Here's a Quicktime movie of Oleg Cassini's appearance on the television program What's My Line on
Jan 29, 1961, just a few days after the JFK inauguration. "Well, I think he's real good!"
Merrily I Ramble On
James Troutman
Date: 1998/06/15
Last revised: 2003/07/17
The original version of this essay was sent to the Sondheim list on 1998/06/15. It was inspired by the Arden Theatre Company's 1998 production of Merrily We Roll Along.
As Bobby in Company says, once you've been married, you can never not have been married again. Similarly, once you've seen a show and/or gotten to know its music, you can never approach it again from a totally fresh viewpoint.
Having seen the original production of Merrily We Roll Along, and more important, having grown to love its score from repeatedly listening to the recording, I can never really judge how the revised version would affect me if I were encountering it for the first time.
So it was interesting to see the reactions of my work-mates who had never seen the show before. In my little theatre party of last week, I was the only one who was familiar with the show, and I was delighted to find that everyone loved it (with one partial exception, which I'll get to in a minute). I had made sure that a couple of my theatre-going friends were exposed to the score before-hand, but even the ones who were experiencing it without any knowledge of the score enjoyed it. In fact, one fellow who is not especially interested in musicals (he goes with us to have a sociable the night out after work) made a point of telling me today how he thought Merrily was the best of the shows he had seen with us.
The partial exception, of course, was list member David K., who had travelled 200 miles to see it. He posted his opinion a few days ago, and I couldn't help thinking that his reaction was at least partially colored by his expectations of what a Sondheim show ought to be. (Forgive me, David, if I'm mis-representing your viewpoint.) Based on the brief conversation I had with him, the main Sondheim shows that he is familiar with are Sweeney, Passion, Assassins, and Follies, all of which have a much darker theme than Merrily. "If you have no expectations, David, you can never have a disappointment."
...
One of the local reviews refers to Frank as turning from an idealist into a monster. But I don't see the Frank of the opening scenes as a monster. While he's not an admirable role model by any means, he certainly tries to preserve his friendships. He puts up with a lot of crap from Mary, only ushering her out of his party after she behaves abominably. And who can blame him for severing his friendship with Charley, who publicly humiliates him on national television? We know that Mary's problem is that she's been in love with the guy for 20 years; I say isn't it time she got a life and stopped blaming her drinking problem on Frank? And Charley can't seem to accept the fact that people do change; grow up, Charley.
(Yes, I know, it's not that kind of show. And both Mary and Charley are more sympathetic characters than Frank, but they are more responsible for what happens to themselves than Frank is.)
If there is a monster in the show, it is most certainly Gussie, who thinks first marriages don't count, discards her second husband to latch on to a Broadway producer in order to further her career, ditches him in turn when she becomes a star, seduces Frank away from his wife and friends, and doesn't behave very graciously (to say the least!) when Frank in his turn dumps her for a young starlet.
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As far as the backwards motion of the show, I don't see how it could be done any other way without major rewriting. Each scene is structured to take advantage of what we know is going to happen in the previous scene. In the final scene of Act I, when Frank's friends convince him to take a cruise to clear his head, we already know what the consequences of that cruise are. When Beth declares that she trusts leaving Frank alone with Gussie, we remember her earlier (later in time) lament that she had been warned about Gussie. Or in the final scene of Act II when Charley declares he doesn't want to get married for a long time, we already know that he's going to marry the unseen Evelyn (whom we've been hearing about all evening) before the next (previous) scene; which makes for a nice little "aha" when we find out that Mary's roommate's name is Evelyn. There are lots and lots of details like this.
On the other hand, there are a lot of details that one cannot appreciate without having seen the show before. For example, it is Joe Josephson (the producer) who disrupts the singing of "Good Thing Going" by starting to hum along, to essentially the same tune that he earlier (later in the show) declared: "That's just not a hum-mm-mm-mm-mm-mable melody!"
...
Merrily is about friendship and about abandoning one's youthful ideals for expediency. That it uses the trappings of a songwriting team to tell its story, is mainly an expedient of the plot: it helps remove some of the awkwardness of the inevitable cue for a song. But, surprisingly few of the songs are diegetic (songs sung by characters who know they are singing and who others on the stage know they are singing). I like to think of "Old Friends" as diegetic (perhaps it's a song that Frank and Charley wrote and Mary and Frank start singing it to get Charley out of his funk and he joins in and they start dancing around the room), but I don't know if that was Sondheim's and Furth's intention. "Growing Up" is partially diegetic; Frank is playing the piano and humming along, but the words he sings are an interior monologue.
Banfield (in his book Sondheim's Broadway Musicals) asks whether the songs are Frank's (and Charley's) or Sondheim's, and the answer, of course, is both. It's worth noting that the delightful "Bobbie and Jackie and Jack" number, while ostensibly a part of the nightclub act, is actually Sondheim reminding us of the events of 1960 (the "Nixon didn't win" line reminds us of the later year when Nixon did win--and the aftermath). I can imagine someone writing the main part of the song in, perhaps 1961, but surely not in the last 2 months of 1960. "The decade is starting anew and maybe the country is too" reminds us of the high promise with which the turbulent 60's began.
The opening of Act II (the "11 o'clock number" in Frank and Charley's show) is clearly Sondheim writing self-consciously bad lyrics ("Okay, the moon is cheese!") and bastardizing "Good Thing Going" to show that Frank and Charley have compromised in order to have a popular success. Does anyone have a theory as to who (if anyone) Sondheim is mocking at this point?
It's also interesting that "Good Thing Going" (Frank and Charley's big hit song) doesn't sound so much like a Broadway show tune as it does a pop song (a saloon song, the kind that, say, Frank Sinatra might (and did) sing). Was Sondheim consciously trying to replicate the success of his earlier hit song ("Send in the Clowns," which he has declared sounds like a piano bar song)? That the ambiguous lyrics to "Good Thing Going" can be interpreted as the loss of a friendship (or a love affair), and thus encapsulate one of the themes of the show, has been commented on by others, but it still bears repeating.
And by the way, does Frank Sinatra (or his estate) get any royalties now that his recording of "Good Thing Going" has been incorporated into the show?
Oh, well, enough rambling for one evening...da Da da Da-da da Da...
Beliefs