Episode 73 “Merrily We Roll Along” Panel

I was at that fateful opening night of Stephen Sondheim and George Firth’s Merrily We Roll Along, in 1981. It followed Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and it was bound to be a smash hit. It was to be such a sensation that ABC news sent a producer and a young intern to film a documentary of this historic event.

But it wasn’t.

Merrily closed after 16 performance, and since then has undergone probably more post-mortems than any show in Broadway history.

It couldn’t have been the music; the score is sensational.

It couldn’t have been the book; Kaufman and Hart pulled it off.

Was it the cast of teen-aged and young adult performers? Maybe.

Whatever, the show refused to die. Thanks in large measure to its superior recording, first on LP and later on CD, the show became a hit among theater cognosci.

Since 1981, it’s been produced around the world, more recently in a re-worked iteration which won an Olivier award in the UK.

In November 2022, Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis, under the direction of its founding artistic director, Peter Rothsetin, presented it own brilliant and completely sold-out production.

A few weeks before it opened, I gathered a panel featuring two members of that original cast, Anne Morrison and Jim Walton, the recording producer, Emmy®-award winner Thomas Z. Shepard, that young ABC News intern, Alexander Bernstein, and Peter Rothstein, to discuss the show, the actors’ lives following its closing, and the closing’s impact on them. For Anne, Jim, Alex and Tom it was a reunion – maybe not their first – but certainly a merry get-together! For Peter and me, it was a chance to wallow in Broadway history.