“Merrily We Roll Along” is a musical with a legendary status among theater lovers. Most infamously, it was Stephen Sondheim’s biggest flop, with its original 1981 Broadway run closing after only 16 performances, leading to Sondheim nearly retiring from composing. Luckily, a cast album was still recorded, allowing the gloriously exuberant score to gain a cult following. In the subsequent 40-plus years, many productions have tried to “fix” the show with new stagings and changes to the script. But it wasn’t until director Maria Friedman tried her hand at it that the show finally made it back to Broadway. The 2023 revival was, to borrow a Shakespeare quote reappropriated by Sondheim, “a palpable hit.” Starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez, the production received incredible reviews, broke box office records, and won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical Revival and a pair of awards for Groff and Radcliffe’s performances. Luckily for musical fans around the world, the performance immediately following their triumphant night at the Tony Awards was filmed, and is now being distributed to cinemas by Sony Pictures Classics.
Director Maria Friedman chatted with Next Best Picture about her highly cinematic filmed version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” what she hopes audiences will get from her film, and how it feels to join the incredible roster of filmed productions of Sondheim musicals.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hi Maria, how are you doing today?
Very good, thank you, happy to talk to you.
Fantastic. Same, right back at you. I am so excited to be speaking with you about this amazing capture of your really incredible Tony-winning revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” Right off the bat, I just have to say that I was there at the first performance after the Tony Awards, which I believe was one of the ones that got filmed.
Wow, it was! So you can see my edit point with the tape because it went on for five minutes. [note: this refers to a moment in the performance where the audience applauded so long that the show stopped] I ran out of the truck and I had to say to Jonathan [Groff], “You’re gonna have to give me an edit point, they’re gonna go berserk when this happens.” I said, “Hand it to everybody,” and then he held it. I said, “Now you’re just gonna have to stay still, ’cause when I go back and do the edit, I’ve gotta be able to cut out.” It was seven minutes long!
It was insane. I was part of the problem. I made your edit no easier ’cause I was screaming just as loud as anybody else!
No, it was gorgeous. We were happy. You just had to keep still for a minute.
It was extraordinary. And the curtain call…I mean, you were there, it was amazing. So getting to revisit that for me personally was really wonderful.
Lovely.
But I wanna take it back to even before it got brought to Broadway. “Merrily We Roll Along,” as a show – what about it speaks to and spoke to you, and made you want to direct it in the first place?
Well, I’d already worked with Stephen Sondheim doing “Sunday in the Park with George.” He was reworking the script and he asked me to play Mary [in “Merrily We Roll Along”]. He came down to a small park in middle England, Leicester Haymarket Theater, where he basically arrived with George Furth and we worked with them on this new version. So I got to see how much joy and hilarity there was in the rehearsal room. And how he would just be changing and moving and giving us new lines and new songs and new whatever it was. It was just an incredible experience and it’s where I really became – I was already friends with him, but when I played Mary in “Merrily,” it became a different dynamic.
So from that perspective, I fell in love with the piece because it speaks to everybody, anybody who goes to see it and decides to engage in it is floored by it, and it sounds pretentious, but we are reminded of the best bits of ourselves and the worst bits of ourselves. And it gives us an opportunity to kind of look at that in a really safe space with a lens of being in the piece and also observing other people that you can identify with one after another.
So, it’s grown with me. It stretches over 20 years. I’ve been doing it 20 years. The things that have happened to me in 20 years have been extraordinary. When I first started, I didn’t have any children when I was doing this, and now, my child is 30 this year. I mean, I’ve been doing it over 30 years, so over 30 years it changes. It’s a masterpiece, it’s a piece of genius. And like all those things, it has universal appeal. It’s hard to find people who see it who don’t get deeply impacted by it, profoundly impacted by it.
Right. Because it’s almost like a strange wish fulfillment. We all wish we could look at our life, maybe not necessarily in reverse, but in a way that lets us see the dominoes that got to where we are today.
That’s right. But we do, you know, if we are smart, we look at the bits of our lives where we perhaps could have made a different decision. There’s no point living with regret, but some understanding, some introspection about your part in something can allow you both to to move forward and to forgive yourself. That it’s okay. We all make mistakes. It’s okay. We are always going to make mistakes. It’s how you manage them and what you do with them.
There’s an essence that we kind of grow up, we find ourselves with. And for Frank it’s, “If I didn’t have music, I’d die.” He says at the beginning of the end of the piece. And what is that bit of you that if you didn’t have, you would be a lesser person than? And I think you need to find that essential essence of who you are in life to move forward and grow. And if you take away from that, like the way you treat people, the way you make friendships, the way that you deal with whatever particular talent you have, it doesn’t have to be huge. It can be just an acknowledgement of a sunset or a beautiful moon. The acknowledgement of beauty in the world. If you stop doing that in minutia, you are depleted somehow. So, I love the idea of just reminding yourself that it’s okay to fail. There’s a deep empathy built right through this piece about understanding one another and forgiving one another, and forgiving ourselves.
Absolutely. And part of what made this revival so special, among many reasons, was your incredible central trio: Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez.
And Katie Rose Clarke and Reg Rogers. Each one of them push into Jonathan Groff, [his] extraordinary performance, that he allows us to see them all by this incredible strength in the central performance. Incredible, humble, dignified, non-competitive as an actor, straight down the line truth.
Right, he’s magnetic, but not all-consuming, if that makes sense. It’s amazing.
Extraordinary. They are all magnificent. I could point the camera anywhere, and that cut all the way through. That’s all the way through to the smaller parts. Anywhere I wanted to put it, on Katie or on Meg [played by Talia Simone Robinson], all these parts, their faces, their humanity, the beauty and the depth that they were all feeling in terms of being full characters. I’m so proud of them all.
It really comes across well on film too. It’s a very cinematic capturing of the stage production..
Well, on purpose, we didn’t do a capture. We made it cinema, we went in. You are getting a cinema experience.
Absolutely.
You’re getting a plus-plus from an auditorium. Because you’re not in the auditorium, you’re in a cinema. You’re in the room, you’re with them.
There were actually times where I forgot that there was an audience right there.
Yeah, that’s the point. It should be for you, Cody, specifically sitting wherever you are, that you’re not missing out not being there. You’re getting something that’s been crafted for cinema. For the screen.
Well, I was personally way up in the balcony, so getting to see the faces a little closer was even better!
Great!
What does it mean to join the incredible pantheon of filmed Sondheim shows? Because we all know the “Into the Woods” capture is so important to so many of us. “Sunday in the Park,” “Passion,” “Sweeney Todd,” and now “Merrily.” So what’s it like to be part of that amazing roster of captures and films?
I do it for Steve. Steve and George wanted their work to be seen by as many people across the globe as possible. Not everyone can get to Broadway. Not everyone can get to the West End. The tickets are astronomical. Even the ones in the gods, you’ve gotta be a committed theatergoer. That’s the way it is, and I love theater. There’s a very different feeling of the energy you get in a theater. I honestly love cinema so much because it’s a medium where I can get into your head. I go in. And therefore, I think there’s an add-on to this particular thing.
I know there are communities all over the world who don’t get to go and see it, and they need stories about themselves. They need to find themselves in the corner of some farmland, somewhere where they feel like the outsider. They can go along to a cinema and they’ll find people like them who are looking for themselves and will find themselves in this film. They’ll laugh, they’ll cry, but they’ll see themselves. And it’s full of the most incredible music and the most incredible performances and everything, but ultimately, it’s full of humanity and empathy. And I want people to, just remind them that it’s really important to care about one another, and to pick up the phone to a good friend, and to allow yourself to make mistakes and to get up and brush yourself down, take another step forward. I think stories are…I’ve spent my whole life doing them. I believe in them profoundly as a gentle, quiet way of finding your tribe and gently reminding yourselves of your own potential, whether it’s good or bad. So, that’s what I think the film should and will do.
It absolutely will. And Maria, thank you so much for chatting with me and I am so excited for more people than ever to get to experience “Merrily” because of your film.
Me too. Me too. Thank you.
“Merrily We Roll Along” is now playing in theaters.
You can follow Cody and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars and Film on Twitter @codymonster91
