(no subject)

I went to go see Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway with genarti and my parents last week -- my second time seeing this show, the first in 2012 with aquamirage with (apparently) Lin-Manuel Miranda in one of the lead roles, though I must not have cared much at the time because of this fact I had no memory. This time it starred Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, though Lindsay Mendez was not in fact there on the night we saw it, but her understudy Sherz Aletaha was phenomenal so no complaints there.

We all had a great time and walked out of the theater enthusiastically arguing with each other and with the ghost of Stephen Sondheim -- Merrily We Roll Along is, famously, a Sondheim flop, and there are definitely still reasons for that even in this most recent and much-amended production. The show is about three Creative Best Friends -- composer Frank Sheppard, novelist Mary Flynn, and playwright Charlie Kringas -- and the various creative and financial pressures and compromises that eventually tear their friendship apart, but it's told in reverse, so you start with Frank at peak Successful But Unhappy and the relationships at Maximum Broken and then rewind the clock back to the moment they all first meet as young idealistic artists and fall collectively in creative love.

And it's the way that they are in creative love with each other, all through -- the way that the play is about that kind of creative love, the absolutely incomparable high of making cool shit with people who you think are geniuses and who also inexplicably think that you are a genius too -- that makes the show work, inasmuch as it does. And I say that, but it doesn't actually work, once you start thinking too hard about it, because the creative tie is only really between two of them. Frank and Charlie are partners and collaborators and have a long ongoing project together that they're trying to make happen all through the show, but Mary is a novelist, her work isn't tied in with theirs at all and in fact we learn appallingly little about it; Frank hasn't let Mary down creatively, just personally, because she's unfortunately in unrequited romantic love with him which IMO is a boring choice.

(I had a theory, which I told genarti, that the reason that Charlie and Frank's breakup is so intricately tied up in creative codependency and artistic betrayal and Mary gets the unrequited love is because Sondheim was a gay man writing in the 1970s and so he just split out the romantic part of Charlie and Frank's massive mutual creative crush into a female character. But then I also was reading up and saw that in the play that Merrily is based on there are also three of them so I don't know if that theory holds water ... anyway I do think there should be three of them, they're more fun and interesting as a trio, I just think all of them should be inhabiting the same undefinable Intense Creative Friendship space and we should perhaps have at least a vague idea of what Mary's bestselling book is actually about.)

AND YET all that said it does frequently work and frequently hit, largely because the scenes and songs when they're all together sell the friendship so well and make you believe in it as the most significant relationship in all of their lives, make you believe in the show as a show that is centralizing the friendship. The whole theater when you walk in is plastered with 'Old Friends' signage -- I turned to genarti when we walked in and said "remember that tumblr post about how the phrase 'old friend' is inherently homoerotic" and she said "I don't know that I ALWAYS agree with that but it is Certainly Fraught." Anyway, here's a music video of the cast singing 'Old Friends', I really enjoy when Jonathan Groff gives Dan Radcliffe a piggyback ride.

My favorite scene is when young Frank and Charlie are at a rich-and-famous-people party, and the rich people coax them to sing their song Good Thing Going, a wistful breakup song that of course awfully foreshadows everything that we know is going to happen later, and it's a beautiful and quiet moment and they nail it -- and then they're coaxed into singing it again despite their own better judgment, and now people are bored with it and talking through it and it's awful and frustrating and there's simply no way to recapture the magic. But the magic was real, and it was there, and maybe if they hadn't tried to push it they could have held onto it, or maybe there wasn't any way to hold onto it at all. For me, that hits.

I do of course have a lot more thoughts on how to fix Merrily .... genarti has ideas about Mary which I'll let her drop in a comment and for myself I will just say that I think Gussie (Frank's Temptress Wife who gets a real villain edit) is like seventy percent of the way to being a genuinely effective foil/parallel for Frank and COULD get there with some better and more nuanced dialogue, I think. I will also say that it is always very charming to see Dan Radcliffe dance on stage, he always seems to be having such a great time with it.