New Merrily Pro-Shot? — Page 5

I'll probably watch this when it hits streaming, but I have little to no interest in any production of Merrily without Hills of Tomorrow and High Schoolers in neon T-shirts. I still don't think the original production had any issues with it. The audience was the problem.

Netflix

DramaTeach said: "CoffeeBreak said: "Netflix"

Is that a guess, a question, or a factual response?"

I forgot how needlessly bitchy everyone is on here lol.

I adored this production on stage and thought the film capture was pretty much perfect. A pleasure to see that trio singing Sondheim's brilliant score again

The strengths of the combination film/pro shot are the leading trio, who made the closeups work for them. But as a big fan of the revival, I didn’t think the film worked nearly as well as the stage version. I am glad it exists, but the insistence on so many tight closeups - even of the ensemble during the transitions - felt silly. It seemed like Friedman took a perfectly reasonable idea and then overdid it to the film’s detriment.

The movie emphasized the flaws of the revival and the underlying material. I didn’t mind Krystal Joy Brown’s Gussie in the theater - she was an outsized character who was there to drive parts of the plot - and to illustrate Frank’s flaws. In the film, Gussie’s character feels more ludicrous, mostly a campy villain who is way too transparent.

Merrily We Roll Along was my favorite revival when I saw it in October 2023, so perhaps some disappointment was inevitable. But I started to wonder things like whether Jonathan Groff might have been a little too successful in humanizing Frank. Is the main trio just a little too nice? Is the story just too simplistic? Did Frank’s adorable child really need to be in that last transition? (Father and son had no relationship, after all.) The final moments of the show felt so haunting and sad in the theater. The film didn’t have the same impact.

caitlinette said: "I walked in not knowing the show at all, and loved it, but was very puzzled by Gussie. I’m not sure if it was the actress, the way the role is written, the directing, or a combination of both, but she came off as a total caricature, almost like a Sally Bowlestype. It felt quite incongruent with the rest of the production. On another note, whydid they not try to change up Mary or Charley’slooked throughout the show? Gussie went through so many changes. You could easily track her throughout time, but the others looked virtually the same decade to decade, with no fashion (or hair) changes at all."

I mean they do give Mary that odd/awful party dress in Act II but I see your point. I think with Gussie you're meant to see her extreme transformation from Joe's more mousy (for lack of a better word) assistant to a STAHR. I do think she's TOO caricatured, and Maria Friedman seems to bring that out all the more in this staging compared to the proshot we have of this production from 2013 London with its original cast.

One of the things (among many) that I don't think is improved in the current revised Merrily book is expanding Gussie's part, and making her a full on femme fatale type who Frank simply can't resist (done, in part I think, to make Frank's later decisions more sympathetic to audiences...)

The direction and editing are sh*t, but the performance is still the performance. I couldn't stand the overacting at NYTW, but by the third of fourth time I saw the show, I accepted Gussie (and Krystal's performance) for the creation/artifice she is, as referenced by the line, "one day, I just made myself up, and now I never change."

Updated On: 12/9/25 at 12:22 AM

Sadly those release numbers are bad. It is too bad, no matter what the opinion is of the film creatively it shows a lack of audience for this kind of capture going forward. Other shows will be harder to sell to streamers. I was hopeful about this one with the star power and critical acclaim of the show.

Updated On: 12/9/25 at 10:00 AM

Several factors about the box office:

- Release times were limited and spotty. I wasn’t surprised it was only booked for a week and in smaller theaters in multiplexes in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was a little surprised that, at most, there were two showings per day. There was often just one. And compared to other areas in the country, where it wasn’t available at all, this was a lot.

- There wasn’t really much promotion aside from a few chat show appearances by the main trio.

- The folks releasing this treated it like a specialty item, of interest only to a small number of people. They’re probably right. We never got a true test of Hamilton’s box office appeal as a film but I suspect even that wouldn’t have done as well as Disney hoped when they bought it.

- It’s hard enough for movies to make much of a dent at the box office. Musical proshots are always going to a tough sell, no matter how much they tried to make this one look more like a movie. (And it didn’t really work anyway. It was still shot on a stage and that was obvious.)

And here I thought 1.3 mill was actually pretty good? It only played one night here.... (Maybe I'm just putting it beside how badly Kiss of the Spider Woman did...)

Updated On: 12/9/25 at 07:07 PM

I can't believe no one asked Katie Rose Clarke to tone down her Glinda. On camera it's atrocious, she's practically doing Popular, hair toss and all, awfully distracting.

blaxx said: "I can't believe no one asked Katie Rose Clarke to tone down her Glinda. On camera it's atrocious, she's practically doing Popular, hair toss and all, awfully distracting."

I noticed that too. All I saw was Glinda.