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looked just as wiry and ageless as ever, though slightly depleted from his rehearsals for an upcoming concert version of Company at Avery Fisher Hall, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Patti LuPone, and Stephen Colbert.
    During Merrily ’s incubation, Lonny was the one we all clung to (and over whom many of my cast-mates mooned—I have the diary entries to prove it). He used to tease me constantly and affectionately about being “married” to him (“Where’s my wife, Evelyn?!”) and even insisted that we create a mock holiday card with faux children to give to the entire cast and crew; we posed as “The Kringas Family,” with my little brother, David, then thirteen, playing our “son,” and Joanna Merlin’s younger daughter, Julie our “daughter.”
    Now, here I was, at forty-five, utterly distanced from those teenage years—that pre-real-life moment before I’d ever had heartbreak, sex, or a job—sitting together nearly three, experience-filled decades later, in my own bona fide home with photographs and appliances, my children doing homework in the next room, my husband at the office, two published nonfiction books on my shelf plus various stops along the résumé. Other than our original cast being connected on Facebook (and we are—through supportive updates and excavated snapshots), Merrily was a lifetime away.
    But Lonny brought it all back: the first reading, the last audition, the first rehearsal, opening night, closing night, the album recording, the reunion.
        He asked how the experience had changed me and, at first, I wasn’t sure it had.
    Then I realized how much.
    It was my first proof that dreams can get realized overnight…and be dashed just as fast.
    It was the dividing day between believing idols are infallible…and learning that everyone fails.
    It was a taste of the thrill of professional theater…and a reminder that maybe my skin wasn’t thick enough.
    But above all, it was the moment in my life when I felt airborne. When everything up ahead was bright, and possible.      
    “In truth,” Sondheim writes about Merrily , “like the characters in the show, I was trying to roll myself back to my exuberant early days, to recapture the combination of sophistication and idealism that I’d shared with Hal Prince, Mary Rodgers, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the rest of us show-business supplicants, all stripped back to our innocence.”

    I wonder about innocence—when we lose it, if we ever really had it.   I look at my 11-year-old daughter, Molly, and she still seems untarnished by deflation or any sense that things might not happen just as she envisions.  My teenage son, Benjamin, however, already has an old soul’s perspective on the way life throws up hurdles.   If there’s anything I hope my children glean from my Merrily adventure, it is to leap early and fully, before there’s too much at stake—or even when there already is.  

Harold Prince (left) and Stephen Sondheim in rehearsal for "Merrily We Roll Along."Fall 1981.  Photo by Martha Swope/(c) New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Harold Prince, Jason Alexander and Terry Finn in rehearsal.   Photo by Rivka Katvan.

Me backstage.  (Personal photo.)

Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince embracing after reunion concert.  Photo by Bruce Glikas for Broadway.com - Sept 2002.