old friends
nostalgia and the peril of the past in Sondheim
When Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along made its Broadway debut in 1981, the New York Times review opened with this line:
AS we all should probably have learned by now, to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one's heart broken at regular intervals.
Much like other negative reviews at the time, Frank Rich’s estimation of the show mirrored its textual themes of regret and disappointment. The show was widely disliked and considered a failure by critics and audiences. But since then, it has been given new life many times in revivals, and its most recent iteration returned to Broadway in 2023. After years of being haunted by its reputation, the show was finally embraced as a hit, and at the 2024 Tony Awards, it received the award for Best Revival, as well as Tonys for two of its stars(Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe) and for Best Orchestrations(Jonathan Tunick).
The musical itself follows the stories of three friends—Frank, Charley, and Mary—who meet as struggling artists in New York, and the rise and fall of their careers and personal lives across two decades. But instead of following these simple arcs of dreams, success, failure, and fallout through a traditional temporality, the show takes us backwards through its story, a few years at a time. When we first meet lauded movie producer Frank, he is a sellout in a failing second marriage. But through the show’s story, we get to know him and his friends, and to better understand how he came to this point, moving backwards through time until we first meet him as a young, idealistic composer starting out in the city.
“How did you get to be here?” is the question asked by the show’s titular opening. We trace the steps of the main characters back along the road that led them to their current positions, unfolding the story in reverse. We see the fateful arguments that cause our main trio’s friendships to dissolve, we see the follies and mistakes that destroy Frank’s marriages. We see the group finding major success in their first Broadway show, the arduous processes and work that led to that show being produced, and finally we roll all the way back to learn how the friends originally met, and the hopeful artists that they once were.
The music of Merrily is essential to how it tells this story, and its songs engage us in the lives of the characters, the shifting time frames, and the nostalgia and dramatic irony that suffuse our retrospective view of the group of artists and friends.
One of the key ways this is done is through the reprisal and repetition of certain songs across the score. The seven “Transition”s that appear each time the year changes are connected by the motif of “merrily we roll along”, giving the passage of time in the story a sense of continuity and movement even as it regresses. These musical motifs help us to make sense of our characters in the story across the different time periods and connect certain ideas and struggles that recur throughout their lives. One example is the song “Old Friends,” an anthem for the friendship and comaraderie between the show’s three leads, but which is first introduced in the more somber “Old Friends —As It Was” where Mary laments the way that their relationships have fallen apart. The song “The Blob” references and revisits one of the earliest scenes in the show, “That Frank” where we first see the crowd of “movers and shakers” that make up the New York art scene. While the influential group of trendsetters praise Frank endlessly in the first scene, in the later “The Blob” we see Frank and Charley as they are only beginning to establish themselves and build connections here, and the crowd nearly overwhelms and consumes them. Another marvellous use of reprise in this show can be found in the song “Not a Day Goes By”, which is sung several times by Frank’s first wife, Beth. We first hear it as their divorce is being finalised, but a later reprise occurs during their wedding. In different points in their lives, the lines “you’re somewhere a part of my life/and it looks like you’ll stay” take on different resonance as they are sung once with remorse and pain, then later with hope and love. There’s tragedy in the wedding vows shared between Beth and Frank—not because of who they are in that moment of union, but because of what we know their future will be. As Sondheim writes:
“The structure of Merrily We Roll Along suggested to me that the reprises could come first: the songs that had been important in the lives of the characters when they were younger would have different resonances as they aged;”1
Thus, the more bitter or mature versions of songs are “sung first in the musical’s topsy-turvy chronology,” reflections and recurrences of music in the show encouraging the audience to experience emotion and memory alongside the characters in a sort of reversed déjà vu as we roll back through their lives.
The score is full of pastiche2, engaging with the different time periods of the story through its composition in really interesting ways, and the music is clever on several levels as we hear songs composed by Stephen Sondheim to tell the story, songs by Sondheim to evoke a certain period and style, and songs composed by Sondheim as Frank and Charley at various points in their careers, etc. This particularly comes through in songs like “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a comedy performance written by Charley and Frank that pokes fun at the Kennedies and contemporary politics(and, stylistically, the musical comedy style popular at the time), or “Opening Doors”, a song which chronicles the characters’ early attempts at career success, during which we get to hear some of the songwriting duo’s early work as it is pitched to and torn apart by potential producers for lacking “hummable melody”, a critique that was often levied at Sondheim himself early in his career.3 The music here operates on several levels, creating a layered portrait of its characters, their contemporaries, their changing careers, songwriting as an art form, and more, all through song as a storytelling medium.
These elements of the score are perhaps best exemplified by the paired songs “Gussie’s Opening Number”4(which appears in Frank and Charley’s in-show Broadway debut, Musical Husbands) and “Good Thing Going”(the duo perform an early draft of the song they have written together at a party). The former is a big, brassy showtune pastiche, while the latter is a sentimental, pared down tune filled with all the heartbreak and wistfulness of friendship and creation that Merrily sings about. The stylistic aspects of these compositions shine through here, where two very different versions of the song are delivered with a certain dramatic irony and play around with audience expectations, memory, and our engagement with the movement of time in the musical, as well as demonstrating the development of the characters, their careers, and the themes of the story being told. In both versions, the repeated lines “we took for granted a lot, but still, I say: … we had a good thing going” speak to the show’s themes about growing up, growing apart, and the allure and tragedy of nostalgia and trying to return to the past.
“Yesterday is done,” the opening lines of the musical tell us. The road goes on, and we can look back at past relationships with love or remorse, watching our lives unfold either burdened by the past as Frank, Mary, and Charley are when we meet them at the beginning(“[blame] the way it is on the way it was,”) or with endless hope as they do in the finale(“our time, breathe it in, worlds to change and worlds to win”).
“It’s us, old friend, what’s to discuss, old friend?”
Many of those 1981 reviews compared Merrily, (again, pretty unfavorably,) with an earlier work of Sondheim’s—Follies. In this 1971 musical, a group of former show girls and other performers in a Ziegfeldian5 follies company reunite decades later for a party in the now falling apart theatre, but their reminiscence unveils the many ways they remain haunted by their pasts. The ghosts of the younger, more glamorous past selves of the characters float through the theatre, moving and performing alongside the now older stars as they run through their old numbers again(including “Broadway Baby”, “I’m Still Here”, and “Rain on the Roof”) and revisit their past relationships. As these dramas unfold in the present, it culminates in a massive fantasy sequence with classic Follies-style musical numbers. The extravagant dramas and personal histories of the past at last collide with the nostalgia and regret of the present as each character must face and perform their own ‘follies’.
The characters of Follies return to the past to try to recall their old dreams, to relive their glory days on the stage, to reignite old passions. But in doing so, they become drawn dangerously into that lost past, drawn into the chorus of ghosts and the hyperreal world of ‘Loveland’. The present begins to implode as the show goes on and old bitterness takes the stage.
“Time stops, hearts are young, only serenades are sung
in Loveland, where everybody lives to love.”
Similar to Merrily, music and the use of pastiche in Follies helps to bring the audience into the past and the world of memory alongside the characters, and Sondheim plays around a lot with the follies and vaudeville-style musical numbers here, such as in the processional chorus number “Loveland”, the melodramatic “Losing My Mind”, and the comedic patter of "Buddy’s Blues”/”The-God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues”, songs which utilise their nostalgic and stylised musical trappings to “reflect both the real and emotional lives of the principals: a sort of group nervous breakdown,” that explores their unresolved past lives and loves, and the follies of their reunion.6
“You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow/Love Will See Us Through” brings the ghosts of the young versions of Ben, Phyllis, Buddy, and Sally back to the stage, recounting their wedding days in 1942, and in some ways the reminiscence here is also a reencounter of the different versions of the characters, past and present, as the characters of tomorrow recall the optimistic love of yesterday:
“Say toodle-oo to sorrow
and fare-thee-well, ennui
You’re gonna love tomorrow,
as long as your tomorrow is spent with me!”
As the Follies continue, Buddy reminisces on his unhappy relationships with his wife, Sally, and his mistress(“Those “tell-me-that-you-love-me-oh-you-did-I-gotta-run-now feelings!”) as a vaudevillian comic; Sally is overcome by her lasting, obsessive feelings for Ben(“I dim the lights and think about you, spend sleepless nights to think about you”) in a Gershwin homage; Phyllis sings a Cole Porter inspired song as she confronts her conflicting feelings about her past and present self(“if Lucy and Jessie could only combine, I could tell you someone who would finally feel just fine”), and finally, Ben takes on the role of a Fred Astaire-type leading man and attempts to make sense of his life philosophy(“learn how to laugh, learn how to love, learn how to live!”) until at last all of the leads, their past selves, and the follies in total break down completely.
Through this sequence, we see both the incredible allure of returning to the past and reliving the glory days that brings the cast together, but also the dangers of trying to go back to a theatre of ghosts and all the melodramatic longing, remorse, and pain that plays on and on.
“Thank you, but never again. Life was fun, but oh, so intense. Everything was possible and nothing made sense,”
There is no clearer portrait of this nostalgic return to the past than that painted by Sunday in the Park With George(1984). The show’s visuals and characters draw inspiration from the George Seurat painting “ A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. In “Move On”, Dot sings to her lost great love, George:
Stop worrying where you’re going, move on…
I chose and my world was shaken, so what?
The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not
You have to move on.
The song is an earnest, blunt look back on past relationships, past lives, and the irrecoverability of lost time. Across this and other songs in the work of Stephen Sondheim, characters sing of the way that history pulls us back, the way that time moves forward and backward in parallel, and the way that the siren call to return to the past is as alluring as it is devastating. But we keep moving on.
Thank you for reading! I’ve been listening a lot to the musical scores talked about here over the last few months, and have had such a wonderful time sitting with them and exploring one of the themes that most fascinates me across Sondheim’s work.
While finishing up a draft of this piece, I rewatched Lady Bird(2017), a film which pays clever homage to Sondheim’s work when its teenage characters perform Merrily in a high school production. I saw this film in the theatre when it came out7, and at the time all of the references to Merrily, and the resonances it has in the coming of age story of the film completely flew over my head; yet years later I know every scene and every line of the musical, and it was like I was seeing a different film than the one I had seen before, music creating and rewriting memory. After dinner, I went for a walk in the neighbourhood, the score to the film in my headphones, and the light was coming through the trees at just the right angle to take me back in time, like with each passing block I was in another place and chapter of my life, warmed by nostalgia and the August sun, starting to set earlier again at last. But then time moved forward again, and the light shifted, and I kept walking. (“Before you know where you are, there you are.”)
Coming soon in the newsletter, reflections from the summer, a return to talking about art museums, more film discussion, and a remix of one of my favourite pieces from the last year. If you enjoy cloudtopia, please share with an old friend, a ghost from the past, etc. <3
going, going, gone,
isobel
p.s. just one more thing…
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, Virgin Books, 2010, p. 383.
As Sondheim defines it(“as [he uses] it”) in Finishing the Hat: “pastiches are fond imitations, unlike parodies or satires, which make comment on the work or on the style being imitated.” (p. 200)
In the documentary Six by Sondheim(linked here: the version of “Opening Doors” performed for the documentary, which features Sondheim himself as the producer!) , the author says that this is among his most autobiographical songs. I see a lot of parallels between the musical that the characters are writing here(Musical Husbands) and Sondheim’s own first work, Saturday Night. The song Frank and Charley pitch here, with the lines “Who wants to live in New York? Who wants the worry, the noise, the dirt, the heat? Who wants the garbage cans clanging in the street? Suddenly I do!” and “ever since I met you, I-” in particular is very reminiscent of another song about love in the city from Saturday Night:
“What More Do I Need?”
Once I hated this city, now it can’t get me down.
Slushy, humid, and gritty, what a pretty town!
…
If I can love you, I’ll pay the dirt no heed.
With your love, what more do I need?
Nearly all the lyrics I quote here are transcribed from Finishing the Hat, but there are a number of differences in lyrics between different versions of the show/soundtrack. In talking about “Gussie’s Opening Number”, my analysis references lyrics that don’t appear in the original version of the song Sondheim writes about in that book, and I include the longer version of the song used in the most recent revival, as it appears in the soundtrack.
I also got the lyrics for “Move On” from the original Broadway cast recording, as Sunday is not discussed in the book(which shook me to my core considering the reference being made by the title).
What do we think of using “Ziegfeldian” as a descriptor…
Sondheim, 231.
with my mother. this was not a good film for us to see together.