Free Showstopper by Abigail Pogrebin Page A

his musicals. I suddenly had a window into where he felt Merrily had gone wrong, and I was moved to read how strongly the experience had impacted Sondheim himself. It prompted me, after three decades of dormancy, to reflect on what I myself took away.
    The most powerful time-travel moment came last March, 2011, when I was asked by Lonny Price, one of the original leads of Merrily —now an accomplished theater director—to be interviewed by him for a documentary he is co-producing on the making of Merrily. As I began answering his questions about whether the show had informed my approach to life, I was startled to hear myself admit how much it had. The experience taught me that creativity takes audacity, that Utopia materializes, that failure can be survived. It was formative to see that songs—which underwhelmed some critics in 1981—could become classics ten or twenty years later; that a bedeviled flop could become folklore, that art can keep breathing after it’s declared dead, and even come to life again, many times over.

        No one in Merrily has ever put the whole story to paper, but every one of us was imprinted by it. The plot-line came to life before our eyes—not the selling-out so much as the dissolution of relationships and, in any pursuit, the certainty of at last one big fumble. Those of us who watched our heroes build Merrily— and then attempt to save it—were galvanized and startled by their struggle. And as I reconstruct the timeline here, I’m actually aware of how pivotal this roller coaster was in my overall perspective, a definitive lesson—in ways both valuable and invisible to a teenager—in how things can not go your way.

“How did you get there from here?”

    I became part of the show’s first iteration in 1980—a staged reading of the libretto by George Furth, who adapted Merrily from a 1934 play of the same title by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and who had written the Tony-winning book for Company . Merrily ’s casting director, Joanna Merlin—Prince’s trusted arbiter of talent and the original Tzeitel in Prince’s Fiddler on the Roof (starring Zero Mostel)—tapped some of her daughter’s classmates to audition and I was given a small role. Joanna had seen me perform in school productions at Dalton, a private school in New York City, and she’d always been an avid booster of student potential.
    The cast was instructed to show up at the Broadway Theater, whose tenant was Evita —Hal Prince’s latest tour de force, starring newcomer Patti LuPone. The stage was constructed on a rake, sloping down toward the audience, and I remember feeling both unnerved by the excitement and worried about falling off my chair. It was one of those dreamlike scenes—to be in front of Sondheim and Prince, reading the words of the Company author, on the stage of Evita , which happened to be my latest musical-theater addiction. I’d seen Evita countless times in the preceding year, thanks to Prince’s daughter, Daisy, who had become a close friend when I entered the ninth grade at Dalton, the same autumn that Evita opened. Daisy had attended the school since seventh grade, but she made me feel like we’d grown up together; musicals became our emotional glue. We shared a delight in theater trivia and an encyclopedic command of lyrics ranging from Brigadoon to Fiorello!  Between classes, we would sit on the school fire stairway, singing through every score. Daisy was the first person, aside from my identical twin sister, Robin, who knew—and cherished—as many musicals as I did.
    Some kids liked Fleetwood Mac, some liked the Stones. I loved Sondheim. I sobbed at age ten when Pacific Overtures lost the Tony for Best Musical to A Chorus Line . I considered it an “outrage” that the brilliance of Pacific hadn’t been recognized over A Chorus Line ’s sequin top hats, disregarding the reality that Sondheim’s storyline was atypical Broadway fare, i.e., the British invasion of