The Sondheim musical that would not be denied

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This article was published 22/05/2024 (720 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some people are addicted to their phones, others to the bitter taste of black coffee, but Jillian Willems? She’s addicted to Merrily We Roll Along, a once-failed, now-acclaimed show-biz musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth.

The trouble started after Willems tossed her mortarboard into the air as a graduate of Oak Park High School. “It was a million, bazillion years ago,” she says.

After convocation, a friend of the family gave Willems her first taste of the musical when they handed her a compact disc of the original cast recording from the show’s abbreviated, and often-pilloried, 1981 run on old Broadway, directed by the legendary Hal Prince and featuring mostly teen-to-early-20s actors including Jason Alexander, Giancarlo Esposito and Ann Morrison, who originated the role of Willems’ favourite character, Mary Flynn.

Who can say whether that family friend, who worked at the University of Manitoba’s faculty of music, knew how influential the gift would become.

Willems listened to the album’s 16 tracks — including Opening Doors, Not a Day Goes By and Old Friends — frequently enough that she began to picture it in her head, envisioning herself in the role of Flynn, one of the show’s three central friends, each of whom enters the world of show business full of vim and vinegar. In her mind, Willems figured the show she was hearing was a smash.

“And as I got older, I realized, ‘This was a total flop,’” she says. “It ran for less than two weeks.”

That’s no issue for Willems, who, with local music director Paul De Gurse, hosts a podcast called Monkeys and Playbills dedicated to Broadway shows with 100 or fewer performances. In fact, it made Merrily, in which she starred during her graduating year at Alberta’s MacEwan University, even more interesting.

When Merrily premièred, Sondheim, who died in 2021, was in his third decade as a main draw on Broadway. In 1957, at age 27, Sondheim penned the lyrics to West Side Story, placing his name in the history books alongside composer Leonard Bernstein, writer Arthur Laurents and director Jerome Robbins.

It kicked off a period of productivity and success for the New York-born Sondheim, followed up by hits including Gypsy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company and 1979’s Sweeney Todd, a barbaric barber masterwork starring Angela Lansbury and Winnipeg’s Len Cariou in the first iteration of the title role.

Merrily — based on a 1934 work by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who collaborated on the Pulitzer-winning You Can’t Take It With You — was met with a more tepid response, especially considering the sterling reputations of Sondheim, Prince and the librettist Furth, who’d joined forces on Company a decade earlier.

In his review, New York Times critic Frank Rich acknowledged Sondheim’s lyrical ingenuity, but ultimately found the production to be a failure, his review serving as fuel for a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy of a short run.

“Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful — that soar and linger and hurt. But the show that contains them is a shambles,” he wrote.

After 16 performances, the show closed, leading Sondheim to continually reinvent and edit the told-in-reverse story, which originally started, as did Willems’ obsession, at a high school graduation ceremony.

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It’s that revamped, revised version of the original musical that is now earning Tony nominations on Broadway and is coming for the first time to a Winnipeg stage, produced by the independent company Dry Cold Productions.

“They’re raking in something like $12 million a week (on Broadway),” says producer-director Donna Fletcher, who used Not a Day Goes By, a Merrily torch song, in auditions long before Lindsay Mendez sang it during the current run, which also stars Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff.

Dry Cold — which has produced other Sondheim fare, including two runs of A Little Night Music (2016 and 2001), Follies (2013), Sweeney Todd (2011), Company (2009), and Into the Woods (2002) — is the first Canadian company to produce Merrily since Sondheim’s death, and is the first professional company ever to mount the show in Winnipeg.

Fletcher says the original, failed production had a community-theatre feel to it, but the score and basic story concepts — a united three-character arc told in reverse, grounded in Sondheim’s, Furth’s and Mary Rodgers’ real-life experiences in show business — were so strong that Sondheim refused to let the idea disappear. “He was involved in the current revival literally up until he died,” she says.

In assembling her cast and crew, Fletcher did not need to look far. Willems, who jokes that no production of Merrily that happens in Canada can go on without her, was obviously game, but so too was a cast featuring some of the city’s best musical theatre performers.

Making up the central triad are Willems as the writerly Flynn, Alex Menec as the bookish Charley Kringas and Josh Bellan as Franklin Shepard, the cynical gone-Hollywood producer who hosts the revival’s opening party.

Menec, a vocal performance grad from the University of Manitoba, is hoping his third time as Kringas is the charm. Two years ago, he was meant to perform Opening Doors for Fletcher’s musical theatre class’s scene night, but COVID shut it down. He later tried again, but got bronchitis. “Now I’m here,” he says, clear-voiced.

Bellan, who starred as Prince Eric in Rainbow Stage’s 2023 production of The Little Mermaid, has been a Sondheim fanatic since discovering Sweeney Todd in middle school.

Also onstage will be Rainbow regulars Catherine Wreford and Nathaniel Muir, as well as Rhea Rodych-Rasidescu, most recently seen in multiple roles in the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre production of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and in last year’s RMTC treatment of Into the Woods, a show Willems choreographed. Katie German, who played a sister in the RMTC run of The Sound of Music, and Simon Miron, who directed the RMTC’s The Piano Teacher, round out the cast, along with Kevin McIntyre, Stephanie Schmid and the young Nathaniel Mercer.

Fletcher says Sondheim’s score has been reimagined by music director Joseph Tritt, who will oversee a three-piece band — De Gurse, Matt Kozicki and Brendan Thompson — in bringing the show’s songs to light on the Tom Hendry Warehouse stage.

The cast and the producer are equally excited.

“I think seeing Jillian’s first costume is alone worth coming to see the show,” Fletcher says. “I’m not telling you what it is. You’ll have to come see it.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com