Maria Freidman | Merrily We Roll Along / 2025 [filmed version of the 2023 stage production]

words without music

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Furth (play, based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart), Stephen Sondheim (composer), Maria Freidman (director) Merrily We Roll Along / 2025 [filmed version of the 2023 stage production]

 

Let me begin by stating that Merrily We Roll Along is neither a gay film or a gay filmed stage production. Yet it ought to be; and seems to be.

    In fact, despite my love of his oeuvre one of my major criticisms of Sondheim is that almost none of his works have gay characters; this from a gay composer/lyricist is almost shocking, particularly given the popularity of his works within the gay community and the theater-going world that would readily accept gay characters. There are a very few bones tossed toward his audience, the suggestion of one of the male figures in Company suggesting that Bobby might try out a gay sexual encounter; or the reprise to “Lovely” sung to a male in drag A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But Sondheim and his writers, many of them, like Furth, also gay, hardly ever created a truly homosexual figure. Arthur Laurents, also gay, created a possibly trans character of Anybody’s in West Side Story. Only in the gender-shifted version of Company, a creation of director Marianne Elliott where two males actually marry do we actually see gay characters. But basically, Sondheim steered clear of his own kind—which I would define as a real failure in a complicatedly emotional man who even created a TV musical, Evening Primrose, for his then-lover Anthony Perkins, playing a straight man.

     But in Merrily, he really missed his chance to redeem himself. If only he had given one brief chorus of “Not a Day Goes By” to Franklin Shepard’s (Jonathan Groff) best friend, Charlie Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe), a song that expresses the female characters’ love of Frank. For it is actually Charley who is the oldest and deepest friend of the charming conniver Frank.

    As anyone who loves Broadway theater who hasn’t been hibernating for the last several decades knows, Merrily tells the story of Franklin Shepard’s theater and movie success backwards in time beginning with a scene that shows him probably at the top of what has become a fairly empty career, having just finished a movie everyone—at least those asslickers who surround people who smell like success—agrees is sure to be a “popular” production, his praise sung by the guests (hangers on who follow Frank throughout the work called “the Blob") in the song “That Frank.” I should mention that a couple of the Blob dancers appear to be gay, at least in Friedman’s version.

     In attendance, but getting drunker by the moment, is Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez) Frank’s only remaining friend from his old days, Charlie Kringas, having publicly attacked Franklin for wasting his talent as a composer on movie productions and other evasions. Mary is not only disgusted by the party guests’ shallow behavior but by Frank’s abandonment of his true talent, composing, has been banned from Frank's life. Mary drunkenly proposes a toast to Frank that mocks his new-found fame before she falls down drunk, hastily making her leave, his last friend from the old days now gone.

     Frank must also face the anger and frustrations of his second wife, the actress Gussie Carnegie (Krystal Joy Brown) who is now being replaced by Franklin’s new mistress, Meg Kincaid (Talia Robinson), featured in his new production. Recognizing that her husband has been cheating on her, Gussie, pretending to apply iodine on a small cut Meg has received, splashes the ointment over her face and storms out, their marriage now also over.

      Frank can only admit that he has pursued financial success at the expense of his friendships, loves, and career.

     Charley, we briefly hear has a new play on Broadway which is a true dramatic success; and if nothing else Mary has written and published a full novel, but the musical talent of Franklin (a role that puts him in a position similar to Sondheim’s) has been sold out to other concerns.

     The play continues in its move backwards it time, this production being especially careful to delineate the various periods the musical inhabits, as we explore Frank’s developing relationship with Gussie, his separation from his loyal and loving first wife Beth (Katie Rose Clarke) and his estrangement from their son, Frank Jr. (Max Rackenberg).

     Over the years we see Franklin, beloved by Beth and friends Charley and Mary, put off, lie and cheat his way out of truly exploring his talent and his emotions after his and Charley’s first small musical success. If Franklin grows richer, he is most definitely poorer as a human being as his simple relationship that he early established with Charley involving typewriter and piano grows to incorporate "Franklin Shepard, Inc.," the most complex song of the work in which Charley, having grown disgusted with the loss of Frank’s talent and—unspoken—his love, lacerates Franklin publicly on a TV show. That number, which demonstrates Radcliffe’s true musical genius, finally forces a break between the two, from which the musical itself never recovers.

   It also makes it clear that although the two truly caring women who have come to love him (Beth and Mary), sing the most memorable song in the musical, “Not a Day Goes By," that the heart of the work is centered on the relationship between Franklin and Charley, often simplistically summarized, along with Mary, in their attempt to keep their friendship going in the several versions of “Old Friends,” a lively ditty which seems to patch up the several cracks until both Charley and Mary realize there is nothing left to hang on to.

      In responding to questions in Interview, Groff (himself gay) has argued even though Frank is straight, the dynamic between Mary and Frank is, “to me, a very gay guy-straight girl relationship. There’s an intimacy, but it’s never going to go into romance.” Later in the same interview, he expands: “I don’t think that he’s [Frank] gay, and I don’t think that he’s a repressed gay at all. He’s straight. But two gay men wrote him. And the emotionality and the interior life of the character feels incredibly gay to me, and so relatable. That line of his, “I spent my life saying yes when I meant no,” feels pretty gay to me, as a guy that was closeted until I was 23.”

    To me, it is also apparent that, despite the fact that he is also married, that Charley has long had a crush on his composing partner, which is why he so brutally attacks him in “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” making it almost the equivalent of Frank’s angry departures of his wives.

    Particularly, as we skip back in the last scene of the musical to the first moments in Charley and Frank’s life together, making their way to the roof to watch the first spacecraft, Sputnik orbiting the earth—where not only do they first meet Mary but Charley’s future wife, who is absent throughout the entire work except for a quick moment in this scene. There they join up as partners to write a political musical. The ballad “Our Time” is about two youths coming to realize that it is their time to speak out and make meaning in the world, but in its constant reiteration of giddiness and even dizziness, the world spinning around them both, it is also a true declaration of their love for one another. The “me and you” of this new coupling, we sense, is far more that a meeting up of lyricist and composer, but a kind of marriage sung with emotional confusion (“feel how it quivers, on the brink”):  

 

Something is stirring, shifting ground

It's just begun

Edges are blurring, all around

And yesterday is done

Feel the flow, hear what's happening

We're what's happening

Don't you know, we're the movers and we're the shapers

We're the names in tomorrow's papers

Up to us man, to show 'em

It's our time

Breathe it in

Worlds to change, and worlds to win

Our turn, coming through

Me and you man, me and you

Feel how it quivers, on the brink

What?

Everything

Gives you the shivers, makes you think

There's so much stuff to sing

And you and me, we'll be singing it like the birds

Me with music and you the words

 

    Franklin may abandon this same-sex “marriage” like he does all the heterosexual marriages in which he temporarily engages, but in my thinking it is, nonetheless, a true marriage despite its never being named, a relationship which fails for the very reasons that all marriages fail: the positioning of the self over the other, the pronoun “I” transcending the survival of the “we.” As in so many of the failed relationships Sondheim analyzes, the demands and commitment of the one are simply not concomitant to the needs of the couple. The “company” suffocates the single selfish self. Sondheim’s delusion that you can “marry a little” represents a true lack of vision. The wonder and the tragedy of real “marriage” (as opposed to the symbolic ceremony and certificate) is that you become someone else.

     I have now seen two live productions, a documentary about the original production, and this filmed version of a Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along. All of the have been quite moving, but this one is by far the most successful in capturing what seems to me Sondheim’s and Furth’s original vision.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).