Merrily We Roll Along
John Doyle bids farewell to the theater that launched his international career - Berkshire’s beautiful and intimate Watermill Theatre, Newbury - with that most famously vexed of musicals about growing up if not necessarily growing wise: Merrily We Roll Along, the 1982 Broadway flop from Stephen Sondheim and George Furth that owes its resuscitation in no small measure to the UK. A Leicester production some years ago with Maria Friedman demonstrated the sheer theatrical viability of a bruising score - one of Sondheim’s very best - that was thrown under an even better spotlight at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000 in a Michael Grandage-directed staging of Merrily that, against the odds, went on to dominate the musical categories at that year’s Olivier Awards. This latest incarnation isn’t as purely touching as those previous two productions and tends to substitute anger and a pervasive sourness for the extraordinary emotional surges that marked out the Donmar version, in particular. (I, for one, shall never forget watching that production’s final performance from the Donmar balcony, the cast all but losing it in conjunction with the audience by the time they reached Sondheim’s seminal, almost hymnal paean to life’s possibilities, Our Time.)
Doyle completists will nonetheless want to catch the Tony-winning Scotsman’s third staging to place Sondheim under this director’s very particular actor-musician way of working, following Sweeney Todd, which of course first began life at the Watermill, and his subsequent, Ohio-spawned, Tony-winning Company, which had a sleekness and affective command that, in the case of this Merrily at present, remains for the moment out of reach. The dictates of the Watermill space mean that we bear direct witness to some exceedingly adroit musical doubling and even tripling - Thomas Padden’s notably well-sung (and unusually tall) Charley, for instance, holding forth on both violin and oboe, as various backwards turns of the reverse narrative dictate, while Elizabeth Marsh’s fierce-eyed Mary moves from the brassy sounds of the sax to the more plaintive notes of the flute in accordance with her own rewinding from cynical middle-aged critic - say it isn’t so! - to the young, hopeful writer espied on a Manhattan rooftop in 1957. (The cunning new orchestrations are by Catherine Jayes.) The roof is the place, as devotees of the show will know, that first brings together the lyricist Charley and his collaborator-to-be, Franklin (Sam Kenyon, who was in both Sweeney and Doyle’s fine Amadeus), the latter of whom catches the unrequited eye of the increasingly bitter Mary, who spends more than a quarter century nursing what in Marsh’s barely suppressed ferocity clearly remains a very open emotional wound. At the same time, the performance of the night in some ways is Joanna Hickman’s Beth, here holding a cello almost bigger than she is and attired in a virginal, bridal white as if in constant rebuke to the Franklin who flung her aside for Rebecca Jackson’s predatory, flaming-haired Gussie.
The singular structure of the musical here unfolds as the ever-beating recollections of an eternally haunted Franklin, and Tim Mitchell’s lighting is forever catching Kenyon’s ashen-faced man on the move in various snapshots of stricken repose, implying in so doing that the show’s defining and also most difficult character were being put on trial for his own, apparently often unkind life. The upended chronology, meanwhile, is made literal by tapes that are on seen visibly rewinding throughout, often abetted by the characters, while the backdrop of Liz Ascroft’s set shows a blown-up piece of sheet music from Sondheim’s score - and why not, given that the material is itself about a composer? It must have been tempting on numerous levels for Doyle to take the themes of Merrily into cautionary account himself, since he by now has surely known first-hand any number of the by-products of success that accrue to Franklin in the play. What’s missing is the contrapuntal joy - that movement away from and toward ecstasy and innocence, in turn - that flesh out what in this instance is a relatively pinched emotional spectrum. Still, even if it’s left to Sondheim’s ever-astounding score to move us in ways that the individual performances don’t necessarily accomplish, Merrily We Roll Along remains more than ever its creators’ ceaselessly, fascinatingly damaged masterpiece, and I look forward to following its distinctive, ever-idiosyncratic journey, wherever this show - and this production - roll along to next.