Highlights for those not able to get past the paywall:
What propels the highs and lows of Merrily We Roll Along, the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical that begins performances this month at the Hudson Theater, is friendship. But for the stars of this first Broadway revival - Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe - embodying the implosion of that friendship may well be more emotionally charged, rewarding and wrenching than anything they've done before.
As often happens with actors portraying intimacy, the sentiments they evoke in performance have bled into real life - or the good feelings anyway, when their characters are still fresh, hopeful and unconditionally smitten with one another. These well-seasoned pros may be in their 30s or early 40s, but when they describe their relationship - offstage, I mean, although the line becomes blurry: they're as effusive and dewy as Romeo and Juliet before the going got tough.
"It's such a special show in that way," said Groff. "Often I feel you get that with the people you play romantic interests with. But the love story in this show is the friends. So there's this intensity in a friendship that I've never experienced with a play before."
Groff made those observations last fall when Merrily, the American directorial debut of the British actress (and frequent Sondheim interpreter) Maria Friedman, had just started previews in its Off Broadway incarnation at New York Theater Workshop. That its transfer to Broadway seemed guaranteed once it opened had much to do with the aching, loving sincerity with which its cast suffused it.
More perhaps than any of the recent Sondheim productions, this tear-streaked Merrily pronounces a definitive finis to the perception of the composer as an overly cerebral artist of chilly, distancing cleverness.
Friedman's approach, of locating and clinging to the show's wrenching emotional center, clearly affected its 20-some member ensemble, which has been increased by two for Broadway. When the Workshop production ended its limited, sold-out run in January, Groff said he and his co-stars were a wreck, even knowing we were going to Broadway, to say goodbye to an experience that meant so much.
Nonetheless, Groff, Mendez and Radcliffe agreed to think as little as possible about Merrily for the next seven months. And while they continued to keep in close touch (they all attended Sweeney Todd together), they avoided discussing it.
While [the birth of his first child] kept Merrily thoughts mostly at bay, Radcliffe - who registers as the most obsessive of the three - admitted that he continued to practice his solo "Franklin Shepard, Inc.," a rapid-fire tongue twister. He would even sing it while holding his son. "He seems to respond to really fast music," Radcliffe said.
The bond among the stars felt, if anything, tighter than when I spoke to them last December. They were aware of it from the moment they met. "When the three of us first walked into the room," Groff said, "there was a natural..."
"It was a heart connection," Mendez said.
Groff continued: "It's a vibe. It's chemistry. You have it on dates sometimes. And then going night after night after night and digging into the energy that was between us and the show deepening it. The three of us have, it's such a gift - a meant-to-be alignment of personality and energy."
What they share, among other things, is a bone-deep love of that currently beleaguered art form, the theater. Groff and Mendez, who turned 40 this year, arrived in Manhattan in their late teens from Pennsylvania and California to "pound the pavements," as they said, sounding like the hoofers in a Busby Berkeley musical.
By that time, the London-born Radcliffe, 34, was already world-famous as the title character of the Harry Potter film franchise, in which he starred for a decade. His parents had been stage actors before he was born, and Radcliffe said that, growing up, he spent as much time going to theater as to the movies.
"I think I love the element of risk," Radcliffe said of working in theater.
So would he describe himself as a member of that New York-centric cult that makes a religion of the Broadway musical? "They're the high priests," he said, pointing to the others. "I'm like an altar boy." He said that hearing a perfectly normal phrase like "How do you do?" will trigger his co-stars to start performing a lyric with just that phrase.
Sure enough, when a few moments later I mentioned that I grew up in Winston-Salem, N.C., Groff and Mendez responded immediately and simultaneously in swooping falsetto and soprano. "Winstooon-Saaalemm," they sang, quoting a number I had almost forgotten from the musical The Light in the Piazza.
When they discussed their lyrics and dialogue from Merrily, they often seemed tremulous with the excitement of discovery. With an exactitude and passion that was unexpected at the end of a long rehearsal day, they parsed several scenes and musical numbers for me, especially moments when their characters just miss the chance to repair what's gone wrong in their relationship.
Groff and Mendez started crying during several such descriptions, as if they had only just fully realized the extent of the destruction being done.
Mendez said those moments resonate even more fully now than they did seven months ago. "When we rehearsed this downtown, and had started being friendly, the thing that would hit me in my heart, was the idea of the friendship. But now it's the actual friendship; we feel the way we feel they feel in 'Opening Doors', she said, referring to an ebullient, optimistic trio performed when their characters are just starting out in New York. "So to think about that deteriorating is pretty gutting."