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Sondheim: "Merrily We Roll Along"

 I'm cautiously interested in the new Broadway-bound "Merrily We Roll Along." I've seen this show three times, and I buy into the received wisdom: stunning score, one of the all-time great overtures, who cares about these three middle-aged dopes?


One thing that "Merrily" does especially well, in any version, is to narrate a story of unrequited love. This theme consistently puts wind in Sondheim's sails--whether he is describing Desiree in "Night Music," Sally in "Follies," Mrs. Lovett in "Sweeney," John Hinkley in "Assassins." But the love theme is really special in "Merrily."

Sondheim's mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, would famously stuff a Second Act with reprised numbers. The reprise would tie a little bow around a story. Liesl von Trapp flirts in Act One; in Act Two, using the Liesl melody, Maria delivers a gooey sermon about the virtues of waiting before sex. Nettie ends one part of "Carousel" by comforting a grieving widow. In Act Two, the comfort melody becomes a kind of valedictory speech at a high-school graduation.

Fiendishly, Sondheim resists the urge to comfort anyone. His "reprise" of his big love song is much darker and more upsetting than its original version. The reprise describes the bitter end of love: "I'll die day after day after day....till the days go by." The "first" version is a celebration of the start of love: "It only gets simpler and freer and richer and deeper....It can't get much better much longer...."

We're asked to look at one line in two ways; if you're hounded by the ghost of your lost love, then it's sad to say, "You're somehow a part of my life....and it looks like you'll stay....." The words create a different mood if a bride is singing them to her groom at the altar.

A final magic trick: For a long while, we've sensed that the character Mary is a mess. But it's not until late in the evening that a "flashback" shows the source of the problem: Mary has secretly loved her uninterested friend, Franklin, for the entirety of her adult life. Sondheim confirms this in the most artful and startling way--through music--and he makes the "Les Miserables" love triangle seem like child's play.

For these reasons, of course I'll see "Merrily" once again. My (still-guarded) hopes are high.
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