Keen to make the piece a showcase for young performers, Prince cast actors very early in their careers (among them a 22-year-old Jason Alexander, long before he became Seinfeld’s George Costanza), while the repeated motifs of Sondheim’s score-inspired by brassy Broadway musicals of the 1950s-riffed on the story’s reverse chronology and “undercurrents of memory.” (“How did you get there from here?” is a loaded refrain in the show’s title song.) The show followed three friends-Frank, a composer-turned-film producer Charley, a lyricist and playwright and Mary, the journalist and critic gluing them all together-over roughly 20 years, working backward from their jaded, fractious present in the 1970s, when they’re all about 40, to their first meeting as bright-eyed coeds, full of promise and wonder as they spot Sputnik from a rooftop. Directed by Hal Prince, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, it represented the triad’s first collaboration since Company a decade earlier-a work that, after its own premiere at the Alvin, wracked up a record-setting 14 Tony nominations and effectively changed musical theater forever.īut anyhow, Merrily. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s somewhat obscure 1934 stage play of the same name, opened at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on West 52nd Street. Forty-one years ago this fall, Merrily We Roll Along, a musical adaptation of George S.
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