Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along might be the only example of a show that is both a notorious flop and a beloved classic. After Harold Prince, the leading director of the day, made a series of spectacularly awful choices—casting inexperienced and largely indistinguishable teen and young-adult actors, then dressing them in sweatshirts with their names on them for identification—the initial version lasted only sixteen performances. Sondheim and Prince, previously close collaborators, had a falling-out that lasted decades.
Today, the triumph of the first Broadway revival, slated for a date to be determined this fall, seems all but guaranteed. It will be a transfer of the euphorically received production that closed in January at downtown’s New York Theatre Workshop, whose 199 seats quickly sold out for the run of the show, leaving ravenous fans camped out on the sidewalk at each performance hoping for returned tickets. Maria Friedman, the director, did what Prince couldn’t do—get out of the way of Sondheim’s incandescent writing.
Friedman’s revival featured a big movie star—Daniel Radcliffe—as the lovable nerd lyricist Charlie Kringas. Radcliffe, who seems intent on running as far away from Harry Potter as he can (lately he appeared as Weird Al Yankovic in an amusing television movie) is, to his credit, content to play the comical second-banana role. The lead is a major Broadway figure, Jonathan Groff, a superior singer and actor who plays the central role of Franklin Shepherd, a genius composer whose personal and professional missteps
