Overview
When Merrily We Roll Along returned to Broadway at the Hudson Theatre on October 10, 2023, it accomplished something almost unimaginable given its history: one of Broadway's most notorious failures became one of the most celebrated revivals of its generation. The musical follows three friends—composer Franklin Shepard, playwright and lyricist Charley Kringas, and writer Mary Flynn—across approximately two decades of friendship, ambition, collaboration, love, and disappointment. But Merrily tells their story backward. The musical begins with Frank in middle age. He is wealthy and successful in Hollywood, but his closest friendships have collapsed. Mary is bitter and unhappy. Charley no longer speaks to him. Frank has achieved much of what his younger self dreamed of achieving, yet something essential has been lost. Then the musical moves backward. Scene by scene, we watch consequences disappear. Arguments become friendships again. Failed marriages become romances. Cynicism becomes ambition. Regrets become possibilities. Eventually, we reach the beginning: three young friends on a rooftop in 1957, looking up at Sputnik and imagining everything they might accomplish together. Songs including “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Old Friends,” “Like It Was,” “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” “Now You Know,” “Not a Day Goes By,” “Opening Doors,” and “Our Time” ask a deceptively simple question: How did people who once loved one another and dreamed together become the people we met at the beginning?
Historical Era
The history of Merrily We Roll Along is almost inseparable from the meaning of the musical itself. The original production opened at the Alvin Theatre on November 16, 1981, directed by legendary producer-director Harold Prince, Sondheim's collaborator on Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd. Expectations were enormous. The result was disastrous. After a troubled preview period, Merrily closed after only 16 regular performances. (IBDB) Yet the score refused to disappear.
“Not a Day Goes By,” “Old Friends,” “Good Thing Going,” and “Our Time” became admired independently, while Sondheim and Furth continued revising the musical. Regional and international productions repeatedly experimented with how to make its unusual structure work. Over four decades, Merrily slowly changed status. It went from flop to cult musical to rediscovered masterpiece. The Reverse-Chronology Experiment The feature that makes Merrily difficult is also what makes it extraordinary. Most stories give audiences cause and then effect. Merrily gives us the effect first. We initially meet Frank after his compromises have already occurred. He appears wealthy, distant, and frustrating. We do not yet understand why Mary is furious with him or why Charley abandoned their partnership. Then time moves backward. Information accumulates in reverse. We see Frank and Charley before their friendship broke. We see Frank and Beth before their marriage failed. We hear “Not a Day Goes By” first through the pain of a relationship ending and later through the optimism of the same relationship beginning. The words remain connected. Our understanding of them changes. The structure turns the audience into something like an archaeologist, digging backward through people's lives until we reach the ideals buried underneath everything that came afterward. Success and Compromise At the center of Merrily is a question that appears repeatedly throughout Sondheim's work: What does success cost? Frank begins as an idealistic composer who wants to create meaningful work with Charley. But success offers alternatives.
Hollywood offers money. Commercial producers offer opportunities. Gussie offers access to another world. None of Frank's individual decisions necessarily seems catastrophic. That is what makes his transformation disturbing. He does not wake up one morning and decide to betray everything he believes in. He compromises gradually. One opportunity leads to another. By the time we meet him at the chronological end of his story, he has achieved almost everything that conventional measures of success say he should want. Yet he has lost the relationships that once gave those ambitions meaning. “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” One of the musical's most devastating moments is “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” Charley and Frank are supposed to appear together for a television interview. Instead, Charley explodes. He describes watching his friend become consumed by meetings, deals, producers, contracts, and commercial obligations until the creative partnership they once shared barely exists. The number is funny, furious, and heartbreaking at the same time. Because the musical moves backward, however, the audience later encounters the younger Charley and Frank when their collaboration was effortless. That makes the earlier argument more painful in retrospect. We already know what they will lose. They do not. “Opening Doors” and the Young Artist Near the chronological beginning of the story comes “Opening Doors,” one of Sondheim's most autobiographical-feeling depictions of young artists attempting to build careers.
Frank and Charley write songs. Mary works on her novel. They audition material. They receive criticism. They make almost no money. They celebrate tiny successes. The number captures the strange period before a career becomes a career—when people are producing work largely because they believe something might eventually happen. Because audiences have already seen Frank wealthy and successful, these scenes acquire an unusual emotional weight. Normally, we would look at struggling young artists and wonder: Will they make it? Here, we already know Frank will. Instead we wonder: What will making it do to him? Maria Friedman's Revival Director Maria Friedman, a longtime interpreter of Sondheim's work, had previously directed the production at London's Menier Chocolate Factory in 2012 before it transferred to the West End and won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival. The production was subsequently reworked for New York Theatre Workshop in 2022 and transferred to Broadway in 2023. (Sonia Friedman) Friedman's approach helped clarify something crucial: the reverse chronology should not be treated primarily as an intellectual puzzle. It is an emotional mechanism. The audience does not need elaborate tricks to understand what year it is. What matters is recognizing the changing relationships among Frank, Charley, and Mary. The 2023 production therefore placed extraordinary emphasis on the actors. Jonathan Groff played Frank, Daniel Radcliffe played Charley, and Lindsay Mendez played Mary. (Tony Awards)
Their chemistry made the final destination of the backward journey particularly painful. “Our Time” The final song is “Our Time.” But chronologically, it is the beginning. Frank, Charley, and Mary are young. Their careers have barely started. They stand together watching Sputnik cross the night sky. The future appears enormous. They do not know about the marriages that will fail. They do not know about the television interview that will destroy Frank and Charley's friendship. Mary does not know what her feelings for Frank will eventually cost her. Frank does not know how success will change him. They simply believe: this is our time. The audience knows better. That knowledge turns optimism into heartbreak. But Sondheim does not make their younger hope ridiculous. The dreams were real. The friendship was real. The possibility was real. The tragedy is not that they were foolish to believe in those things. The tragedy is that we have already seen how difficult they will be to preserve.
Historical Significance
The 2023 production became the first Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along since the disastrous original production four decades earlier. (IBDB) Its reception represented one of the most extraordinary reversals in modern Broadway history. At the 2024 Tony Awards, the production received seven nominations and won four: Best Revival of a Musical, Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Jonathan Groff, Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Daniel Radcliffe, and Best Orchestrations for Jonathan Tunick. (Tony Awards)
The commercial reversal was equally striking. The production recouped its $12 million capitalization and ultimately played 312 regular performances and 20 previews. Its final week broke the Hudson Theatre's box-office record and became the highest-grossing week for a Sondheim musical on Broadway at that time. (Sonia Friedman) A musical that survived only 16 performances in 1981 had become, more than forty years later, a sold-out Broadway event. (IBDB) A Revival That Changed the Original That history makes the 2023 Merrily especially important for an exhibition about Broadway. Usually, we think of revivals as preserving successful works. Merrily demonstrates that a revival can do something more radical: it can change history's judgment of a work. The score did not suddenly become different in 2023. The reverse chronology was still there. Frank still compromises. The friendships still collapse. “Our Time” still ends the musical. What changed were decades of revisions, performance traditions, directorial interpretation—and the audience encountering the work. The failure of 1981 and the triumph of 2023 therefore belong to the same history. That makes Merrily itself resemble its structure. To understand where the musical ended up, Broadway had to look backward. Friendship, Ambition, and Time Ultimately, Merrily We Roll Along is not really about whether ambition is good or bad. Frank's desire to succeed is not inherently wrong. Charley's artistic idealism is not always easy to live with. Mary's loyalty does not protect her from bitterness. All three characters make mistakes.
What matters is the gradual accumulation of choices. That is what reverse chronology reveals so powerfully. We usually experience our own lives forward, unable to know which small decisions will eventually become turning points. Merrily gives the audience an impossible privilege: we get to see the turning points after we already know where they lead.
Why It Resonates With Me
What resonates with me most about Merrily We Roll Along is its question of how you pursue ambition without losing the reasons you became ambitious in the first place. Frank, Charley, and Mary begin with creativity, friendship, and the feeling that the future contains endless possibilities. Frank eventually achieves the kind of success his younger self could barely imagine, but the musical forces us to ask whether achievement still counts as success when the relationships and values that once gave it meaning have disappeared. I also find the history of the musical itself almost as moving as its plot: a show that lasted only sixteen performances eventually returned more than forty years later and won Best Revival. That makes Merrily a perfect argument for why Broadway should be understood as living history. Sometimes a work is not finished simply because one generation decided it had failed. Time can change not only how we understand our own choices, but how we understand art itself.
