On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (23 page)

This is the plot of Kaufman and Hart’s comedy-drama
Merrily We Roll Along
(1934), in three acts with three scenes in each act. The action covers eighteen years, from 1916 to 1934:

ACT ONE

1916: Delivering his college valedictorian address, Richard Niles extols his “great friendship” with classmate Jonny Crale.

1918: Richard courts Helen, a simple soul unsuited to his intelligence and culture.

1922: Jonny, now an artist, introduces Richard to a new best friend, Julia Glenn, a writer. She tells him, “You’re going to do great things in the theater.” Richard’s experimental off-Broadway piece got him nowhere, but now he’s writing a Society comedy for Althea Royce, a trendy star. He has to live with his loathsome in-laws to do it, which harms his marriage, as Helen sides with their endless assaults on him.

ACT TWO

1923: At the opening-night party for the Royce vehicle, her earthy mother, a vaudeville veteran, mocks the tony airs of Richard’s characters with her own loud antics. (Raising a glass, she shouts, “Up the chimney, boys!”) Sensing that Richard and his star are involved, Helen walks out of the party and her marriage.

1924: Lurid headlines about lovemaking with Althea on a leopard skin rug bedevil Richard at his divorce hearing. Julia (who secretly loves him) urges Richard to get away for a vacation. Paparazzi scam a photo of Richard, holding up a leopard skin behind him, and he breaks down sobbing.

1925: Richard’s bond with Jonny and Julia weakens because they aggressively deplore his writing contentless hits. What about that socially progressive “coal-mine” piece? Richard says it’s not what people want. As he leaves, Julia sadly tells Jonny, “He’s met The Crowd, and there he goes!”

ACT THREE

1926: Living on Park Avenue in bespoke tailoring with a Japanese manservant, Richard is the very glass of style. He neglects his pals—Jonny accuses him of “posing for those lousy pictures in
Vanity Fair
all day.” And Richard has done harm: abandoned by Althea, her husband kills himself.

1927: Jonny has painted a portrait of Richard clutching Althea and a cash register. At a bon ton restaurant, he tries to make up with Richard, who socks him, starting a brawl.

1934: Like The Great Gatsby, Richard has a home on Sands Point (“West Egg” in the Fitzgerald novel). Now it is Althea’s turn to sense that Richard is involved with another woman. At the height of a party, Althea attacks his talent. Fashionable playwright? No: “Fashionable prostitute!” In a fury, she hurls iodine into her replacement’s face, blinding her.

These are the play’s events in chronological order—but not in playing order, because
Merrily We Roll Along
’s narrative ran backward. As the program noted, “Each scene takes place at an earlier time than the scene preceding.” Thus, the play’s first act starts with the Sands Point party and the iodine incident, and the third act ends with Richard’s graduation speech.

The authors’ design was to show the audience, first, how their protagonist ended up and then, step by step, to isolate the mishaps that led a gifted but sensitive and even mousy artist to forfeit all rights to self-fulfillment. As the years recede, we see him fall out with his two best friends because they demand he live up to not his own expectations but theirs. They scorn the elite—The Crowd, as we saw Julia call it—but Richard enjoys being a part of it. “I like meeting Noël Coward,” he tells Jonny, “and I like being successful.”

More important, he adds, “I’m enjoying myself for the first time”: because he was failing at serious work, taking menial jobs and sponging off his gruesome parents-in-law in an atmosphere of non-stop pushing and nagging. Then, at last, the authors pictured Richard finishing college in the certainty that ideals and friendship were all he needed. Because the young believe they are invincible.

It was perfect source material for Sondheim, with the “knowing what you want” problem, the “past creating the present” meme, and the chance to write a kind of newfangled version of good old musical comedy, substantial yet at times lighthearted, and very touching at the close. Comedy tonight, with a kick. Or: it was
Allegro
with a hero who never escaped from The Crowd, as
Allegro
’s hero finally does. Or: it was
Follies
in which Ben marries Sally and leaves her for Phyllis, who in this version is vicious—throwing iodine in someone’s face in 1934 could actually cause blindness. It was a challenge, as all Sondheim’s shows now were, and the first of the challenges was the updating. When the play
Merrily
opened, it was smack in the middle of the sophisticated 1930s, and a smart and ambitious fellow could make a name and fortune as a playwright. Moss Hart was a kid from nowhere; by 1940, he was a national treasure. However, in Sondheim’s day the culture looked to not Broadway but Hollywood, so Sondheim and his librettist, George Furth (returning after
Company
, five shows ago), made their hero a songwriter who becomes a movie producer.

But is a movie producer in the 1980s at all equivalent to a playwright in the 1930s? The author of successful drama back then was a man of renown. “Eugene O’Neill” became a household term, the American for “major playwright” as “Caruso” meant “top opera singer” and “Lindbergh” meant “daring aviator.”

However, in the musical
Merrily
’s 1980s, few knew or cared who produced movies. It mattered in Hollywood—that is, in the industry itself—but not in the cinemas. The rock stars of film were actors and directors, even certain soundtrack composers. What does a movie producer do, anyway, besides make deals? Producers can be extremely powerful, but they’re not
famous
. And the play
Merrily
emphasizes that it is Richard’s fame that grants him entrée into the cultural ruling class. The musical
Merrily
substitutes power for fame, making it a somewhat different story. Richard Niles gets to meet Noël Coward. His counterpart in the musical, Franklin Shepard, meets … who? Laverne and Shirley?

Before we go on, let’s set forth the name changes the three leads underwent from play to musical:

Some of the changes from play to musical made the material more effective, especially in the shift from then to now. Instead of Jonny’s picturing Richard as a Dorian Gray, Charley defames Frank during an interview on national television, a much more dramatic event. And Julia’s phrase “The Crowd” gave rise to a number called “The Blob,” on the hows and whys of the opinion-makers who run New York’s arts scene.

In the play, The Crowd is simply the elite, of which George S. Kaufman was a willing member and Moss Hart an enthusiast. Indeed, Hart’s favorite stunt was to set onstage replicas of the Names that his audience read about in Walter Winchell’s column—Gertrude Lawrence; Harpo Marx; Johnny Weissmuller; Elsa Maxwell; Katharine Cornell’s gay husband, Guthrie McClintic; and even Hart’s mother-in-law, Kitty Carlisle’s mom. In the musical, The Blob is a richer concept than The Crowd—not just the famous and talented but their vast coterie of friends and near-friends, who at times unleash destructive forces as they Make Their Opinions. This aspect, one of the musical
Merrily
’s most intriguing aperçus, got a bit lost; the “Blob” number itself was even cut during previews (though it was reinstated in a later revision).

One very important element of the play completely vanished in the musical—the lengthy scene in which we see Richard’s peace of mind under siege while he boards with his grotesque in-laws. They do appear in the musical, briefly, characterized as intolerant and boring. But the play reveals them as instruments of Richard’s destiny, for their cruelty drives him to seek financial independence, to be free of obligations to anyone who assaults his self-esteem. It explains why he becomes uncomfortable with Jonny and Julia, why he “sells out,” and why his first marriage dissolves.

Worse yet, the musical altered the play’s charming madcap Jonny into the hectoring, self-righteous Charley Kringas. The original Jonny, Walter Abel, became famous in his maturity as an authority figure, but in his twenties and thirties Abel was a romantic lead. When O’Neill’s reboot of Aeschylus’
Oresteia
,
Mourning Becomes Electra
, became the talk of the town, in 1931, the Theatre Guild sent a second company out on the road, headed by heavyweights Judith Anderson and Florence Reed. And Walter Abel played Orin, O’Neill’s equivalent of Orestes and one of the classic jeune premier parts. He is haunted, yes—it wouldn’t be O’Neill if he weren’t. But he is as well attractive and (sort of) powerful.

It would seem that Kaufman and Hart planned Jonathan Crale as a counterweight to Richard Niles: something solid and alluring to contrast with Niles’ hesitant style. Act Two opens with Jonny in pajamas after a night with his current girl friend. After she leaves, Julia comes in, and while talking with her Jonny starts to change. A shot of the two of them, with Abel looking toothsome in his pajama pants, was used prominently in the show’s PR, a bold address of the public for 1934.

In fact, the simple act of showing male skin on stage, so common today, was a contextual signifier in the 1930s: something was up. Later, it was because director Joshua Logan was so closeted that his gay ID resided in the casting and unshirting of gleaming hunks; in
Merrily
’s 1930s, it was called “suggestive”: advising the worldly that something beyond “normal” sex was in play. In other words, the play
Merrily
at least considers a homoerotic subtext in the relationship of Richard and Jonny. The musical’s Charleys might be more effective if they did less kringasing and put some effort into charming us.

The only successful part of the musical in its original form was Sondheim’s score, a combination of easy-listen melody and intricate classical construction. Using a number of melodic cells throughout the evening—as in
Sweeney Todd
but much more overtly—Sondheim combined and adjusted them, so that an improvised piano riff turns into a school song, “The Hills of Tomorrow” (heard in the original production but no longer in the revised show), then into Frank and Charley’s carefree audition piece, “Who Wants To Live in New York?,” and
then
into their soulful ballad, “Good Thing Going.”

Yet the score came off as ingenuous musical-comedy music, appealing and impulsive. Unstudied. The old snark that Sondheim doesn’t write “hummable” tunes never seemed as lame as it did here, and the plan to strip away the compositional devices as the show proceeded exactly matched the “youthening” of the characters. At length, we reached the happy, crazy juveniles who loved each other because they were going to conquer the world together, in “Opening Doors” and the finale, “Our Time.” A Sondheim show can end in mixed feelings; this Sondheim show starts that way, but ends in love and optimism.

Unfortunately, when
Merrily
began previews, in October of 1981, at the Alvin Theatre, it played badly. George Furth’s book, filled with glitches, would be vastly improved over the coming weeks. For instance, the musical’s equivalent of the gigantic fistfight that broke out in the play’s restaurant scene was, at first, simply a feeble snub: Frank haughtily turned away from Charley while seated at a banquette. By the time the show opened, on November 16, Frank, standing, ripped into Charley verbally and shoved him away, his rage at his old best friend at a shocking level of intensity. In fact, this was an improvement on what Kaufman and Hart had, as fistfights are almost never believable on stage. A shove can be incredibly effective, but a full-scale brawl has to be choreographed, and always looks it.

Anyway,
Merrily
’s book was not the problem: it was the production itself, because Hal Prince cast very young kids, apparently to suggest a high-school show, with these children enacting the follies of grown-ups. It was supposed to be endearing and touching, but most of the players came off as clumsy and unknowing. Not naive, as intended: incompetent. “They were amateurs,” said the show’s choreographer, Ron Field, in
Sondheim & Co
. “But that was the concept. And I went, ‘Oh, well, if that’s the concept let’s pick the homeliest and awkwardest, and put them on this funny set. And then they’re going to wear what? Wigs? Gray wigs? And … clothing, like from their mother’s [
sic
] closets. … How come I don’t get it?”

Field had created the dances for
Cabaret
and
Zorbá
for Prince, and choreographed and directed
Applause
and an
On the Town
revival. He was used to working with Broadway dancers, who are, frankly, the best in the world at what they do. Never before did Field have to figure out how to move a cast of schmoos and kadiddlehoppers. There was a dance break in the first-act finale, “Now You Know,” and, besides letting two chorus people try erotic this and that and hoping to keep the three leads looking professional, all Field could do with the corps was fold them into a conga line. And it still looked risible. But when Field approached Prince about this parlous state of affairs, Prince simply said, “Ron, we’re not in trouble.”