Merrily We Roll Along was Sondheim's biggest failure. Now it's a feature film triumph

If you were looking for the Broadway musical least likely to find wide theatrical success among general audiences … well, that would probably be Cats.

But if you were looking for the second least-likely Broadway musical to find wide theatrical success among general audiences … OK, that would be Dear Evan Hansen.

But let’s say you were to go a bit further down the list. Eventually, you’d bump into Merrily We Roll Along: the once-panned, then triumphantly revived Tony-winner — now recorded and released as a professionally shot stage production. 

Somehow making its way into theatres this week, the almost standoffishly sentimental Stephen Sondheim musical is not so narratively or sonically soothing as Wicked or Cynthia Erivo's Defying Gravity riff. Instead, what you get is musical theatre at its musical theatry-est, featuring tracks so full of jazzy sharps and flats that one character even ironically mocks them in song.

"There's not a tune you can hum," croons the dollars-and-cents obsessed producer Joe Josephson, played by Reg Rogers. "There's not a tune you go: 'Bum-bum-bum-di-dum.'"

And that's not even mentioning a story so convoluted and depressing, its original 1981 run inspired mass walkouts and a closure barely two weeks after its debut.

Based on the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play of the same name, it's a story of a three-way friendship, told in reverse chronological order and peppered with stilted-but-elevated turns of phrase like “Don’t let’s go to extremes,” “Fermez all those bouches” and “The worst vice in this world is advice.”

This is a musical so scattered and uninterested in commercial viability that it makes scathing criticism of fun, accessible art one of its central themes. A show that spoils its own ending right in the opening number, and then demands its audience tag along for the following two hours to see why it all matters.

In short, it’s fantastic. 

To be clear, Merrily We Roll Along is not the production to win over your showtune-hating friend. Opening on a disastrously climactic party in 1976, we’re introduced to Merrily’s main characters right as they decide to part ways for good.

First, there’s Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff), a composer simultaneously at the apex of his career and rock bottom of his personal life. Having just effectively sold his soul to get a banal, though lucrative Hollywood film released, we look on as his drama critic best friend Mary (Lindsay Mendez) drinks herself into a stupor, before storming out of Shepard’s self-indulgent, self-pitying whirlpool of a life.

We then slowly journey a few years at a time back to the night they met in 1957. Witnessing adultery, betrayal, divorce courts and a whole lot of musical theatre, we learn just what drove apart Mary, Franklin and their lyricist/playwright friend Charley (Daniel Radcliffe).  And — in a gloomy nod to the embittering difficulties of life — the closer to the beginning we find ourselves, the more optimistic our characters become.

As these starry-eyed kids take different paths to different ends — selling out for success, toiling toward genius in relative poverty, or simply giving up — the play takes on an increasingly tragic framing as the songs get more upbeat. 

Trapped by their own ambition and blind to the gradual accumulation of emotional wounds they inflict on one another, Merrily We Roll Along hammers its point home with an unrelenting, heartbreaking finality: be careful what you wish for, but be more careful of what you give up to get it.