Maria Friedman’s transformative revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” made the show one of the great flop-to-hit comebacks in Broadway history. In the heady days after her production won four Tony Awards in 2024, the company — with a cast led by Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez — spent three days turning the musical into a movie, preserving their performance forever. That film will be released in theaters on Friday. Here are five things to know about the musical, and the new film.
What is “Merrily We Roll Along”?
It is a 1981 musical, with a score by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, about the implosion of a three-way friendship among a playwright, a composer and a novelist. But there’s a twist: The story unfolds in reverse chronological order.
The show has been reworked many times, but this latest version begins in 1976, at a party in Los Angeles at which it becomes clear that the friendship has splintered. It moves backward, through nine scenes, to 1957, when three starry-eyed 20-somethings meet on a New York City rooftop where they have gathered to watch Russia’s Sputnik satellite pass overhead.
“It makes everybody think about their relationship with their friends — in the past, and moving forward,” said Dave Sirulnick, president of entertainment at RadicalMedia, the film’s production company.
Why was the original production a flop?
Directed by the legendary Hal Prince, a regular Sondheim collaborator, the original was cast with teens and young adults, and that just didn’t work for audiences or critics. In his review for The New York Times, Frank Rich called it “a shambles.” The show closed just two weeks after opening.
But the dashed-dreams story, with some of Sondheim’s most moving songs, didn’t disappear. (The show, Rich acknowledged, had “a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful — that soar and linger and hurt.”)
A community of admirers grew over the years, as the musical was rethought, reworked, restaged and rediscovered, and its odyssey was the subject of a 2016 documentary, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.”
How did this production come about?
Maria Friedman, a British actress, starred in a production of the show in England in 1992 and became a believer. She directed a student production two decades later, and then kept going, directing a professional production at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, and using what she learned there to inform subsequent productions in London’s West End, in Japan, and at Boston’s Huntington Theater.
By 2022 she was ready for New York, and Radcliffe — famous for playing Harry Potter onscreen — agreed to join the cast, making it a must-see. The Off Broadway production, at New York Theater Workshop, was a sold-out smash, and it transferred to Broadway, produced by Friedman’s sister, Sonia, in 2023.
The response could not have been more different than in 1981. The reviews were unanimously positive (“‘Merrily’ has been found in the dark,” exulted the New York Times critic Jesse Green.) The sold-out show was twice extended; the 10-month run was profitable (a rarity on Broadway); and by the end ticket prices had reached $949. It won the Tony for best musical revival, and forever altered the way “Merrily” will be described in the annals of musical theater history.
What did it take to turn the play into a movie?
The Friedmans wanted to preserve the production, and to make it accessible to wider audiences.
“Steve wanted his stories to be seen and heard,” said Maria Friedman, who then quoted a line from the show: “Musicals are popular. They’re a great way to state important ideas, ideas that could really make a difference.”
The filmmakers shot three performances with a paying audience and also shot the actors doing scenes without an audience, which allowed them to put cameras onstage to get tight shots.
That was followed by months of editing, color correcting, audio mixing — and designing scene titles, with time and place in period fonts, to help the audience track the action. The effect is something more than a straightforward live-capture — you hear, but do not see, the audience laughing and cheering, but the perspective is generally much more intimate than from a seat in the theater. Quite a bit of detail is revealed: You can clearly see tears on the faces of Groff, whose character has a lot to regret, and Mendez, whose character suffers from unrequited love.
“There’s lots of big Sondheim fans around the country and the world that may not have been able to see our production,” Radcliffe said, “so I’m very glad that a version now exists for all those as well.”
Isn’t there another “Merrily” movie in the works?
Yes, but it’s going to take a while. In 2019, the director Richard Linklater started shooting a “Merrily” film, casting young adult actors (Paul Mescal, Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein) with the idea of shooting intermittently over the course of two decades, so that the actors would always be the approximate age of the characters they are playing.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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