Merrily We Roll Along (musical): History and Key Facts

Merrily We Roll Along is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

The show tells the story of how three friends' lives and friendship devolve over the course of 20 years; it focuses particularly on Franklin Shepard, a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies. Like the play on which it is based, the show's story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends' lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best.

Merrily premiered on Broadway on November 16, 1981, in a production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince, with a cast almost exclusively of teenagers and young adults. However, the show was not the success the previous Sondheim–Prince collaborations had been: after a chaotic series of preview performances, it opened to widely negative reviews, and closed after 16 performances and 44 previews.

In subsequent years, the show has been extensively rewritten and enjoyed several notable productions, including an Off-Broadway revival in 1994 and a West End premiere in 2000 that won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The 2022 Off-Broadway production staged at New York Theatre Workshop transferred to Broadway in fall 2023, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez and directed by Maria Friedman. It won four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. A film adaptation starring Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt is currently in production and is being filmed over the course of 20 years, having begun in 2019.

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