Merrily We Roll Along Lyrics
From the Album
1. Overture
2. Merrily We Roll Along
3. That Frank
4. First Transition
5. Old Friends (Part 1) / Like It Was
6. Franklin Shepard, Inc.
7. Second Transition
8. Old Friends (Part II)
9. Growing Up
10. Third Transition
11. Not A Day Goes By (Part I)
12. Now You Know
13. Act Two Opening
14. It's A Hit!
15. Fourth Transition
16. The Blob
17. Growing Up (Part II)
18. Good Thing Going
19. The Blob (Part II)
20. Fifth Transition
21. Bobby And Jackie And Jack
22. Not A Day Goes By (Part II)
23. Sixth Transition
24. Opening Doors
25. Seventh Transition
26. Our Time
Merrily We Roll Along is a 1981 American musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.
The show tells the story of how three friends' lives and friendship change over the course of 20 years; it focuses particularly on Franklin Shepard, a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies. Like the play on which it is based, the show's story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends' lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best.
Merrily premiered on Broadway on November 16, 1981, in a production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince, with a cast almost exclusively of teenagers and young adults. However, the show was not the success the previous Sondheim-Prince collaborations had been: after a chaotic series of preview performances, it opened to widely negative reviews, and closed after 16 performances and 44 previews.
In subsequent years, the show has been extensively rewritten and enjoyed several notable productions, including an off-Broadway revival in 1994, and a London premiere in 2000 that won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
The 2022 off-Broadway production staged at New York Theatre Workshop transferred to Broadway in fall 2023, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez, directed by Maria Friedman. A film adaptation starring Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt is in development.
-Wikipedia-
The show tells the story of how three friends' lives and friendship change over the course of 20 years; it focuses particularly on Franklin Shepard, a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies. Like the play on which it is based, the show's story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends' lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best.
Merrily premiered on Broadway on November 16, 1981, in a production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince, with a cast almost exclusively of teenagers and young adults. However, the show was not the success the previous Sondheim-Prince collaborations had been: after a chaotic series of preview performances, it opened to widely negative reviews, and closed after 16 performances and 44 previews.
In subsequent years, the show has been extensively rewritten and enjoyed several notable productions, including an off-Broadway revival in 1994, and a London premiere in 2000 that won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
The 2022 off-Broadway production staged at New York Theatre Workshop transferred to Broadway in fall 2023, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez, directed by Maria Friedman. A film adaptation starring Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt is in development.
-Wikipedia-