Sondheim's 'Merrily' Rolls Bumpily Uphill

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 12, 2007

As with other geniuses we could name, Stephen Sondheim has his problem plays, none more fascinating than "Merrily We Roll Along," the 1981 musical he wrote with his "Company" collaborator, George Furth: The show travels back in time with three pals, starting with their estrangement in melancholic middle age and ending at the rhapsodic moment their friendship began.

The premise, taken from a 1935 Kaufman and Hart comedy of the same title, seemed a great match for Sondheim's restless imagination. But fiddle with the thermostat as he and Furth might, they've never been able to get just right the temperature of this sour peek at the world of showbiz sophisticates. Although the piece scales some poignant melodic peaks, it's pulled back down by a book filled with false wisdom. Cliches rearranged inventively are still, it turns out, cliches.

Signature Theatre, its welcome mat out once again to this great Broadway composer, is tackling "Merrily" for the first time, and the glossy but uneven results suggest that the revelatory production Sondheim fans eternally hold out hope for is still a pipe dream. (We're a patient group.) Director Eric Schaeffer, choreographer Karma Camp and their design team offer up some incisive ideas: Among the best are the stylized uses they put to the chorus of jaded hangers-on, and the ways costume designer Robert Perdziola has been freed to think of fashion as an expression of the musical's clashing personalities.

The presence, too, of Will Gartshore in the pivotal part of songwriter Franklin Shepard adds enormous value. He has become a true Signature star, and if only the appealing young actors who play the two other sides of the musical's central triangle would assert themselves a bit more forcefully, some of "Merrily's" narrative flatness might be easier to take. Right now, Tracy Lynn Olivera and Erik Liberman feel as if they're both holding something back. That leaves the regrettable impression that the characters of Mary and Charley lack the backbone that could make the lifelong tug of war with the overly self-involved Frank a fairer -- and more consequential -- fight.

It's no secret that the librettos of Sondheim's collaborators tend to be a lot less accomplished than his scores. (Arthur Laurents wrote a brilliant script for "Gypsy," although Sondheim's contribution was limited in that case to the lyrics for Jule Styne's music.) He has never found a book-writing partner of the caliber of, say, his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II; his best might have been Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the books for "Sweeney Todd" and "A Little Night Music."

The books, for instance, of Sondheim's early "Anyone Can Whistle" and the decades-later "Bounce" are far more troubled than "Merrily's." Which is to say that "Merrily" doesn't fall by any definition into the category of disaster. After the strained and dyspeptic middle-aged versions of the characters wane with Act 1, in fact, a jauntier, more inviting "Merrily" is allowed to commence.

The show is built around the idea of the inevitability of corruption, that success comes at the expense of love and honor, that you sacrifice the best parts of yourself for material gain and public approbation. Gartshore is especially adroit at imbuing his character with a fuller, more generous nature as he grows younger. A problem, however, is that "Merrily" casts the corrosiveness of success as an issue of black-and-white -- from a composer who generally paints the world in subtler shades.

In the musical's reverse chronology, we see the awful dissolution of Frank and Charley's partnership before we see what they can achieve, just as we witness the fragmenting of Mary's personality before we're given a glimpse of the depth of her longing for Frank. Lavish parties are thrown, affairs end (and then later, begin), as slowly, the hope and brightness of their younger selves are illuminated.

Schaeffer's production gets better and better as it moves back in time, but you don't feel the show's full force until about one-third of the way into Act 2, when Frank and Charley, emerging as a Broadway team, are asked by a voracious hostess (Tory Ross) to play a song at her party. As they sing the lusciously plaintive "Good Thing Going," the blase Manhattan partygoers applaud, then quickly lose interest -- a shift dramatized beautifully by the throng's drowning-out of Frank and Charley with its own song.

The staging consistently conveys urbanity, from designer James Kronzer's sleekly minimalist set -- white laminate floor, baby grand piano and winding staircase into the sky -- to the elegant movement and dance steps that Camp assigns the ensemble. The choreographer does an especially fine job traffic-copping dancers through the endless transitional variations on the title song.

Chris Lee, meanwhile, comes up with arresting strokes of intense colored light. And speaking of catching the eye, Perdziola's loud costumes for the first act wittily play off their more muted counterparts in the second. Conductor Jon Kalbfleisch, too, gives a pleasing sense of Broadway roundness to the orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick.

Vocally, though, things are still a bit patchy on Signature's new main stage. Although Gartshore and especially Ross, as a Streisand-style Broadway luminary who becomes Frank's second wife, are strong, the unamplified Olivera and Liberman are sometimes harder to hear. (Perhaps that helps to explain why their performances don't seem completely front-and-center.)

The strains of Sondheim's doleful ballads, such as the glorious "Not a Day Goes By," certainly cushion some of "Merrily's" bumpier conceits. Still, despite the company's lavish attentions, the show remains one more of lamentable jagged edges than consoling soft spots.