Rhymes with Integrity

Mark Umbers, Damian Humbley, and Jenna Russell
as Frank, Charley, and Mary

(reflection on the High Definition transmission of Merrily We Roll Along, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by George Furth, directed by Maria Friedman.  Production at the Harold Pinter Theatre, summer of 2013.  Also, Stephen Sondheim's book, Finishing the Hat, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

About Stephen Sondheim, the commonplace comments are, "You can't hum his tunes," "His songs are too cerebral," and "He sure does know how to rhyme!"

Since I saw director Maria Friedman's 2013 revival of Merrily We Roll Along broadcast in HD from London last week, I've marveled how natural-sounding rhymes bring home the characters' thoughts and feelings with a snap that makes the listener chuckle, or wince.  Finding myself humming the song "Growing Up" non-stop,  I've realized that song haunts me for an oh-so-cerebral reason:  added to the score four years after the show closed on Broadway, this song snaps together the story's characters and themes with the score's musical motifs.

Purpose for "Growing Up" The commonplace comments about Merrily are, "It's told backwards," "It was a fiasco in 1981 that ended Sondheim's collaboration with Hal Prince," and, "You don't like the main character." In Sondheim's own words...

Frank, the central figure, is entirely unsympathetic for the first half hour of the show.  He is arrogant, an adulterer, a betrayer of his best friend and the cause of near-suicidal alcoholism in the woman who loves him unrequitedly. (Sondheim 395)

Sondheim doesn't disagree:

I just happen to like stories about unsympathetic characters, because I trust the author to tell me why they interest him. That was the purpose of "Growing Up"...(396).

Four years after the short-lived run of Merrily on Broadway (so short-lived that I never got to use my tickets), director James Lapine revised the show with Sondheim and book writer George Furth. He suggested a song for the third scene to give the audience "a progress report on [Frank's] moral state." Sondheim obliged with a song that "allowed the audience to feel affection for Frank an hour earlier than they had in 1981."

Set Up for "Growing Up" So, in the fully-integrated version of the show, Frank sits down to a piano. He's alone in an unfurnished room, trunks and suitcases unopened around him. He's back from a cruise, beginning a new life after divorce. His closest friends Charley and Mary have just visited, but the joyful reunion almost fell apart in a disagreement about Frank's next move: Will he collaborate with Charley on the politically idealistic musical they've always wanted to write, or put that off again so Frank can pursue a Hollywood deal that'll pay child support? The adults worked through their differences in the tense middle section of an otherwise joyful paean to "old friends." Now, Mary and Charley have gone off to an old favorite night club to wait for Frank, who stays behind to take a call expected from Gussie, a Broadway star, wife of his producer / patron Joe. 

Because Merrily We Roll Along is told backwards, we know what's "ahead." Frank, at a party some years from now, surrounded by sycophants, denounced by ex-friend Mary, despised by second wife Gussie, forbidding any mention of his ex-friend Charley, will proclaim "I hate my life.  If I could go back and start over....!" 

But there's a lot we don't know, yet, about what brought him to this piano in an empty apartment.  Sondheim's song laces together strands of Frank's past. Given the backwards flow of this script, "Growing Up" foreshadows what we'll hear later. Sondheim invests later moments with resonance.

"Growing Up," part one Frank softly plays steady chords and hums a melody.  Then he sings words, as if to Charley and Mary,

Thanks, old friends ...
Keep reminding me...
Frank's old friends
Always seem to come through.
Frank will, too. 

No tricky rhymes here, just a natural sounding statement of affection and gratitude. He continues his thoughts about the decisions ahead:

So, old friends,
Now it's time to start growing up.
Taking charge,
Seeing things as they are.
Facing facts,
Not escaping them,
Still with dreams,
Just reshaping them,
Growing up...

It's a gentle tune, every phrase reaching upward in a way that feels positive.  With a couple of rhymes, now, the lyrics still feel like something a guy might say to explain himself across a table in a coffee house. 

Yet there's more going on, here:  We in the audience have heard those steady chords once before during the overture, along with what Frank hums.

When we will hear those chords again, in the second act, it will be years in the past, when Frank and Charley are about to find commercial success. They're at a swanky party, where Frank accompanies Charley on "Good Thing Going," a song they've written for their idealistic musical Take a Left. Frank is about to take a sharp right: Charley doesn't know that their hostess Gussie Carnegie has just seduced Frank into promising her that song for a frivolous rom-com she hopes will boost her career. Charlie's lyric, a gentle breakup ballad, could describe Charley's and Mary's relationship with Frank, their regret that "it could've kept on growing, / instead of just kept on."

While the accompaniment for "Growing Up" is borrowed from "Good Thing Going," the vocal line comes from another source, a motif we will hear at other crucial moments in Frank's life. Compare "So old friends / now it's time to be / growing up" to Mary's advice for Frank when divorce seems to have shattered his life: "Now you know,/Life is crummy, well,/ now you know." While Mary's song is uptempo, and the second and third pitches are reversed, "Growing Up" is still a variation on the same tune. So is the tune Gussie sings in mockery of her own guests: "Meet the Blob, / The bodies you / read about. / The ones who know everyone / that everyone knows." Using that same wise-cracking "now you know" motif, Gussie lets Frank in on her private joke -- flattering him, buttering him up for seduction. Moments later, Gussie sings her own slow, seductive version of "Growing Up."

But in the present scene, the tune comes across as a gentle affirmation of acceptance.

"Growing Up" interruption Then there's an outburst of short musical phrases that twist around within an interval of just four steps of the scale,  a little like kids' sneering "nyeah- nyeah nyeah" on a playground: 

Charley is a hothead.
Charley won't budge.
Charley is a friend.

Charley is a screamer,
Charley won't bend.
Charley's in your corner.

We've heard that twisted little tune several times already. It's the second motif of the overture. It starts the innocent little figure that the keyboard plays early in the song "Franklin Shepard, Inc." As that song grows into a furious indictment of Frank for abandoning friends and ideas, that little mocking motif snakes under most of the song.

But, for now, at the climax of "Growing Up," Frank's outburst grows to a high note on the word "change" before it subsides in the pair of lines that follow, which rhyme like an old adage:

Why is it old friends
Don't want old friends to change?
Every road has a turning,
That's the way you keep learning.

The "turning" of a "road" is a metaphor developed in the opening number, and repeated at transitions between scenes: "Bending with the road, / Gliding through the countryside, / Merrily we roll along, / Roll along, / Catching at dreams" (384).

"Growing Up," first ending Frank's conclusion pulls all these strands together:

Trying things,
Being flexible,
Bending with the road,
Adding dreams
When the others don't last.
Growing up,
Understanding that growing never ends,
Like old dreams --

Frank qualifies this last one:

Some old dreams --
Like old friends.

The vamp returns for "Good Thing Going," and, with the apparent end of the song, Frank has made up his mind to meet his friends, to leave Gussie and her "blob" world behind, but then, suddenly, she's there. She snuck in while he was playing.

She tells Frank that she has left her husband. He rebukes her for leaving a man devoted to her who is Frank's patron and friend. Why now, asks Frank. "Because I saw tonight that I could lose you." She continues Frank's song:

Growing up
Means admitting
The things you want the most.
Can't pursue
Every possible line.
Folding tents,
Making choices,
Ignoring all
Other voices,
Including mine...
You're divine...

"You're divine" is a non-sequitur, but it keeps the integrity of the drama, as Gussie is turning from rhetoric to outright seduction.  The phrase is a bit far-fetched, but not for Gussie, whom George Furth endowed with memorably precious dialogue, as when she tells her guests to "fermez all those bouches".  At this spot, where the twisty mocking motif comes in, Sondheim stretches it out in legato phrases, and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick brings in the saxophone to make it into a sultry tune:

You decide on what you want, darling,
Not on what you think you should.
Not on what you want to want, darling,
Not from force of habit.
Once it's clearly understood, darling,
Better go and grab it.
Things can slip away for good, darling.
What is it you really --?

She finishes with a come-hither gesture, and Frank follows her to the bedroom.  He's hooked.

But Frank fought the good fight, and every word of this song rings true. It's realism, it's common sense, it's appealing:  Who doesn't want to grow?  Who doesn't realize that realities change?  Who can't identify with "wanting to want" what one "should?" 

And That's Just One Song Every scene, every song in Merrily We Roll Along displays such integrity. 

But if the songs are good, who needs all that? Why should Sondheim and Furth have taken such care to integrate music, lyrics, and dialogue, along with story, character, and theme? 

They do it to create a world for the actors -- and audience -- to inhabit.  In an interview before the broadcast, Mark Umbers ("Frank") tells us that "Sondheim does all the work for you," unlike other writers who leave gaps for the actors to cover over.  Director Maria Friedman's staging and her cast's performances match the material in integrity and skill. Moment to moment, we feel that what we see and hear is really happening;  everything fits;  and, for the man who has lost his integrity, there is no escape from the consequences.

Happily, Friedman finds a way to emphasize a possibility for redemption at the very end.  When we first see Franklin in her production, he's pacing alone at night, considering a manuscript bound in red. Then follows the party where he says that he hates his life, and that, if he could go back, he'd start over.  After the beautifully hopeful anthem "Our Time," sung by young Frank, Mary, and Charley on a rooftop under a clear starry sky, the scenery and ensemble fade away, and we're left again with Frank in that living room.  He's back to clutching the red manuscript, which we now recognize to be the play that he and Charley always wanted to complete.  Could he be ready for a new start?  There's hope.