to fix Allegro.
The second realization is that I once had a Franklin Shepard moment myself. It was when I agreed to write Do I Hear a Waltz? I took the job out of expedience and greed, and although I didn’t pay for it as heavily as Frank does, it taught me a lesson—I never again wrote anything that wasn’t for love. And it had a silver lining: the experience helped me write Merrily We Roll Along. It was a show I adored and a deep disappointment in its first outing, and it marked an important period in my professional life.
But then I met James Lapine.