Good Thing Going

Once dismissed and derided, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along triumphantly returns to Broadway. Revived and reinvented or showing the heart it's had all along?

- Marley Marius

On a chilly day in early February, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez are huddled on a couch in a photo studio in Queens. Not three weeks after Merrily We Roll Along ended its off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop, gathering again for a photo shoot has made all of the actors cry. (An amused publicist thinks it was the sight of their old costumes, by Soutra Gilmour, that set everyone off.) “It’s just really settling in that we’re taking this to Broadway,” offers Mendez, a Tony winner for Bartlett Sher’s 2018 revival of Carousel. “It’s a big dream for us to get to shepherd this piece, which means so much to so many people, and yet has never gotten its proper due.”

“To hear the overture on Broadway…?” Groff adds. “I’m gonna die.”

Forty-two years ago this fall, Merrily We Roll Along—a musical adaptation of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s somewhat obscure 1934 play of the same name— opened at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on West 52nd Street. Directed by Hal Prince, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, it represented the triad’s first collaboration since Company a decade earlier; a work that, after its own premiere at the Alvin, racked up 14 Tony nominations and became an era-defining hit.