I'm in Love With Sondheim All Over Again. Thank You, 'Merrily We Roll Along'

HOLLYWOOD PARTY The cast of the 2019 revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Sondheim’s musical about three longtime friends who work together, make it big and let things fall apart.

IN MY LIFE SO FAR (counting this past Wednesday afternoon), I have fallen in love with Stephen Sondheim three times. The first time, I didn’t even catch his name.

I bring this up because “Merrily We Roll Along,” his 1981 musical written with George Furth, is back. Somehow I’d never seen it before, and — despite its mixed reviews, sad performance history and shaky cult status over the decades — I found it one of the purest of Sondheim creations.

THE SECOND TIME WAS the Saturday before Labor Day 1970. My friend DS and I were very young, very unsophisticated and so new to New York that we didn’t know we were supposed to go away for holiday weekends.

Like tourists, we actually went to a hotel concierge and asked for a theater recommendation, then found ourselves seeing the original Broadway production of “Company.” — with Elaine Stritch, Dean Jones and all the rest. I was blown away. Everything I’d ever felt about being single, about commitment, about living alone in New York seemed to be on that stage.

OVER THE YEARS I saw “Company” in London, in Washington, in New York revivals and at an AIDS benefit concert version with the original cast — 20-something years after the fact. (That’s most of the original cast in the black-and-white photo. Dean Jones, in front, replaced Larry Kert early on.)

I was just a small-town Southern girl, new in the big city, and didn’t realize that I’d already adored Sondheim for years. My college roommate MBW and I had spent most of one semester singing and acting out the numbers from “West Side Story” in our dorm room. Our favorites included “I Feel Pretty,” “America” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” (which had daring-for-midcentury references to cross-dressing, drugs and sexually transmitted disease). We thought they were the funniest, cleverest words-in-music we had ever heard, and it never occurred to us (well, to me anyway) to say, “Who is this brilliant lyricist?”

It was Stephen Sondheim, of course. He was 26 when he wrote those songs, and “West Side Story” was his Broadway debut. I was in elementary school, and I was horrified when I played it for the first time on the stereo of our local Baptist minister and his wife.

So Sondheim (that’s him in both photos, a few decades apart) had always been part of my life, even when I hadn’t known it, and I guess I missed “Merrily We Roll Along” the first time around because I was a cash-strapped freelance writer that year. Anyway, Frank Rich, reviewing it for The New York Times, had called it “a shambles,” and it ran a mere 60 performances, including previews.

Here’s the story, which was based on a Kaufman and Hart melodrama from the 1930s.

THREE’S NOT COMPANY The close friends whose success tears them apart are, from left, Charley (Manu Narayan), Mary (Jessie Austrian) and Frank (Ben Steinfeld).

STEPHEN HOLDEN OF THE Times summed it up beautifully — in abstract — decades later. “Merrily” was “a musical about the ravages of time on friendship and youthful ideals.” Three bright-eyed young adults meet in New York and dream big. Their careers intersect and divide, they become successful, and they change and grow apart in heartbreaking ways.

SEPARATE SPOTLIGHTS Nothing breaks up a friendship like being the subjects of the same media interview.

We first meet them in 1980 when at least one of them, Frank, is famous enough to be making the commencement speech at his alma mater. Then we move quickly to a Hollywood party the year before, where Frank and his Broadway-star wife, Gussie, are celebrating the premiere of a new movie. The air is thick with tension, Charley has some choice words for his former business partner, and Mary drinks too much. Worse, she’s become a critic and she hated the film they’re all supposed to be celebrating.

SMILES AND CAMERAS A scene from the revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.”

One theory about the show’s initial failure is that the reverse chronology confused audiences. (But maybe the original script didn’t have characters shout out the years — “1973!” “1964!” all the way back to “1957!” — the way they do now.) On the other hand, I remember seeing the film version of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” a couple of years later and not having a problem. It begins with a pair of ex-lovers meeting a while after their breakup and goes back through the affair all the way to the night they first touched.

Another theory is that it was a mistake to have cast such young people to play characters who reverse-age from their 40s or 50s to their 20s. Jason Alexander was in the original cast, as a supporting character, and he was only 22. So was (news to me!) Abigail Pogrebin, a daughter of the author Letty Cottin Pogrebin and the sister of my Times colleague Robin Pogrebin. Abby was 16 at the time.

AUTOGRAPH HUNTERS The supporting cast includes (beginning second from left) Paul Coffey, Emily Young and Brittany Bradford.

Fiasco Theater and the Roundabout Theater Company have not made that mistake this time. Jessie Austrian (Mary), Manu Narayan (Charley) and Ben Steinfeld (Frank) don’t give their ages in the Playbill biographies, but their newspaper wedding announcements tell all; the three leads appear to range from their late 30s to their late 40s. You need actors and a director (Noah Brody, who is 47 or so) who have seen something of grown-up life, because frankly it’s hard to imagine just how many things can go right and wrong and every which way — and how that affects the people you care about most.

YOUTH, IDEALS AND A TOKEN They used to get you on the subway. Narayan, Steinfeld and Austrian in a scene that takes place way back when.

“MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG” GETS to the heart and soul of things. This may be a modest production (thanks to double- and triple-casting, there are only six actors). It includes one achingly beautiful Sondheim classic, “Not a Day Goes By,” and a few numbers, including Mary’s “Like It Was,” that deserve to be better known.

Any show that has lyrics like these gets five stars from me: “People love you and tell you lies/Bricks can fall out of clear blue skies” (“Now You Know”). “I keep thinking, when does it end?/Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting?” (“Not a Day Goes By”). “Here’s to us. Who’s like us? Damn few” (“Old Friends”). “You’re right. Nothing’s fair, and it’s all a plot” (“Now You Know”).

And there’s nothing bare-bones about Derek McLane’s set, a towering collection of what could be a multistory wardrobe and props closet.. Or, as Frank Rizzo wrote in Variety, a place just ”crammed with several lifetimes of stuff.” I particularly liked the sign for the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon), which is where “Merrily” played the first time around.

“Merrily We Roll Along,” Laura Pels Theater, 111 West 46th Street, 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. 1 hour 45 minutes (no intermission). Opening night: Feb. 19. Limited run. Closes on April 7.