Merrily We Roll Along, 1981

The run closed November 28, 1981

Opened

November 16, 1981

Closed

November 28, 1981

Performances

16

Previews

—

Theatre

Neil Simon Theatre

Of the 465 productions we hold that opened in the 1980s and record a performance count, this is the 324th longest. That is a rank within what we hold, not within everything that was staged.

Other stagings of Merrily We Roll Along 6 more that season

Who was in it10 named

J

Jim Walton—

A

Ann Morrison—

L

Lonny Priceb. 1959

T

Terry Finn—

Jason Alexanderb. 1959

G

Giancarlo Esposito—

Donna Marie Elio
Geoffrey Horne
Gary Stevens
James Weissenbach

6 of these 10 names have a person record behind them and link to one. The other 4 are set from the identifier in the cast list, which is a slug of the name — so hyphens and full stops are lost and a few come out wrong. We hold nothing else about them. Nobody here is matched to a character: the cast list records who was in the company and not what they played.

Characters6 roles recorded

Jim Walton Franklin Shepard
Lonny Price Charley Kringas
Ann Morrison Mary Flynn
Terry Finn Gussie Carnegie
Sally Klein Beth Spencer
Jason Alexander Joe Josephson

Only 512 of 13,459 productions carry role names, and these came out of a wiki table — the names arrived with the table's own cell markup on them and have been stripped back. They are not linked to person records because the identifiers in that table do not resolve to ours.

Creative team

Director

Harold Prince

Choreographer

Larry Fuller, Ron Field

Orchestrations

Jonathan Tu

A producer is one string on this record, however many people or companies it names. Directors and choreographers are held both as text and as identifiers; where an identifier exists the name links to a page.

Around this production

was just too silly to win critical approval; when it closed in two days, one cast member of the still-previewing Merrily expressed concern: "Everyone loved that show and it closed.

• Kaufman and Hart once again joined forces to write the next Music Box show: Merrily We Roll Along (1934). This unusual comedy started in the present and went back-wards in time. It served as the basis for a 1981 musical of the same title by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth. At This Theatre 100 Years of Broadway Shows Stories and Botto Louis Viagas Rober, p. 166
• Kaufman returned with his collaborator Moss Hart and their unconventional play Merrily We Roll Along (9/29/34; 155 performances). The play told its story in a reverse chronology. Audiences were not completely confused by the strange construction, but they certainly did not care for any of the cynical, disillusioned cha… Broadway Its History People and Places An Encyclopedia Bloom Ken 1949 2nd Ed New, p. 385
• Stephen Sondheim returned to the Alvin with his musical Merrily We Roll Along (11/16/81; 16 performances). Librettist George Furth, who had previously collaborated with Sondheim on Company (also at the Alvin), based his book on the Kaufman and Hart play of the same name. Broadway Its History People and Places An Encyclopedia Bloom Ken 1949 2nd Ed New, p. 396
• The Prince-Sondheim collaboration ended with the ill-fated Merrily We Roll Along (11/16/81; 16 performances). Reteaming with George Furth, the pair attempted to musicalize a KAUFMAN AND Hart comedy about friendship that was told in reverse chronology. Broadway Its History People and Places An Encyclopedia Bloom Ken 1949 2nd Ed New, p. 445
• The next Prince/Sondheim collaboration was the thriller Merrily We Roll Along (11/16/81; 16 performances), an adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart play. The show was told in reverse order. Broadway Its History People and Places An Encyclopedia Bloom Ken 1949 2nd Ed New, p. 523

Passages naming this production, found by keyword across 178 books. Where it turns up in the literature, not curated notes about it.

What this page does not know

• No photograph of this staging. 48 of 13,459 productions hold one.
• No recording is held for Merrily We Roll Along at all.
• Reviews, box office, running order, understudies and designers: none of it is held for any production.