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Merrily We Roll Along 1981 Original Broadway Cast
Cast Recording
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Merrily We Roll Along
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MP3 Music, April 18, 2006
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| Audio CD, Cast Recording, July 14, 1986 |
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Track Listings
| 1 | Overture - Paul Gemignani |
| 2 | The Hills of Tomorrow / Merrily We Roll Along (1980) / Rich and Happy |
| 3 | Merrily We Roll Along (1979-1975) / Old Friends / Like It Was |
| 4 | Merrily We Roll Along (1974-1973) / Franklin Shepard, Inc. |
| 5 | Old Friends - Lonny Price |
| 6 | Not a Day Goes By - Jim Walton |
| 7 | Now You Know |
| 8 | It's a Hit! - Lonny Price |
| 9 | Merrily We Roll Along (1964-1962) / Good Thing Going |
| 10 | Merrily We Roll Along (1961-1960) / Bobby and Jackie and Jack - Sally Klein |
| 11 | Not a Day Goes By - Jim Walton |
| 12 | Opening Doors - Sally Klein |
| 13 | Our Time |
| 14 | The Hills of Tomorrow |
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It's a shame that Merrily We Roll Along was such a flop on Broadway, for it contains some of Stephen Sondheim's best, brightest, and brassiest music. The reasons have been well documented: a youthful, inexperienced cast; cheesy sets and costumes; and, most of all, a confusing plot structure that starts in 1980 with bitter, cynical characters and winds its way backward to 1955, when a high school graduating class is dreaming of making its mark on the world. The main focus is on three friends (Jim Walton, Ann Morrison, and Lonny Price) who share musical ambitions but are gradually driven apart by the turbulence and fragmentation of their lives and the America around them. (You'll also hear a pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander, and even a young chorus girl named Liz Callaway.) Sondheim almost imperceptibly reworks his themes as his characters develop, and the score includes the infectious "Old Friends," the driving title tune, the ballad "Not a Day Goes By," and "Our Time," an uplifting anthem of hope when performed out of the show's context, but emotionally devastating within it. And if the backward structure--inherited from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1934 version of the show--really bothers you, you can run it almost completely chronologically by reprogramming the CD. --David Horiuchi
Product details
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- Product Dimensions : 5.62 x 4.92 x 0.33 inches; 3.84 ounces
- Manufacturer : Masterworks Broadway
- Original Release Date : 1986
- Run time : 1 hour and 6 minutes
- Date First Available : February 10, 2007
- Label : Masterworks Broadway
- ASIN : B000002W91
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #43,677 in CDs & Vinyl (See Top 100 in CDs & Vinyl)
- #423 in Musical Soundtracks & Scores
- #641 in Traditional Vocal Pop (CDs & Vinyl)
- #19,240 in Pop (CDs & Vinyl)
- Customer Reviews:
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Why did it fail? Perhaps it was the young cast of unknowns, perhaps because of its self-reflective (possibly indulgent) exploration of a successful musical composer, after a decade of success was it payback time for Sondheim and director Hal Prince, or could it be the air of cynicism and melancholy that pervades the score? Who knows?
Another fascination of this score is that it was recorded they day after the show closed after it's short run. This seems to only add to the sense of melancholy and the self-reflexiveness begins to pile up even more.
Finding the right voices was the first and fatal misstep of this original cast album. the cast sounds juvenile, making the reverse plot wobbly since the leads sound young at every stage. There's no reason, vocally, to believe that cynicism and bitterness are moving backward toward innocence. Harold Prince's notion of casting the show with teenagers was horribly off the mark. Also, Merrily has never found a charismatic Frank. There are special "Sondheim voices" - Elaine Stritch,Mandy patinkin, Bernadette Peters - that are distinctive and off-kilter. They inhabit a world of bittersweet cynicism that's true to Sondheim's mixture of champagne and ground glass. Merrily needs such voices. Only in the encores recording, which was meant to rehabilitate the show form the doldrums, did Mary get cast with the right chemistry, but the male side remains weak. The original Broadway cast didn't come within a country mile of sounding at home with the score.
the major problem after casting is Sondheim's artistic quandary. Merrily has a vein of sentimentality about "old friends" that is jejune, and its theme about selling out art for success isn't vicious or poignant enough. Only after he arrived at Sunday in the Park did Sondheim find the maturity to tell the story form the perspective of a conflicted artist (from that show, the song "Putting It Together" says more than the entire script and lyrics of Merrily). Musically, Merrily's score resembles Into the Woods in its cheeriness, but Sondheim hadn't found a way to cut through Broadway sunniness with dark shadows.
So Merrily has languished in limbo. The encores album made the protagonists into adults, which was a good step, and it reduced the oversized orchestration, a necessary step since the songs are mostly too breezy to need a big band a la follies. But Frank lacks charisma, and Charlie, who is meant to be the show's moral compass - he stands for "pure" art - comes across as a whiny pest. At best we are halfway to getting what the score deserves - George Furth's book will always be a liability, but that's true for company, and it has succeeded despite its weak book.
Better things may be in sight. The current West End revival in London is sharper, more bitter, and more energized than any cast album so far. Like the trimmed-down versions of Sondheim shows directed by John Doyle over the past decade, this production began at the Menier chocolate Factory, and astute decision-making turned Merrily into a show with packed houses. If it comes to New York and if a cast album gets made, Merrily may flourish the way Anyone Can Whistle has. for now, it's still a problem show.
Top reviews from other countries
L'Original London Cast est moins claquant.
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