Essential listening for Sondheim fans, therapy for recovering overachievers, and a warning label for anyone moving to New York or LA with a dream. 9/10. Have tissues ready for the rooftop.
Of course, you can’t write about Merrily without mentioning the train wreck of 1981. After the genius of Sweeney Todd , Sondheim and director Harold Prince assembled a cast of fresh-faced kids (including a 22-year-old Jason Alexander). The out-of-town tryouts in San Diego were a bloodbath. Audiences, disoriented by the reverse chronology, walked out. Critics sharpened their knives.
And for anyone who has ever wondered where their 20-year-old self went, Merrily We Roll Along is that crack. Look inside. You might not like what you see. But you won’t be able to look away.
It’s not a perfect musical. It’s clunky in places. The second act drags. But it is, to borrow a phrase from Charley, a musical about "a moment of truth, a crack in the wall."
If you’ve never listened to Merrily We Roll Along , don’t start with the 1981 cast recording. It’s frantic and under-rehearsed. Start with the 1994 Broadway revival cast or the 2023 New York City Center production. Listen to "Opening Doors" (a mini-show within the show about trying to get produced) and "Not a Day Goes By" (a gut-punch of a breakup song that plays forward in time, creating a structural rhyme with the rest of the backward plot).
Telling a story in reverse is a gimmick in lesser hands. In Sondheim’s, it’s a scalpel. We know where these people end up. We see Frank as a soulless producer before we see him as a hopeful pianist. So when young Frank makes a small compromise—skipping a rehearsal for a TV gig, taking an easy paycheck "just this once"—the audience doesn’t see a mistake. We see the first crack in a dam that will eventually drown his soul.
Here’s the miracle: Merrily refused to stay dead.
There is a specific, gut-wrenching moment in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along that haunts me. It’s not the big betrayal at the end, nor the famous flop of its 1981 premiere. It’s the line: "How did we get here?"
Then, scene by scene, we rewind. We watch the lawsuits disappear, the affairs un-happen, the friendships mend, and the cynicism fade to bright, naive ambition. We end in 1957, on a rooftop in New York, as three college kids swear to change the world and "make it last forever."
For most stories, that’s the opening question. For this musical, it’s the entire plot.
And that final scene—the rooftop—is devastating not because it’s sad, but because it’s hopeful . You watch them sing "Our Time," a song so pure and soaring it hurts, and you think: They have no idea what’s coming. But you also think: And isn’t that beautiful? For one night, they were right.
It closed on Broadway after 16 performances. For years, it was the show’s epitaph: Sondheim’s beautiful disaster.
