Новая постановка мюзикла «Весело мы катимся» в Signature Theatre: критики оценивают успехи и проблемы производства

No one wrote ambivalence like composer Stephen Sondheim, which makes his and George Furth ’s Merrily We Roll Along stand apart in its prescriptive reckoning with the unchecked pursuit of fame and fortune. “How did you get to be here?” the ensemble sings pointedly at its sellout lead character, leaving little question for the audience that we’re about to be told exactly how. But with the legend of the musical’s fraught history hanging overhead, and despite four decades’ worth of valiant attempts to make it sing—including Signature Theatre’s new production playing through Nov. 1—the question seems better directed at its iconic creators than its characters.  Beginning at the end of a decades-long friendship and moving backward to their first meeting 19 years earlier, Merrily follows composer Franklin Shepard ( Jason Gotay ), librettist Charley Kringas ( Jake Loewenthal ), and author Mary Flynn ( Melanie Field, from Amazon Prime’s A League of Their Own ) as they try to hold tightly to each other with one hand while striving for artistic success with the other. On our first meeting, they are worn down by divorce, infidelity, alcoholism, disappointment, and commercial failure. With each scene—a reconciliation, a movie deal, a smash Broadway hit, a Sputnik sighting—they slowly come back to life, allowing us to clock the moments that compromised their idealistic innocence. Sondheim’s midcentury score runs the gamut from rueful retrospectives like “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” and “Like It Was,” to exhilarating odes to optimism, a la “Opening Doors” and “Our Time.” In a lifetime repertoire marked by masterpieces, several of Sondheim’s best songs belong to Merrily We Roll Along. Even so, for most of its history, Merrily has been a musical pariah, haunted by the specter of a failed 1981 Broadway premiere that marked the end of Sondheim’s fruitful collaboration with director-producer Harold Prince. A connoisseur of puzzles, Sondheim worked with Furth to revise and refine Merrily over decades, leaning on the devotion of fans and eagerness of savvy directors—from former Arena Stage artistic director Douglas C. Wager to British actor Maria Friedman, and now Signature’s artistic director, Matthew Gardiner —to try and make the troubled show finally work.  But structural challenges baked into the show’s ambitious storytelling mode mean the pieces of the Merrily puzzle never fit entirely, cleanly together. After meeting Frank and his friends at their most jaded, it takes 25 minutes or so for glimmers of that which made them friends to finally shine through. Two of the show’s most famous songs, “Not a Day Goes By” and “Franklin Shephard, Inc.,” would be strong candidates for 11 o’clock numbers in any other show, but feel unearned when performed within minutes of their singer’s first introduction. Diegetic songs like “Gussie’s Opening Number” and “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” pad the score, but sag on the story. And the hallmark backtracking twists what would otherwise be a cautionary tale into a sermonizing morality play. The challenge in production is translating a story about working artists losing professional collaborators into a convincing elegy of people losing someone they love, including themself. Unfortunately, that responsibility falls almost entirely on the shoulders of the actor playing Frank. Furth’s book loudly proclaims the thick dividing line between Frank’s apparently bygone earnestness and newfound commodified phoniness. Whether through magnetic charisma, infectious charm, flashes of extreme empathy, or something else entirely, Frank has to convey why his beleaguered friends stuck around for so long. This is a very high hurdle and one that Gotay, who excels musically and makes many thoughtful choices in his characterization, has not yet fully cleared. Standing next to Field and Loewenthal’s comparatively neurotic Mary and Charley, his Frank looks more the manager than the managed, complicating the example Sondheim and Furth try to make of him. It doesn’t help that the others, who the creators try to position as his victims, tell on themselves: Charley cashes in on the deals Frank negotiates, Mary self-destructs without Frank’s validation, and Beth Spencer ( Kerstin Anderson ) demands full custody of their child and every dollar Frank has after he admits to infidelity. It’s juicy material for actors, but the creators have moral-conundrummed themselves into a very bleak corner.  Even so, it’s an achievement that Gardiner (who shared during a curtain speech that directing Merrily has been a dream since first working with Signature 20 years ago) has managed to fit enough of the pieces together to render a compelling production that leaves audiences with a glimmer of optimism. His capable ensemble deftly moves across nearly two decades of story, making the most of bit parts that emphasize the role of enablers and middlemen in shaping and distorting artists on the rise. Field is an effective musical interpreter, and she finds the right balance between Mary’s acerbic guardedness and self-inflicted humiliations. Loewenthal eschews writerly nerdiness and impulsive explosiveness that often defines other actors’ Charleys in favor of a more controlled and calculating characterization that pays off. And as the second Mrs. Shepard, Gussie Carnegie, Maria Rizzo embraces the character’s reputation for diva-like behavior with abandon, making the role a formidable foil for Frank. They are backed by a 12-piece orchestra that carries Sondheim’s brassy score exceptionally well under Jon Kalbfleisch ’s direction. For years, Gardiner has demonstrated a knack for crafting stage pictures that assert cohesion in vision even when the underlying material is shaky. In scenic designer Wilson Chin, costume designer Ivania Stack, and lighting designer Cory Pattak, he’s assembled a trio as complementary as Frank, Charley, and Mary at the beginning of their friendship. Frank’s piano sits center stage on a lush purple carpet surrounded by concentric zones of less vibrant hues—blue, then brown, then black walls that box in his life. Stack echoes this progression in the wardrobe, adding a loose correlation between fabric color and integrity. And Pattak creates his own distinctive levels in the squat MAX Theatre, anchored by ambient floor lamps that rise to illuminated orbs that float like the moon and stars the young friends once shot for.  It all adds up to a Merrily that rolls along in spite of itself. Maybe 45 years on, the lesson to be taken lies less with Frank, Mary, and Charley than theater-makers who know what they’re up against, but square their shoulders and try anyway. Perhaps, for them, the last lyric is not an affirmation, but an invitation: “It’s our heads on the block. Give us room and start the clock. Our dreams, coming true. Me and you, pal, me and you.” Merrily We Roll Along, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by George Furth, based on the original play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and directed by Matthew Gardiner, runs through Nov. 1 at Signature Theatre. sigtheatre.org. $47–$141.