.Helen_E_Shaw reviews two new productions—“Merrily We Roll Along” and “Some Like It Hot”—in which brilliant casting and a palpable sense of joy make old stories feel new.
“It’s our time, breathe it in,” the friends Frank , Charley , and Mary sing ecstatically at the end of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Stephen Sondheim’s much beleaguered musical about three artists and their deteriorating relationships and ambitions. Time in the musical goes backward: we first meet the trio during their lowest point , so the youthful optimism of those last, hopeful lines is meant to sound false.
The music tries to make this bleakness bearable. Sondheim’s songs for “Merrily,” including “Not a Day Goes By,” “Good Thing Going,” and “Opening Doors,” are some of his lushest and most richly colored. Gussie’s puzzle of a character is a repository for some rather nasty prejudices about actresses, but at least she gets to sing your socks off, which Brown absolutely does.
Friedman unearths the potential that Sondheim-heads have always suspected was in “Merrily” by infusing it with enthusiasm, sympathy, and love. The show’s three central performers are emotional fire hoses who all palpably adore one another. Radcliffe has a common or garden voice, but he fizzes like a cartoon fuse: any time he moves, he ricochets, and his past as the boy wizard Harry Potter helps the audience fill in the outlines of his boy-genius character.
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