Coming to you from the opposite end of the movie musical spectrum from where “Wicked” perches is Maria Friedman’s compact, propulsive film of her acclaimed revival staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”
The revered composer’s 1981 musical is that canon rarity: a flop (as in, it closed two weeks after opening) that over time became a treasured classic. That’s an apt turn of fortune for a story deploying reverse chronology. Captured at the Hudson Theatre last year during its Tony-winning Broadway run, this “Merrily” is stirring evidence of a hit production, which starred Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the tight-knit trio of New York creatives whose friendship, depicted backward across decades, feels like a shattered vase being reassembled so that we appreciate the cracks and cohesion.
At times it’s as if you’re onstage with the cast. And yet that simple approach, in confident hands, reflects the magic that only cameras and cutting can do: collapse distance and time into a special intimacy, letting strong actors with expert-level songs be the greatest of special effects.
Filmed theater gets a bad rap but it shouldn’t when it’s more than just a recording, and, for now, this version fulfills. (It must, since Richard Linklater’s upcoming cinematic rendering, which he’s filming “Boyhood”-style over 20 years, is truly a “faraway shore,” to quote Sondheim.)
Think backward: Where things begin is the bitter end, at a glitzy Hollywood Hills party in 1976 full of showbiz hangers-on. Frank (Groff), once a motivated composer, has abandoned music to be a hotshot movie producer and two-timing husband. Mary (Mendez), a sharp-witted writer, is an alcoholic no longer tolerant of the sellout Frank has become.
As present becomes past, we see nervous breakdowns first, then the teetering points that predate them and lastly those first blooms of camaraderie, success and love. We’ll meet spotlight-averse lyricist Charlie (Radcliffe). It’s a treat to watch the magnetic Groff trace an unlikable guy to his idealistic origins, Radcliffe’s face soften from judgmental colleague to wide-eyed hopeful and the wonderful Mendez peel back layers of unrequited love. No less powerful in rolling back years are Krystal Joy Brown and Katie Rose Clarke as the talented wives who become collateral damage in Frank’s soulless quest for fame and riches.
It’s fitting that the trajectory leads not toward a splashy crescendo but the softer, melancholy landing of the finale “Our Time”: starry-eyed dreams sung on a rooftop in 1957. In an age when so many filmmakers have forgotten how to make movies out of a few people in close quarters, there are lessons to be learned from the modest goals of this “Merrily We Roll Along”: to bring a movie audience to the life of the stage and, in so doing, to those thorny stages of life.
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