You and me, we were nicer then
Sondheim, Onegin, millennials, nostalgia
I have a lot to say about Merrily We Roll Along, the musical by Stephen Sondheim currently running in revival on Broadway, but first let me say a few words about Onegin.
Earlier this week, my dear friend Emily and I went to see the play Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words, currently running at BRIC in Brooklyn. At the door to the auditorium, an attendant stopped us. She was standing in front of a booth full of puppets. “This is a children’s show,” she said. “So you need a child. It’s impossible to watch the show without one.” We were invited to choose our children from among the puppets. I took one with a nametag reading Michael and measuring cups for hands. Emily’s had braids and a dress. I was a bit alarmed; I had no desire whatsoever to see a children’s adaptation of Onegin. I heard similar expressions of alarm from the patrons behind me, who were also being given puppets. In the end, the show didn’t turn out to really be for children, although it borrowed heavily from the tropes of “educational” children’s theater. There are a lot of examples, now, of artworks and media that take the form of something meant for children, though their intended audience is adults. I’m unsure if there are more of these than there used to be, though it often seems that way.
Later that week we went to Merrily We Roll Along, running now at the Hudson Theatre in a production starring Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff. It didn’t occur to me until I sat down to sketch out this piece that there are parallels between the themes of Eugene Onegin and those of Merrily. Both stories dramatize the gap between an innocent youthful self and a damaged, experienced older self; both consider the problem of regret.
The main conceit of Merrily is that it runs backwards: in the opening scene, we encounter the characters in cynical middle age, and each subsequent scene takes the story back in time by a few years until we finally see them as idealistic and optimistic kids who are just beginning their careers. When the show opens, Frank, the principal character, is a rich and successful producer of inane (it’s implied) movies. He’s no longer on speaking terms with his former best friend Charley. His other best friend, Mary, is a miserable alcoholic who has come to despise him and makes a bad scene at his party. Frank is cheating on his glamorous but fading wife with a young ingenue. He has a son he’s estranged from. The premise is thus established: Frank has all the trappings of status and success, but he’s miserable.
As the show progresses backward through time, we see all the choices that led to Frank’s position. The tone also grows steadily lighter and happier. Acrimonious fights give way to vows of friendship. The calculating second wife gives way to the kind and trusting first wife. Wealth gives way to plucky aspiration, commercialism to art, cynicism to optimism, separation to love, age to youth. The emotional effect derives from the irony, ironic in the classical sense: when we finally see those hopeful dreamers at the end of the show, we know how those dreams ultimately turned out. The show’s morality is not complex or subtle and, in moments, it is outright sentimental, but I found it very affecting. It’s designed to make you think back on your own life and question your selfishness, your concessions to pragmatism, your abandoned ambitions, your loss of lovers and friends. Depending on how acutely you’re feeling any of those things, Merrily might strike a difficult chord.
The original production of Merrily was, famously, a devastating flop (more on this in a minute). Part of the show’s difficulty is that it can be hard to feel sorry for Frank, or identify with him, or get emotionally invested in the state of his soul. After all, his rise to career success is almost entirely devoid of struggle and it’s easy to read him as an avatar of privilege. The sources of his problem are obvious: he has a shaky sense of integrity, he’s easily manipulated, he loves money, and he has trouble saying no. Jonathan Groff’s performance goes a long way in making him intelligible, even sympathetic. Groff is a charismatic, likable performer and blandly good-looking, with a cream-cheese face: it’s easy to imagine his Frank going through life oblivious to why people find it easy to give him the things he wants. His best friends Mary and Charley are among these people: they can’t help liking and supporting him even when he snubs and hurts him. They, however, are clearer-eyed about the likelihood of getting the things they want from life.
There’s a documentary titled The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened about the original failed production, which closed after only 16 performances. The New York Times wrote, in a “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” review:
…the rest of the cast is dead wood until the penultimate number, an ironic, idealistic anthem titled ''Our Time.'' At that point, Mr. Sondheim's searing songwriting voice breaks through once more to address, as no one else here does, the show's poignant theme of wasted lives. But what's really being wasted here is Mr. Sondheim's talent. And that's why we watch ''Merrily We Roll Along'' with an ever-mounting - and finally upsetting - sense of regret.
A fact that struck me from the documentary is that the original impetus for the show came from director Harold Prince’s desire to do a show “about kids” — since he had two of his own. I’ve always understood Merrily to be about aging (one of Sondheim’s recurring themes), but in its original incarnation, Sondheim and Prince conceived the show as being about youth. In a move that was a large contributing factor to the show’s failure, they pursued this theme by casting young and mostly inexperienced actors in every part. But the kid-ness didn’t stop there: the original set resembled a high school, with lockers and bleachers, and the costumes consisted of colorful sweatshirts with the characters’ names on them. Furthermore, both the script and the songwriting were intentionally naive. The original opening number was titled “Rich and Happy” and was meant to represent “a kid’s idea of a Hollywood party.”1 For the songwriting, Sondheim tried to imagine himself back to his own early career, writing in a simpler and more traditional style. This latter choice resulted in some wonderfully tender, heartbreaking songs — but none of them rise to the greatness of Being Alive or Send in the Clowns, both of which were unquestionably written for adults.
And the audience’s reaction to that first production was not unlike my own, when handed a child-puppet before Onegin earlier that week: they didn’t want to see a children’s show.
Now, of course, Broadway is full of children’s shows, including The Lion King, Aladdin, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Wicked (an adaptation of a young adult novel). And at the performance I attended, there was no sign whatsoever of any audience disappointment or discomfort. The audience, including me and my friend, was absolutely eating it up. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the changes made to the show in later editions — casting experienced pros, elevating the writing, chopping numbers that weren’t working — but also I wonder if the audience has changed.
I am generally annoyed by essays about my age and socioeconomic cohort (“old millennials”) but allow me now to be part of the problem. A couple of months ago I went with a friend to see the reunion tour for The Postal Service, whose album Give Up formed a big part of the soundtrack of my early 20’s. Ben Gibbard once had one of those long swoopy emo haircuts and now resembles a mid-level product manager at Microsoft, presumably like many of the other former wearers of said swoopy haircuts. I hadn’t really listened to the songs in a while, and hearing them fresh, what struck me about them was how often they expressed a yearning for childlike comfort, for a nostalgic escape into a state of fantasy and innocence.
We were yearning for innocence and we weren’t even old yet, I thought during the show. I considered that it might have been better, nobler, if in our early 20s we had been eager for experience and sophistication instead. When I think about how many bands of the era cultivated a twee aesthetic, or sang angsty songs about being eleven years old, I have to think there’s something to the criticism of my generation as cultivating a state of arrested development. I also think back to my days being involved in the indie video game community: the dominating sentiment was a nostalgic one, not a forward-looking one. The most popular aesthetics and themes were overtly nostalgia-driven, especially for the games of the early 90’s, when their makers were children. And we weren’t even old! We hadn’t even lived through especially difficult times, particularly in comparison to the rest of the 20th century! I don’t think this kind of nostalgia is especially admirable — though it sometimes translates into great literature and art — and it’s a tendency I try to fight myself.
Merrily, then, perhaps has aged into its right generational audience. I’ll note that the current production’s two big leads, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, became famous for their work in movies made for children2. But the emotional oomph comes from dramatizing the desired return to innocence while simultaneously showing the impossibility of that desire, and reminding us of our own culpability in cases where we haven’t turned out, as people, the way we hoped we would.
Near the end of Onegin, both in Pushkin’s original novel in verse and the show I saw this week, the character Tatiana reflects, with some bitterness, on a painful episode from her youth. “I was younger then, and better,” she says. This echoes a line from Merrily, where Mary remembers the past and laments: “You and me, we were nicer then.” Onegin, the play, contained a segment about looking into the past, using a metaphor of a child discovering a lost toy when the snow melts in spring, and feeling an inexplicable sadness in the memory it brings. In a monologue, one of the actors explained that if we don’t continuously turn back to reflect on our lives — if we move through life looking only forward, thinking about what’s next — we will be unprepared for that inevitable moment when we are forced to remember. A “late turning,” as he described it, can be a trigger for debilitating obsession, as it is for Onegin when he re-encounters Tatiana as a grown woman.
In the documentary about the original production of Merrily, Harold Prince explains that part of the goal in casting young actors was to communicate a message to the youth: don’t make the mistakes we did, don’t become a bunch of sellouts like your parents’ generation! It’s not surprising that this wasn’t an especially palatable message, and Merrily is now, wonderfully and thankfully, a show for adults. Rather than “don’t fuck it up”, the message must be: you will fuck it up, inevitably. All part of growing up.
Related reading and viewing:
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, streaming on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
My essay on the opera Eugene Onegin
My essay on Stephen Sondheim’s Company
From Sondheim’s book of reminiscences and collected lyrics, Finishing the Hat.
And, of course, my generation is known for carrying a fervency for the Harry Potter universe well into adulthood.