Guildhall School of Music and Drama – Merrily We Roll Along

Oli Higginson, Julia Randall and Joseph Potter in Merrily We Roll Along from Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Merrily We Roll Along, performed by students from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, continues at the Silk Street Theatre, London until 10 July 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Merrily We Roll Along is such a fabulous musical with its fascinating back

-to-front story and some of Stephen Sondheim’s most memorable songs that it’s hard to believe it was such a resounding flop when it opened on Broadway in 1981.

Early audiences were so confused that the producer, Hal Prince, even resorted to putting matching sweatshirts on the cast with the names of each character on them. Yet it still lasted only 16 performances.

To be fair, the show, with book by George Furth from George S Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play, has been tweaked a fair few times since until the ugly duckling’s transformation to sleek swan in Maria Friedman’s 2012 award-winner, receiving more five-star reviews than any other West End production in musical theatre history.

Merrily has an unexpected tie-up with the Guildhall School as it was there on 28 March 1983 that it received its UK premiere. Now here it is back again 36 years later as their annual musical offering with some hard acts to follow. Grand Hotel, Crazy For You and Fiddler on the Roof, the last three I saw, were all brilliant.

This isn’t the best I’ve seen them but it’s still pretty darn good. Understandably, they look more at home when the characters are in their own age group in Act II than in playing people twice their age in the early scenes which take us back, year by year, from 1976 towards where one great friendship started in 1957, on a Manhattan rooftop watching the Sputnik launch.

A bit more silvery make-up was required in Act I to convey the story’s 20-year timespan to an audience, many of whom were new to the show. One or two characters look untouched by time.

This is a story about how money, ruthless ambition and success can destroy relationships. Frank Shepard, Charley Kringas and Mary Flynn are bosom friends to start with, bitterly disillusioned strangers by the end.

Shepard composes successful stage musicals but is lured away by the prospect of Hollywood fame and fortune, Kringas writes wonderful lyrics but wants only to conquer Broadway, while Flynn, unrequitedly in love with Shepard, has brief success as an author before degenerating into a mouthy lush of a theatre critic who can’t control her liquor or her venom (we’re not all like that!).

Kringas’ rant about Shepard when the composers appear on a TV talk show brings their friendship to an abrupt and permanent end. Meanwhile, fickle Shepard dumps his home-loving wife Beth for the more obvious charms of Broadway leading lady Gussie Carnegie and discovers all his new ‘friends’ are just hangers-on and phoneys.

After a slightly uncertain start, Oli Higginson, Joseph Potter and Julia Randall play the three leads with growing confidence, Potter’s Kringas particularly shining on the impossibly difficult pitter-patter showstopper ‘Franklin Shepard Inc’.

Under director Martin Connor and choreographer Ewan Jones, their fine teamwork on classic numbers ‘Opening Doors’, ‘Our Time’ and ‘Old Friends’ carries through to an enthusiastic audience.

Erica Nicole Rothman’s thrilling, almost operatic voice does more than justice to both versions of one of Sondheim’s most beautiful songs ‘Not A Day Goes By’, the bitter one outside the courthouse in Act I as well as the happy one with Frank and Mary on her wedding day in Act II.

As Gussie, Isabella Brownson carries off her big ‘Opening’ number in Act II well and Nick Apostolina, as impresario Joe Josephson, leads the way nicely on ‘It’s A Hit’ when the first Shepard-Kringas musical Magical Husbands opens to great acclaim on Broadway.

There’s robust, first-class work from the 16-strong orchestra which answers musical director Steven Edis’ every call and a word too for Adam Wiltshire’s eye-catching set and fine use of visual aids.

As ‘Our Time’ says “here’s what’s happening/we’re what’s happening/we’re the movers, we’re the shapers/we’re the names in tomorrow’s papers”. Sondheim might just as well have been writing about Guildhall School of Music and Drama’s abundant talents about to be launched on to the waiting world. Good luck to them all.

Jeremy Chapman