‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Was Sondheim’s Big Flop. Can She Save It?

In the beginning, everybody cried. A lot.

“I’d say the entire cast spent the first two weeks of rehearsals in tears, in tears, and they had no idea why,” said Maria Friedman, the director of the new, hotly anticipated revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” That’s the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical from 1981, which opens on Dec. 12 at the New York Theater Workshop, and all but sold out its limited run the day tickets became available.

In a season plump with Sondheim revivals (“Into the Woods,” next year’s “Sweeney Todd”) and literature, this one carries an especially heavy cargo of expectation — the hope that its creator’s most notorious flop might finally be rehabilitated.

A British star of musicals and a peerless interpreter (and friend) of Sondheim, who died a year ago, the 62-year-old Friedman tends to talk in breathless, boldfaced italics. This means that even speaking the unvarnished truth, she often sounds hyperbolic.

“I’d love to be able to say that Maria was lying, but that was very true,” said the film and stage star Daniel Radcliffe, of the high tear quotient during rehearsals. “I would be practicing some of the songs at home on my own and would just cry suddenly. And I’m not a person who cries a lot as a rule.”

During previews, when I spoke to Radcliffe and the show’s other two stars — Jonathan Groff (“Spring Awakening,” “Hamilton”) and Lindsay Mendez (a Tony winner for “Carousel”) — on the phone, they said they were still having trouble staying dry-eyed in performance. “Now the thing that’s challenging,” Groff said, “now that we’ve kind of got the material where we can do it without weeping, is hearing the audience react to it.” Radcliffe and Groff agreed that Mendez was the strongest in that regard.

“That bar is very low,” said Mendez, adding, “This show, it hits in you in the gut every second.” Moving backward in time, from the 1970s to the 1950s, the musical traces the fracturing friendship of three people, from disenchanted present to idealistic past: a charismatic composer who becomes a movie producer, Franklin Shepard (Groff); his collaborator, a playwright, Charley Kringas (Radcliffe); and a novelist, Mary Flynn (Mendez), who is hopelessly in love with Frank.