8:00 pm Monday night: I am watching the credits to the 2025 recorded version of Merrily We Roll Along and I am astonished to see it was based on a 1934 play by Kaufman and Hart. And then I am gobsmacked to read that K&H’s 1934 version was told with the same backward narration.
6:00 pm Monday night: I pick up the musical where I left off, about thirty minutes in.
3:30 Sunday afternoon: I think, “I’ve got to stop watching this and finish it tomorrow if I’m going to get the gardening done. But I liked that ‘Franklin Shepard Inc.’ song because it had a tune.”
2:55 Sunday afternoon: I decide to watch the Merrily We Roll Along movie on Netflix because I vaguely remembered it was the rare Sondheim failure that inspired the documentary The Best Worst Thing to Ever Could Have Happened. One of the difficulties was that the musical was told in reverse chronological order.
June 17, 2024: I watch the opera Galileo Galilei.
1957: Stephen Sondheim debuts on Broadway with West Side Story, including the song “Something’s Coming,” which could just as well be the last (yet chronologically first) song of Merrily We Roll Along, “Our Time.”
How is it that a mystery play can essentially reveal events in reverse, and it doesn’t trouble me, and an opera can do the same and I think it’s fine, but not this? I suppose part of it is that you get invested in a character, and if the character is revealed to be originally different from what you were told then you feel cheated? Galileo doesn’t change from end to beginning. Good guys are revealed to be evil killers, and that’s delightful, because they were evil all along. But this musical gives you someone damaged who was better before, so you have to watch as they get more appealing but then you know that’s the beginning, not the ending.
So I suppose ultimately I didn’t like it. I didn’t like a Kaufman and Hart play, surprising, I know.