This is a continuation of Now You Know from a couple months ago. I started writing it and never quite finished it. (I must have read over this a dozen times, and yet when I re-read it just before publishing it this morning I found a truly blatant eye-burning typo that has probably been there since the very first draft!)

I’ve been watching a lot of videos and listening to a lot of podcasts about the Sondheim/Furth show Merrily We Roll Along, and most of them get several things that are with factually wrong or that I strongly disagree with.

For example, many of them talk about Merrily coming after a string of hit shows by Sondheim and director Hal Prince.

Say what?!

Just how do you define hit, kemo sabe?

While it’s true that the five shows that Sondheim and Prince did previously (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd) did win a bunch of Tony Awards, the way that Broadway generally defines a show as a “hit” is if it turns a profit for its investors, and the only one of those shows to turn a profit was Night Music. Although Sweeney might have turned a profit if Prince hadn’t turned it into such an extravagant spectacle and they hadn’t imported part of a manufacturing foundry for the set which made it far more expensive to mount than it had to be.

Nor were any of those shows unqualified critical successes. In fact, the senior theater critic for the New York Times, Walter Kerr (you know, Jean Kerr’s husband, she of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies fame), panned every single one of Sondheim’s shows. For Walter Kerr the epitome of the Broadway musical was Hello, Dolly! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but musicals can offer so much more and Kerr just couldn’t keep up with the times (no pun intended). I still remember reading Kerr’s nytimes piece on Sweeney where he trashed it up and down and six ways to Sunday.

But it wasn’t just Kerr; when Pacific Overtures was about to open, the Times sent someone to interview Sondheim and ended up publishing a cruel hatchet job.

It wasn’t until Sunday in the Park with George that the Times finally recognized Sondheim’s talents.

So no, the preceding shows were only successful in a very limited way. For the growing number of Sondheim fans, of course, and a few critics here and there. Not that they were flops, of course. They had respectable runs. They just didn’t run long enough to make money for their investors.

I was also surprised to hear people talk about the two most famous songs from the show being “Not a Day Goes By” and “Opening Doors”.

Well, not in my book they aren’t.

I’d opt for “Good Thing Going” and “Old Friends”.

To tell the truth I’ve never much cared for “Not a Day Goes By”. I mean, it’s OK. I don’t hate it or anything. It gets the job done, but it just doesn’t seem as multi-layered as a song like “Good Thing Going”, which works both as a description of a friendship  and of a love affair. Plus, Frank Sinatra sang a cover version of it, which, talk about layering, they now use in the show.

And do I have to defend “Old Friends”? That seems to be the song that defines the show these days.

Here is “Good Thing Going” from the new Broadway Cast recording.

And here is a video of just the accompaniment to “Good Thing Going” for comparison. I enjoy hearing Sondheim’s accompaniment tracks as his harmonies are often so interesting and very idiosyncratic, even when he’s writing a fairly traditional tune such as this.