REVIEW: "Merrily We Roll Along" at the Hudson Theatre on May 24, 2024.
There are few more notoriously storied musicals than the 1981 show composed by Stephen Sondheim and directed by Hal Prince. It was a major fiasco that lasted just 17 performances on Broadway, even though the pair created a string of classic musicals that had permanently redefined musical theatre - "Company", Sweeney Todd", "A Little Night Music", "Follies".
It has taken 43 years to mount a Broadway revival, and the wait was worth it. The concept was challenging to deliver credibly to begin with, a highly complex backward chronology that follows a trio of friends over the course of two decades. The complications start with the characters introduced as estranged and cynical at forty. This was a risky move to engage an audience.
We are then led gradually back to their youthful innocence when they were full of dreams and unsure of their talent. The bond of their relationship is what gets them through the turbulence of both success and failure despite the inevitable intrusion of other characters who threaten to extract the threesome from each other.
The three central performances were essential to pull off such a theatrical conceit, and the cast delivered. As Frank, the most ambitious and divisive of the trio, Jonathan Groff was fiercely compelling and unafraid to come off as unlikeable. Lindsay Mendez played self-effacing Mary with equal parts turbulence and vulnerability as she constantly pulls back on her love for Frank.
I only wished they gave her more of a defining solo with the show's signature ballad, "Not a Day Goes By". Daniel Radcliffe - yes, Harry Potter - was winsome though not quite at Groff's and Mendez's level of stagecraft mastery. Nonetheless he pulls off his two big numbers - the comical meltdown "Franklin Shepard, Inc." and the poignant "Good Thing Going" - with bell-like assurance.
The rest of the cast performed serviceably with Katie Rose Clarke sweetly naive as Frank's first wife Beth. Krystal Joy Brown overplays his second wife Gussie though she was clearly directed to go for the rafters with her performance. Regardless, this is the show that should've happened back in 1981, and I'm just grateful it was made now. Unfortunately it all ends on July 7.
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