Bittersweet dreams
Brown’s delightful Merrily We Roll Along
By BILL RODRIGUEZ
Providence Phoenix
March 14, 2007 4:24:57 PM
The ironically sunny payoff of youthful optimism that caps Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along makes it the perfect musical for a college show. That’s probably one reason why Trinity Rep artistic director Curt Columbus is directing the current Brown University Theatre and Sock & Buskin production (through March 18) in Stuart Theatre.
The 1981 musical remake of a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart tells the tale of a composer and writer musical team who join talents in 1956, develop a troubled relationship as one of them turns to the dark side of commercialism, then break up spectacularly nearly 20 years later.
Optimism? You read that correctly. What makes you leave this show beaming is that it’s structured in reverse chronology. It starts off with a 1976 Beverly Hills party that shows the life of successful Hollywood composer Franklin Shepard (Federico Rodriguez) falling apart. However, it ends on a tenement rooftop in 1957 when he and lyricist/playwright Charley Kringas (Jed Resnick), former college friends, realize that they would make a terrific musical writing team. Their moment of revelation not only includes an actual dawn but also a symbolic one — seeing the Russian Sputnik, a symbol of amazing things to come, speed across the horizon.
They also glimpse Charley’s future wife, who remains unseen in the background throughout the story, and Mary Flynn (Monica Willey), a writer and close friend of both who is the first of them to find success, with a best-selling novel and as a theater critic. She is also secretly in love with Frank for the next two decades and is the one who, in 1976, bitter, overweight, and drunk, spoils his party with angry accusations of his selling out.
Merrily We Roll Along, with these depressing elements in the book by George Furth, took a long time to get to Broadway and once there received critical reviews that quickly sank it. But it’s a staging like this one at Brown, with a cast of hopeful and talented young actors, that can accomplish what was originally envisioned: a cautionary tale about living the right life with your creative talent and not being seduced by commercialism.
Since the time sequence lets the story emerge toward the light and the young cast can be more convincing playing the concluding hope than the lesson-giving failure, the second act is understandably a lot more fun. We can join in their joy in putting on an off-off-Broadway musical review — “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” is an exuberant hoot — and for a while put aside thinking about the consequence of hubris.
Speaking of which, Frank is hardly a tragic figure. His sin consists of not finishing a third and politically purposeful musical with Charley after they’d done the two lighthearted ticket-sellers they promised their producer, Joe (Jonathan Harris). Frank is having too much fun, and success, scoring for Hollywood, since he does it so well and that’s where the money is. He has even stolen their producer’s wife, Gussie Carnegie (Aja Nisenson), by now a haughty film diva.
Charley, meanwhile, has won a Pulitzer as a playwright, yet he so much wants to collaborate again with Frank that he irreparably trashes their friendship on live television as he calls him to account in “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” a hilarious indictment of going commercial.
Speaking of salesmanship, Resnick makes that song one of the crowd-rousing high points of the evening. But it’s mainly those upbeat Act 2 numbers that remind us we are in a musical — a guilt-free one, since we’ve paid dutiful attention to the risks of liking just happy songs with melodies we can hum walking out.
The principals here are all in fine voice and lively spirit, so several songs remain memorable. Charley’s practice wife, Beth (Jamie Rosenstein), enthusiastically joins in on the victorious “It’s a Hit!” Mary and Frank join her in reprising her poignant “Not a Day Goes By” from Act 1. When Frank and Charley, guests of honor at a party, are asked to sing their “Good Thing Going” a second time, conversation interrupts and eventually drowns them out, a nice touch of forewarning. The Brown Orchestra, conducted by Paul Phillips, and colorful costume design by Fran Romasco make good contributions.
Merrily We Roll Along quite ambitiously starts with cynicism, in sophisticated company that sneers at idealistic dreams as naïve, and proceeds to encourage our belief in those very dreams. This Brown troupe of more than two dozen young actors makes all this make-believe quite real.
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