“Merrily We Roll Along,” the Stephen Sondheim musical which was a Tony Award winner for Best Musical Revival in 2023, is in a limited cinema run in Regal Theatres here.
It’s Broadway’s most topsy turvy creation, a major flop when it debuted in 1981 and bombed at the box office, but a merrily magical blockbuster when it was revived in New York for its successful run in 2022-23. As somewhat of a reward, the play was filmed for posterity, and a brief run on the big screen.
If you’re a bona fide Sondheim devotee, this is a must-see, especially if you’ve already seen the show in its run at the Hudson Theatre. It snapped up four Tonys, and deserved one more.
If you’re a newbie to this Sondheim title, welcome to the party.
It’s unconventional. It starts with the ending, and flashes forward to the beginning of the story, in a truly charming and engaging journey about friendship, anchored with a show biz frame. Thematically, it is a backward dismantling of the bond and alliance of three buddies who grow up, grow apart, find loyalty, lose trust, seek communion, and discover distancing.
As the film begins, Frank Shepherd (Jonathan Groff), a musician-turned-producer, bounces from the theater to Hollywood, is celebrating the success of his first flick. His trusty best friend Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez) is a writer who quietly hates him though she secretly loves him, and his former artistic collaborator Charley Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe) tolerates his indifference, though is eager to get back on track to work to produce new work material.
Groff picked up a Tony for Best Leading Actor in a Musical Radcliffe won a Tony for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical. Mendez was a nominee for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical, and deserved to win (you see her momentous and meticulous work in the film). “Merrily” won Best Revival of a Musical and also the Best Orchestration trophy for a total of four wins.
The film, directed by Maria Friedman, literally magnifies the performances, and showcases the masterful Sondheim score with efficiency. A Radical Media crew — which taped the 2020 “Hamilton” performance film — beautifully captures the depth and nuances of Sondheim’s gloriously playful style, motivated by the composer’s familiar identifying tempos and occasional lyrical repetition.
The key attraction of the movie is the inclusion of constant close-ups of the leads as well as other actors. There’s no proscenium here, but many, many group scenes included close-ups hither and yon.
You might say the “money shot” close-ups capture some white hair in Groff’s otherwise shimmering brown hair; Radcliffe’s frequent grins are part of his usual scheme, because he’s a committed workaholic; and Mendez’s wine-sipping moments go right up to her face. The magnified images also zoom in on real tears in the eyes of all the actors, something you can’t readily experience even from orchestra seats in the Broadway theater.
But you know you’re watching a live theater performance that’s taped, with the laughter and applause retained in key moments of the on-stage action; since the movie was shot with a live audience, the clapping was natural and nice, a validation and acknoledgment of the theatrical experience.
A movie version also enabled “Merrily” to indulge in an old-fashioned employment of the play’s overture by Sondheim, with savvy titling elements; ditto, the closing credits provide fun, playful black-and-white visuals of all pertinent artisans involved in the stage show’s transference to the big screen. All this simply means that “Merrily” offers what might be dubbed the first-ever visual Playbill.
But one sticky point: this is somewhat uncommon filmmaking, disguised as a closeup of a stage work in progress, but with unseen cameras on stage documenting the acting, it’s not quite the theater experience from a seat in the house, nor was it intending to be. You can edit a movie, so this becomes the curiosity of sorts, since you can’t edit a specific performance while it’s happening with the cameras rolling. That kind of change can only be done in the show’s next live performance.