“Merrily We Roll Alongside” Director Maria Friedman on Why It Works – New York Theater

How did Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical “Merrily We Roll Alongside,” one of the notorious flops on Broadway, develop into one of many greatest hits of the 2023-2024 Broadway season, 4 a long time later? This primary Broadway revival has seven 2024 Tony Award nominations, with many individuals predicting – and me hoping (2024 Tony Awards: Who SHOULD win, and why) –  that it’ll snag nearly all of them this Sunday on the 77^th annual Tony Awards.

 I used to be capable of ask the query of  director Maria Friedman, who has been nominated for her Broadway directorial debut. She solutions within the video under.

 I discovered her reply stunning, for a number of causes.

As talked about within the video, she sees it as starting some thirty years in the past when she was forged as “Mary,” one of many three buddies on the heart of the story, in a manufacturing of the musical in England. 

However one thing that’s solely alluded to within the video is my shock at her obvious assumption that the issues with the musical have been all within the unique 1981 manufacturing, and stuck way back, every new manufacturing having steadily improved it.

In a pan of a 2019 Off-Broadway manufacturing, Jesse Inexperienced wrote within the New York Instances: “A present with one of many richest scores of the Eighties, by Stephen Sondheim — however one of the problematic books, by George Furth — it has spent the 38 years since its flop Broadway opening [trying] to search out its finest self. On the proof of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal…I’m sorry to say that it’s nonetheless not “Merrily”’s time. Possibly it by no means can be….”

His was not an outlier opinion, not less than not in New York. (My response to the present manufacturing would possibly in sure methods be outlier, though I joined in praising it.)

 That it took so lengthy for “Merrily” to search out its time makes the story much more compelling.

Maria Friedman has a lot of curiosity to say, even in my off-the-cuff interview on the purple carPet of the Theatre World Awards, the place Friedman, a TWA winner in 2006  for her Broadway debut as an actress in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Lady in White,” was again to current an award to a newcomer.

What’s neglected are issues I realized from different interviews: 

She has by no means seen a manufacturing of “Merrily” that she hasn’t herself directed, besides the one she starred in.

She and Sondheim has an virtually forty-year skilled collaboration that developed into a protracted and shut relationship. “I didn’t have a dad, and he took that position for me,” she stated tearfully to Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour  

Her youthful sister Sonia Friedman has significantly extra expertise on Broadway, having received 14 Tonys as a producer, and nominated for 2 this yr, each “Merrily” and “Stereophonic”

“We get requested on a regular basis why this manufacturing is successful,” Jonathan Groff has stated. “There are two phrases which can be the explanation for that success. These two phrases are: Maria Friedman…She has painstakingly crafted each single microbeat of our present.”