This review was published on October 10, 2023. At the 77th Tony Awards, Merrily We Roll Along won four awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. Here’s a thing about the so-called classics: We may have all sorts of feelings, valid ones, about how often they come back around, what was wrong with them in the first place, what’s wrong with them now, and what may or may not be worthier of a current airing; but the fact that they come back around forces us to pause and do that most imperative and unsettling of things — reconsider.
To look at something again really means looking at ourselves again: approaching the same mirror ready to see a different reflection, perhaps even ready to admit that we no longer agree with our past selves. In the Russian director Anatoly Efros’s rehearsal diaries, he returns to Three Sisters several times over the course of many years. One later entry begins, “Perhaps the beginning of Three Sisters should not be exactly as I thought before.
” Another, still later: “Obviously, our production of Three Sisters was not clear enough.” The old plays that keep coming back make us confront the possibility — frightening, vital — of change. Four years ago, in a different world, I reviewed a production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along , and in large part I blamed the book (by Furth, based on the 1934 play by George S.
Kaufman and Moss Hart) for the show’s limited effectiveness. I was hardly the first: When Merr.
