back to that moment when the future looked wide and delightfully indeterminate?
Had I known what I had when I had it?
“How does it happen?”
In 2010, Sondheim published a lush, rapturously reviewed retrospective of his entire canon—or the first half (the second is to come)—called Finishing the Hat . Show by show, he explained the original concept for each production, its evolution, which songs got added or scrapped, which lines he rewrote for later productions. The book is a priceless record and dissection of the Sondheim library.
It also gave me a long-awaited explanation. Until I opened the oversized blue cover, I had never understood how Sondheim himself diagnosed Merrily ’s ills. I’d heard the theories of many armchair critics—the inverted timeline was confusing, the humor wasn’t humorous, Franklin Shepard was unsympathetic and his Hollywood “sellout” unconvincing. (What’s so wrong with seeking movie jobs if you’re an ambitious composer?) But this was the first time I absorbed the idea that Sondheim thought the problem was, to a great extent, us : his gung-ho band of unseasoned gypsies.
“What we envisioned,” Sondheim writes, “was a cautionary tale in which actors in their late teens and early twenties would begin disguised as middle-aged sophisticates and gradually become their innocent young selves as the evening progressed. Unfortunately, we got caught in a paradox we should have foreseen: Actors that young, no matter how talented, rarely have the experience or skills to play anything but themselves, and in this case even that caused them difficulties.” (He excepted Jason Alexander.)
Also notable to me was the revelation that Sondheim and Furth were as blindsided as we were when the reviews were “merciless,” to use Sondheim’s word. “We fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters,” he writes. “By the time opening night arrived, we thought we’d fixed the show.”
But my biggest takeaway from his book was a gratifying one: confirmation that the exhilaration we all felt at the time was shared by Sondheim himself, even during the hardest stretch, maybe because of the struggle itself:
“I speak for myself, but I suspect Hal would agree—that month of fervent hysterical activity was the most fun that I’ve ever had on a single show,” he writes. “It was what I had always expected the theater to be like.”
He doesn’t explain why the charmed run of Steve and Hal ended after Merrily. The reasons don’t appear to include rancor. I never saw them argue in rehearsals or even appear strained, though Jason Alexander said in an interview years later that he did witness tension. Something must have cooled between them, or lost buoyancy. I suspect their separation was intended to be temporary, but it turned into twenty years.
What our cast did surmise after the closing notice went up was that Merrily ’s miscarriage was personally painful for Hal. He seemed to feel, mistakenly, that he’d “let the kids down,” when of course that couldn’t have been further from the truth: He’d given us the ride of our lives. But naturally he’d wanted a triumph for his daughter—the sweetness of their first collaboration deserved a Broadway-worthy happy ending—and it can’t have been easy to break his winning streak. Daisy, of course, couldn’t have been more loyal or uncomplaining. But the disappointment was unquestionably harsh and very public for all of us. There was a shared sense of staggering out into the light—dazed and uncomprehending.
“How did you get to be you?”
Lonny arrived at my Upper West Side apartment earlier this year with a much bigger film crew than I anticipated. After a long setup (during which I kept returning to my bathroom mirror to mask the laugh lines in my face with more makeup), we faced each other under hot lights and talked for an hour about Merrily We Roll Along .
Lonny today
Had I known what I had when I had it?
“How does it happen?”
In 2010, Sondheim published a lush, rapturously reviewed retrospective of his entire canon—or the first half (the second is to come)—called Finishing the Hat . Show by show, he explained the original concept for each production, its evolution, which songs got added or scrapped, which lines he rewrote for later productions. The book is a priceless record and dissection of the Sondheim library.
It also gave me a long-awaited explanation. Until I opened the oversized blue cover, I had never understood how Sondheim himself diagnosed Merrily ’s ills. I’d heard the theories of many armchair critics—the inverted timeline was confusing, the humor wasn’t humorous, Franklin Shepard was unsympathetic and his Hollywood “sellout” unconvincing. (What’s so wrong with seeking movie jobs if you’re an ambitious composer?) But this was the first time I absorbed the idea that Sondheim thought the problem was, to a great extent, us : his gung-ho band of unseasoned gypsies.
“What we envisioned,” Sondheim writes, “was a cautionary tale in which actors in their late teens and early twenties would begin disguised as middle-aged sophisticates and gradually become their innocent young selves as the evening progressed. Unfortunately, we got caught in a paradox we should have foreseen: Actors that young, no matter how talented, rarely have the experience or skills to play anything but themselves, and in this case even that caused them difficulties.” (He excepted Jason Alexander.)
Also notable to me was the revelation that Sondheim and Furth were as blindsided as we were when the reviews were “merciless,” to use Sondheim’s word. “We fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters,” he writes. “By the time opening night arrived, we thought we’d fixed the show.”
But my biggest takeaway from his book was a gratifying one: confirmation that the exhilaration we all felt at the time was shared by Sondheim himself, even during the hardest stretch, maybe because of the struggle itself:
“I speak for myself, but I suspect Hal would agree—that month of fervent hysterical activity was the most fun that I’ve ever had on a single show,” he writes. “It was what I had always expected the theater to be like.”
He doesn’t explain why the charmed run of Steve and Hal ended after Merrily. The reasons don’t appear to include rancor. I never saw them argue in rehearsals or even appear strained, though Jason Alexander said in an interview years later that he did witness tension. Something must have cooled between them, or lost buoyancy. I suspect their separation was intended to be temporary, but it turned into twenty years.
What our cast did surmise after the closing notice went up was that Merrily ’s miscarriage was personally painful for Hal. He seemed to feel, mistakenly, that he’d “let the kids down,” when of course that couldn’t have been further from the truth: He’d given us the ride of our lives. But naturally he’d wanted a triumph for his daughter—the sweetness of their first collaboration deserved a Broadway-worthy happy ending—and it can’t have been easy to break his winning streak. Daisy, of course, couldn’t have been more loyal or uncomplaining. But the disappointment was unquestionably harsh and very public for all of us. There was a shared sense of staggering out into the light—dazed and uncomprehending.
“How did you get to be you?”
Lonny arrived at my Upper West Side apartment earlier this year with a much bigger film crew than I anticipated. After a long setup (during which I kept returning to my bathroom mirror to mask the laugh lines in my face with more makeup), we faced each other under hot lights and talked for an hour about Merrily We Roll Along .
Lonny today
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