Merrily We Roll Along

Spring will be blossoming with aspiration, colorful excitement, and powerful musical energy as Center Stage Theatre prepares to close out their 2024-25 theatrical season with an ambitious production of Merrily We Roll Along - a cult classic musical from legendary composer Stephen Sondheim - set for performances that will run May 9 - 18^th in the Center’s Little Theater.

This moving and thought-provoking musical literally travels back ward in time to explore the relationships of three lifelong friends, tracing their journeys from the accomplished professionals they are today to the youthful and hopeful beginnings of their careers back in college, allowing us to examine the nature of friendship, ambition, and the choices we make through life in reflection of our younger selves.

This Midland Center production is being directed by Chad William Baker, with musical direction by Mike Skull and choreography by Faith Dore. Performed with a full 13-piece orchestra, Merrily We Roll Along features am amazingly vital and memorable score with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim that includes favorites like Opening Doors, Not a Day Goes By and Old Friends, which add immense depth to this narrative about  the high price of success and the importance of staying true to your dreams.

Based upon the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the show tells the story of how three friends' lives and friendships devolve over the course of 20 years, focusing particularly on the character of Franklin Shepard, a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies. Like the play on which it is based, the show's story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends' lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best.

Ironically, Merrily initially premiered on Broadway on November 16, 1981, in a production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince, with a cast almost exclusively of teenagers and young adults. However, the show was not the success the previous Sondheim–Prince collaborations had been. After a chaotic series of preview performances, it opened to widely negative reviews, and closed after 16 performances and 44 previews.

In subsequent years, the show was extensively rewritten and enjoyed several notable productions, including an Off-Broadway revival in 1994 and a West End premiere in 2000 that won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The 2022 Off-Broadway production staged at New York Theatre Workshop was transferred to Broadway in fall 2023, and ended up winning four Tony Awards.

In many ways Merrily We Roll Along is the femme fatale of Stephen Sondheim musicals -  beautiful and troubled - which makes it a particular challenge for any theatrical troupe, largely because the challenges of Merrily are built into its core in a way that make its telling difficult to overcome.

According to Baker, the challenges exist because of the way the script is structured in reverse. “We get these vague hints in the script throughout the play about what happened between Charlie and Frank, but you don’t know exactly what it is until you get to that scene, so the challenge exists in the need to find ways to highlight things these characters are taking about in the future,” he explains. “This happens in Sondheim’s music as well - when the actors sing you hear things being revealed in reverse, which is really cool the way he manages to accomplish this.”

“Sondheim said this was one of the most difficult musicals he ever wrote,” continues Chad. “It has a traditional jazz sound to it, but because he was looking backwards and writing the score in reverse, he would have to create the reprise of a song before the original version, so the score goes bare bones towards the end because this whole transition of writing in reverse allows you to pick up insights into little incidents that lead up to these three friends falling out with one another.”

Baker says that while he was familiar with Sondheim’s more successful big productions  such as Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, it wasn’t until he heard the cast recording in 2013 that he became drawn to this musical and wanted to tackle the task of directing it. 

“For me Sondheim is a genius and the songs he writes are always great,” Chad states. “What make it such a powerful production is in the manner it looks back at all these little choices we made, which at the time may not appear to affect you that much, but as you reflect back upon them start to realize the cumulative impact each choice made in affecting the direction of your life.”

This narrative about friendship and destiny starts out in 1976 when the character of Frank is 40-years old,” explains Chad. “Frank is a composer but the story starts out with him as a movie producer making films in Hollywood. He is no longer friends with his longtime songwriting partner, and we’re never given reasons why that is apart from these little hints that crop up, which detail why their friendship is falling apart and not as strong as it once was.”

“Every three of four years the story moves back in order to articulate and let the audience see what happened to the three of these friends. At the beginning of the play Frank is already on his second wife, a relationship he entered into when still married to his first wife, so we see all these little choices that made him successful also make him lose a lot of important people in his life, and the personal sacrifices each character makes as they struggle to advance their hopes and dreams, which alienate them from the things and people closest to them.”

When asked the biggest challenge with bringing this brilliantly rendered deconstruction of deeply connected lives that are at times bleak and at times hopeful to the stage, Chad says he and the cast have discussed this a lot with each other.  “The continuity flows through the fact each character wants to mend their relationships, so once we establish the foundation to their friendship it becomes a tale of how each of these friends decide to make it worth their time to stick together and tell their story.”

With a total of sixteen cast members, sixteen beautifully constructed Sondheim songs, along with a 13-piece orchestra to perform them, this season finale is a major musical production in every sense of the word. 

“As with most musicals the songs definitely drive the story along and the libretto is very Sondheim in the sense there is never a wasted note or lyric,” reflects Chad. “Every part of each song has something that’s moving the story along through the whole production. The Center gave us the budget to perform this production with full orchestration, which is great, and our musical director Mike Scutt and choreographer Faith Dore are doing an amazing job.”

“We have Noah Walther in the role of Frank Shepard, who majored in Theatre at CMU and has an amazing  voice and is an intuitive actor who understood the character right away, and Jared  Kaufman as Charley Kringas , who performed in Next to Normal last year. Neither of these actors knew each other well before this production, but bonded right away,” notes Chad.

“Erin Whitfield plays the role of Mary Flynn and is an adjunct voice teacher at SVSU. I’m obsessed with her because she has a very good voice and is perfect for that role. She ‘is’ that role because of her inherent warmth mixed with a little bit of attitude, so the three of them are perfect together. They are understand what I want to get out of this show along with the overall vibe of the show.”

“To sum it all up, the strongest qualities with this production is how it shows the importance of friendship to get us through all the success and failures we encounter over the expanse of our lives. How you can always lean on those people who were always there for you from the beginning. Even at certain points where they become fed up with each other, they have each other’s backs.”

“It’s a good story that we need to be reminded about.”

Stephan Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ will run in the Little Theater at Midland Center for the Arts, 1801 W. St. Andrews,  from May 9-11 and May 15-18^th. Performance times are 7:30 PM with 2:00 PM Sunday matinees. Tickets start at $26.50 and are available now by calling (989) 631-8250. or visiting www.midlandcenter.org/merrily.