Marc Miller takes a look at Merrily We Roll Along:
Has a flop musical ever behaved less like a flop musical than Merrily We Roll Along? The 1981 George Furth-Stephen Sondheim-Hal Prince disaster staggered through 16 performances, then wouldn't shut up. It's been revered, rewritten, and revived constantly, and now it's back, scaled down and further reconceived, by the Fiasco Theater (whose Into the Woods was warmly received in the same theater four years back). It's been the subject of a well-liked 2016 film documentary, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, and its many fans won't stop discussing it — check out the voluminous back-and-forth on All That Chat alone. I'm not enough of a maven to closely parse how this Merrily differs from other Merrilys, but I'll tell you this: The score is still great. And the show is still a downer. . . . |
