The 90's OB revival of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 11:47am

Did anyone see it? Care to share?

Susan Schulman directed it and won an OBIE...come to think of it, she did an acclaimed revival of PROMISES, PROMISES regionally around the same time which makes you wonder why she hasn't been tapped to do anything since LITTLE WOMEN.

But I digress. It seems to me MERRILY's numbers are some of the standouts of SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM and wasn't Lapine announced to do a revival a couple of years ago?

[newintown]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 12:01pm

I saw it, and it was my favorite revival (but still not quite so exciting as the original production). Rafter's arrangements were the best ever heard in that acoustically awful little York theatre. Michele Pawk was amazing as Gussie, re-written to be an actress rather than a mindless rich parvenu.

The problem was (as in all productions of the show), by the middle of "Bobby & Jackie & Jack" in Act II, there's suddenly a surfeit of irony. You're hit over the head with the fact that these poor people lost their ways in life. And it just gets hopeless.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 1:17pm

Susan Schulman is no Susan Stroman. Merrily is a difficult piece to do. Perhaps it would have had a longer life with a better director, although who knows?

[newintown]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 1:25pm

I certainly won't defend Schulman, but Stroman is not unquestionably better as a director. They both succeed and fail in certain aspects of their work. Stroman is a better choreographer than Jerry Mitchell, Andy Blankenbuhler, Warren Carlyle, or Rob Ashford, but (sadly) that's not saying much. She also is not an actors' director (she doesn't succeed with actors who need a director to excel). Schulman (I think) is better getting interesting things out of actors, but stages with no imagination.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 3:33pm

I thought her minimalist staging of VIOLET was superb.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 3:37pm

Where's Forbidden Broadway when you need them. I'm sort of seeing a production number ala Chita/Rita.

I am Schulman, I'm not Stroman. Stroman is Stroman and not Schulman. Schulman is Susan and not Suzie, and neither has directed for WE tv.

Updated On: 4/27/10 at 03:37 PM

[newintown]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 3:43pm

Very nice!

[frontrowcentre2]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 3:48pm

Susan H. Shulman has been working the past few summers at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. She hs direceted HELLO DOLLY, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, THE MUSIC MAN among others. I don't have my Stratford book with me but I think she is staging EVITA there this summer.

[newintown]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 3:59pm

Reviewing La Schulman's Broadway career (4 shows - the Sweeney revival nicknamed "Teeny Todd", The Secret Garden, The Sound of Music, and Little Women), I'm struck by the consistency of drabness in her productions.

She certainly seems to like to color dark brown, doesn't she?

[Gothampc]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 4:12pm

As I mentioned on another thread, the SOM revival had a beautiful snow globe in the main curtain. Then when the curtain went up, everybody was wishing it would go down again because it was more interesting than the production. Obviously she went to the Arthur Laurents school of directing as in his production of Nick and Nora, the furniture got more applause than the actors.

[Jon]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:11pm

There are actually THREE Susan Shulmans (various spellings) working in NY theatre - the director, a playwright's agent, and a press agent.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/27/10 at 9:47pm

Merrily doesn't work, period. It will never work. It didn't work when Kaufman and Hart did it and it didn't work when Sondheim and Furth and Prince did it.

It goes backward, which is interesting (to a degree) but ultimately uninvolving.

In George S. Kaufman's famous explanation of the classic three-part dramatic structure, he said that "In Act One, you get the hero up a tree. In Act Two, you Throw rocks at him. And in Act Three, you get the poor idiot back down."

In Merrily, you see an odious hack, then you see how he got that way, then you see him with his friends as idealistic young wannabes.

There's no way to get an audience to care about those characters going backward. The very conceit is uninvolving. It's like showing Donald Trump now and then going back in time to show him as a sweet kid. Um, no thanks.

That said, the score is one of my all-time favorite Sondheim scores, and the overture is the last of the big Broadway overtures.

But it doesn't work and it never will. (Unless you start from the end, which is the beginning, and go to the beginning, which is the end.)

Updated On: 4/28/10 at 09:47 PM

[BwayBaby2000]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 2:34am

UGGHHHH!! I wan't so badly for this show to work because the score is so great. I'm still holding onto my dreams that a great production of this show can be done!

[Lavieboheme3090]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 4:23am

Wasn't there a major production of Merrily at one point that was beginning to end, or rather end to beginning. Well anyway in actual chronological order.

[chewy5000]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 5:09am

But where is the fun in that? Its reverse timeline is the gimmick that makes the show fun. As Sondheim says, "you gotta have a gimmick"

[newintown]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 10:15am

Exactly, chewy - without the backwards progression, the story would be just another story. There are other pieces that play with sequence; Pinter's PASSION, for one. Doing these pieces, which were intrinsically created to be told in a non-forward way, would subtract from the piece, not add to it.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 12:20pm

And with the backwards progression, it is uninvolving.

So there's no solution. The Pinter works for other reasons, with other ground rules. Merrily will never work.

[newintown]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 12:54pm

I believe you're right, Joey; I've never been able to get through a whole production (and I've seen many) without falling into that black hole of nihilism midway through Act II.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 1:11pm

Compare and contrast the time element in MWRA and Last 5 Years. Did it work for you in L5Y?

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 2:07pm

I tend to think most stories of productions (major or otherwise) that reversed the chronology are apocryphal, unless the transitions between scenes were either cut or rewritten. You can't just turn the show around and do it without major changes to the score.

[morosco]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 2:45pm

As my friends were leaving the theatre in the middle of the second act an usher whispered to them, "You've seen most of the show don't you want to stay and see how it begins?"

[PalJoey]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 3:01pm

I think the reason Merrily suffers more from the backwards storytelling is that the essential story of Franklin is "How did this idealist kid turn into a son-of-a-bItch?"

Told conventionally, that story is a tragedy. But told in reverse--"How did this son-of-a-bItch start out as an idealistic kid?"--you're asking the audience to care about a son-of-a-bItch.

Pinter's Passion and the Last 5 Years don't ask the audience to "care" in the same way...and the characters are more complex.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 3:06pm

And I never quite got what made Frank such a sonofabitch to begin (end) with.

Oh, and you got my Sondheim in my Pinter! BETRAYAL is the Pinter play that goes backwards.

[Scripps2]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 5:24pm

I've always found Merrily to be involving, moving and ironic. The characters change, as people do. They aren't all likable all of the time, which can also be said about me and many of those closest to me - people are complex.

What I find annoying is not the ssensdrawkcab of it all but the omission of the bookends of the class valedictorian scenes - they create an excitement at the start and add a beautiful pain to the involvement and irony of the journey inbetween.

And I sometimes wonder why the lead wasn't named Franklyn Lloyd Shepherd.


Updated On: 4/28/10 at 05:24 PM

[bk]

Posted: 4/28/10 at 5:52pm

The problem with Merrily, aside from the backward storytelling, is that the book, especially at the beginning, is way too melodramatic for its own good - in fact, it's terrible, and almost worse in the revised version. By the time we get to the idealistic kids, as others have pointed out, we just are done with this group - I never understand those who are moved by this and I think they're seeing (or hearing) a show in their head that simply is not the show on view. Listening to the score alone it's possible to be seduced by the music and lyrics, but in the theater there is no way to be seduced by anything. This show has defeated everyone who's tried to do it, and that includes some pretty heavyweight creative people and actors.

The York production was okay - the recording, which I did, at least, sounds much better than it did in the theater (we used the reduced San Diego orchestrations for twelve, I think), and there are some wonderful performances preserved on the CD, so that's good.

Updated On: 4/28/10 at 05:52 PM