The triumph of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along in last weekend’s Tony awards is the latest milestone on a long and winding road of theatre history. The original Broadway production in 1981 had more than 40 previews, as its very young company struggled to get it right, but closed after just 16 performances.
That failure put an end to a 20-year collaboration between Sondheim, who died in 2021, and the producer/director Hal Prince, which had created hits such as Company and Sweeney Todd. But Sondheim never lost faith in Merrily, revising and updating it until, two decades on at the Donmar Warehouse in London’s West End, it had an extraordinary renaissance that bagged the Laurence Olivier award for best new musical.
Many of the lessons of this belated success were embedded in the sour-sweet lyrics of this reverse-chronological tale of three friends, whose idealism curdles along with the 20th century: “Success is like failure / It’s how you perceive it / It’s what you do with it / Not how you achieve it,” sings the young playwright Charley, who has not yet met the disenchantments that the audience has already seen his later self encounter.
Most artistic careers, however successful they may turn out to be, are fraught with difficulties. Just look at Harold Pinter, whose first full-length play, The Birthday Party, was so reviled by the daily newspaper critics that it had closed before the Sunday Times reviewer, Harold Hobson, had had the chance to acclaim him as “the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London”. Or the actor Charles Laughton, who never directed another film after the box office failure of his debut, The Night of the Hunter, now a creepy fixture on best film lists.
No discussion of success that arises from failure should ignore the tragedies: originals such as the playwright Sarah Kane or the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, who took their own lives before their uncompromising talents were given their full due. Their posthumous success is not reducible to a party game to those who loved and lost them.
But don’t forget the other stories. The first is the right of any artist to fail, as granted to Sondheim at Merrily’s original production, when the usually merciless New York Times critic Frank Rich philosophically opined that “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals”. In film, television, theatre and publishing today, companies, eyeing cash not culture, increasingly attack this right. Authors are dropped, series are cancelled and ideas are consigned to option limbo before they have had a chance to prove themselves. The attention is on the bottom line, rather than the development of talent and originality.
The second story is the importance of the people who keep the faith through good and bad times. People such as Drake’s actor sister Gabrielle, who has so astutely managed his legacy since his death, or the West End producer Michael Codron, who, when still in his 20s, had the courage to follow up that first Pinter flop, prompting a historic mea culpa from the critic Kenneth Tynan: “Harold Pinter has begun to fulfil the promise that I signally failed to see in The Birthday Party.”
Now we can add the British actor Maria Friedman, who has directed Merrily We Roll Along through much of its successful second life, including the latest award-winning Broadway revival. She started out as a performer whom Sondheim favoured, and has ended up leading his march on posterity.
