Merrily We Roll Along: Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez
A show about show people tailor-made for people who love a show, Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along hits a musical theater sweet spot.
Accessible as the tale of three friends in showbiz whose love and hate for each other ebbs and flows over several decades, Merrily, which premiered on Broadway in 1981, also reps an intensely personal take on an artist’s life from musical master Sondheim and book writer George Furth, adapting the Depression-era play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
The score isn’t as catchy as the score for Company, Sondheim and Furth’s collaboration a decade prior, but the songs and book have bite, particularly pertaining to Franklin Shepard, the uber-successful, not-so-scrupulous movie producer at the center of the plot.
It’s a great part. Frank starts out — or ends up, since the story is told in reverse — as a talented, humble young musical composer, before selling out his friends and collaborators, and his own ethics, for the spoils of Hollywood.
Broadway king Jonathan Groff earned his first Tony Award for his fierce Frank in the recent Broadway revival, and his stellar performance still registers onscreen in the film presentation of the stage production, both directed by Maria Friedman.
Filmed live in June 2024 at the Hudson Theatre in New York City, the production also features Groff’s fellow Tony winner Daniel Radcliffe and Tony nominee Lindsay Mendez, filling out the friends/frenemies trio portraying playwright-lyricist Charley Kringas and writer Mary Flynn.
Stabbed in the back by Frank on his upwards career climb, Charley carries the story’s undercurrent of betrayal, while Mary, woefully unappreciated by unrequited love Frank, permeates the air with bitter truth.
Sondheim, of course, adds sprightly syncopation to these emotions, and Radcliffe especially shines in the solo “Franklin Shepard, INC,” Charley’s caustic account of what it’s like to work with Frank since he’s become a big deal, a corporation unto himself. Mendez’s Mary hits more wistful notes lamenting in “Like It Was” that things aren’t like the days when it was “the three of us.”
As a trio, Groff, Mendez, and Radcliffe connect like genuine “Old Friends” throughout, even when that means tearing each other to shreds in song or dialogue. But Groff stands alone among the entire cast.
Not only do the lighting and close-up camerawork seem to favor the former Looking star (even over The Boy Who Led a Seven Billion-Dollar Movie Franchise), but Groff’s performance just crackles onscreen and onstage with a singular visceral edge.
An Emmy nominee for his King George in the Disney+ presentation of Hamilton (filmed by the same production team behind Merrily), Groff stays tenaciously dialed into the text, the character, and every beat of the score. His Frank, unapologetic, but not unfeeling, makes a riveting heel.
For some in the cast, the portrayals they honed for the stage don’t transfer as successfully to the screen. Reg Rogers as theater producer Joe Josephson, gradually diminished as an industry player and as a husband, offers broad comic relief but misses.
As starlet Gussie Carnegie, who leaves Joe for Frank, Krystal Joy Brown also plays it a bit big for the camera. The portrayal still feels thin, except when there’s a song behind her. Brown is exponentially more persuasive in the part when singing Gussie’s various seductions, like her high-kicking “Opening Number,” one among the handful of razzle-dazzle moments that best blend the stage performance with the film format.
Too often, however, both formats are failed by a sound mix that makes all the audio sound dubbed not live — not all the time, but enough to be distracting. Though, whether recorded live or later, the orchestra is top-notch, Radcliffe and Mendez are good, and Groff’s fascinating Frank Shepard is undeniable.
Merrily We Roll Along (★★★☆☆) is rated PG-13 and is now playing in select theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
Lizzie Borden swings a mean axe in Lizzie the Musical, both as a rage-fueled maybe murderess and as the electrifying voice leading this hard-charging, concert-style rock musical. For director-choreographer Jennifer J. Hopkins' bracing new production at the Keegan, Lizzie's voice -- and her rage and riveting determination -- reside in Caroline Graham.
Lacing Lizzie's fury with a winking sense of humor, Graham positively shreds the grunge-punk rock score composed by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer and Alan Stevens Hewitt, with lyrics by Cheslik-DeMeyer and Tim Maner. Maner wrote the show's book, which hews close to the known facts and testimony that have shaped public perception of the notorious 1892 murder case.
Given how often today's news outlets distort the truth or report outright lies, it's almost comical that E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime was once dismissed by The New Yorker's editor William Shawn. Because Doctorow's tale, set in the early twentieth century, wove real historical figures into fictional lives, Shawn refused to publish a full-length review, calling the book "immoral."
Now, the musical adaptation returns with forceful, spectacular splendor at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. And this second revival of the beloved story arrives on Broadway at just the right time.
Tavis Kordell may not yet be a household name, but their performance career is off to an auspicious start. The young triple threat graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro last year and within six months landed a leading role in Some Like It Hot, the musical based on the hit 1959 film about two heterosexual musicians on the run from the mafia after witnessing a murder. To hide, they dress in drag and join an all-women's band.
Kordell steps into the shoes and heels of the role of Jerry/Daphne, which earned J. Harrison Ghee a Tony Award when the show premiered on Broadway in 2022. Both actors have much in common. They are non-binary, are preacher's children, and, even more coincidentally, share the same hometown.
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