Merrily We Roll Along

Musical (1981)
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by George Furth
Based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
Direction and choreography by Dan Sullivan
Musical Direction: Jenny Tsai
Sullivan Rep
MotherBrook Arts and Community Center
Dedham, MA
June 12-27, 2026

With Sean Donnelly (Franklin Shepard); Carly Evans (Mary Flynn); Daniel Forest Sullivan (Charley Kringas); Katie Clark (Gussie Carnegie); Justin Boudreau (Joe Josephson); Meghan Rose (Beth Spencer); Aeon Smith (Meg); Ensemble: Kevin Hanley, Kristen Sehn, Evan Hill, Marcia Irwin, Anthony Rinaldi, Katie Howe, David J. Kim, Briar-Robin Pollock, Essie Bertain, Melissa Paz, Scott Berozi, Amanda Atkinson, Michael Hershberg

It starts in the nearer present, 1976 or so, and Franklin Shepard (Sean Donnelly), a composer of musicals, is a big Hollywood success, having produced various films, is having an affair with a new star, Meg (Aeon Smith), and generally is in the swim of the glamorous. Mary Flynn (Carly Evans), his old friend, is in attendance at a celebration at his house, not very happy, and drinking too much. His current wife, Gussie Carnegie (Katie Clark), is at the party, but not very happy about Frank’s flirtation with his new star. We get a whiff of Frank’s alienation from his old friend Charley Kringas (Daniel Forest Sullivan) who writes plays in New York and has had some recent success.

As time travels backwards a couple of years, we see Frank falling in with Gussie, then a big star who is married to Joe (Justin Boudreau), a producer with whom Frank has been associated. Frank has been married to Beth (Meghan Rose), with whom he got connected early on and with whom he and Charley had developed a small revue. There is a showdown with Beth who challenges Frank’s relationship with Gussie and who will leave him as a result. None of this pleases Charley or Mary very much, but they try, as old friends, to stay connected with Frank. Ultimately, however, there is a television interview with Frank and Charley who have collaborated on some number of shows, including a new successful one, and Charley lets loose about Frank in the interview, setting the stage for the collapse of their relationship.

Moving back further in time, we see Frank and Charley as young roommates in New York who have come together to collaborate on shows, and how they meet Beth and Mary, and how earnest and joyful it all is. But underlying the joy of friendship is the ambition to succeed, which, early on, is a blessing.

This show, when first produced on Broadway, was a huge failure and almost caused Stephen Sondheim to leave the business of writing musicals to, reportedly, taking up a new career in video games. (Glad that didn’t happen!) The musical has had, in recent years, a successful Broadway revival with Daniel Radcliffe as Charley, Jonathan Groff as Frank and Lindsay Mendez as Mary, brilliantly directed by Maria Friedman. It was originally revived in London in 2012 and Friedman brought it to the Huntington Theatre in Boston where I saw it in 2017. It was terrific in its new incarnation and hard to understand why it was such a commercial flop when it first appeared.

The current production by Sullivan Rep is ambitious for a new young theater, but they rise to the occasion admirably. The music, though lively, is not easy, and there are certainly many instances of vocal work in which there is considerable syncopation and complexity of harmony and counterpoint. The cast is huge – it seems to rival the audience in size at the charming and intimate venue at the Mother Brook Arts & Community Center in Dedham, but they work exceedingly well together. The staging is done with a lot of carefully wrought choreography and the singing and instrumental work are overall very good.

The acting is generally very capable, with a particularly good performance put in by Sean Donnelly as Frank, whom he portrays quite sympathetically. Though the character is meant to be an asshole of some stripe who betrays his wives and abandons his friends, Donnelly gives his character a certain degree of sensitivity. In his hands, Frank seems less an intentional and callous asshole and more one who is determined to be so by the circumstances of ambition. In this view, Frank is just following out the destiny of his original ambition, not meaning to hurt anyone, and just winding up as a magnate from whom his old friends Charley and Mary feel alienated.

Despite all of these positive qualities in this production, there is something, innate to the script, that makes it somewhat clearer about why it was a flop when it appeared forty-five or so years ago. There is no clear explanation in the narrative why Charley and Mary so resent Frank’s success. Of course, they object to his betrayal of his first wife, Beth, and to his general seeming dissoluteness, but there is nothing that quite explains why Charley, especially in the TV interview, is so acerbically critical of Frank. Nor is it clear why Mary is so desperately disappointed in Frank. There is also some seemingly gratuitous stuff about Mary having a hidden pining for Frank that does not fit in so well with the general narrative and ultimately seems like an unnecessary complication.

But what the narrative does show, though it does not quite accentuate its problems as well as it might, is that early ambition, seemingly innocent at the time, is the seed of the bad stuff that happens later. The point gets a bit covered up in the earnest companiability, and the dire effects of that rampant ambition, early on, not well sketched out.

Nonetheless, the roster of songs is truly up to the Sondheimian par, with many wonderful numbers populating the show.

The production is very good, with particularly good singing from Sean Donnelly as Frank and from Daniel Forest Sullivan as Charley, but from the wider cast as well. And the management of the large cast of characters works very well in the theater in the round setting of this small venue. Lighting and sound are quite effective. The production has emphasized some hairdos of the various eras and relies on some pretty bad wigs to do so – that might have been good to avoid.

Overall: An enjoyable three hours of a nice production of a great sow with some narrative gaps, but with some terrific music

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)