Review: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG Finds the Funny at Front Porch Theatricals

Among theatre people, Merrily We Roll Along has always had a mixed reputation. While it contains some of Sondheim's most beloved songs and characters, it's also grim and cynical beyond even Sweeney Todd or Follies. Thanks to the backwards story structure, we start with our characters at their absolute worst and follow them backwards in time, seeing as they grew from likable people to embittered drunks, sellouts or outright monsters. Hell, this is a musical that begins (where the story ends) with an acid-to-the-face attack, one of the most brutal incidents in musical theatre history. It's easy to imagine why audiences would be turned off to a story like this... if it weren't so damned funny too.

Front Porch Theatricals, under producers Bruce E. G. Smith, Nancy D. Zionts, and advisory choices from the late, great Leon Zionts, has developed a reputation for producing challenging shows that sometimes require the audience to meet them halfway. The fact that Front Porch is routinely acclaimed as one of Pittsburgh's top theatre companies should show you that this level of trust in both the material and in the Pittsburgh audience's sophistication is well-warranted. Director (and longtime Front Porch actor) Daina Michelle Griffith has staged a Merrily that may not downplay the darkness, but plays up the humor surrounding it. This candy-coated layer makes the bitter pill go down easier.

Franklin Shepard (Dan Mayhak), a smash-hit Broadway songwriter turned successful film producer, has it all: tons of friends, tons of money, a celebrity wife, a starlet mistress, and a career that is still on the upswing at 40. What he doesn't have, it seems, are the three friends who got there with him: playwright Charley (Nathaniel Yost), author Mary (Catherine Kolos) and actor/first wife Beth (Marnie Quick). A single vicious act of disfigurement at a party he threw seems like it's derailed his story once and for all... but how did he get to that point? Travel back in time and find out, layer by layer.

Dan Mayhak playes Franklin with enough winning energy and charm that it becomes possible to root for him even as we see the flaws in him that his friends see and fixate on. He sings beautifully and mixes a haunted ennui with good spirits time and again. As his more manic, less grounded former writing partner, Nathaniel Yost never hides the beating heart beneath Charley's aggressively "always on" exterior. His performance of "Franklin Shepard Inc," an extended patter song dissection of his love/hate relationship with Franklin, is exhausting but exhilirating; someone get this man into Beetlejuice makeup the minute the rights become available. Rounding out the trio of men making up the leads is David Ieong, who Front Porch fans will remember as the crooked lawyer in last year's Grand Hotel. Ieong bucks the structure of the rest of the show: he's the only character we like more at the beginning than we do at the end. He starts out pathetic, a seeming victim, but as we travel back in time we recognize how sleazy and opportunistic he was at the start. Ieong finds the sad sack in the sleazebag, and the sleazebag in the sad sack, enough that we can see the seeds of either version in these two very disparate versions of the same character.

Catherine Kolos haves a tough role in Mary, since the author admits openly that she can be a harsh person. But Kolos centers both the humor and the heartbreak in Mary, making her the show's gooey center instead of its wrecking ball. Marnie Quick joins the game late as Beth, but she gets two of Sondheim's greatest ballads to make up for it. She grabs the audience's sympathy the minute she appears and never lets go, causing us to root for her even though we know how the story ends. And then there's Gussie, played by Michaela Isenberg with wonderful, icy charm. Gussie is the story's femme fatale, the kind of almost-camp diva role that you'd need a Joan Crawford then or an Eva Green now to play. It's a role requiring a certain amount of scenery chewing, and Isenberg chews like the best of them, giving us a villain we can love to hate in a morally dubious tale such as this.

Director Griffith stages the show with a large ensemble playing multiple roles; their ever-changing costumes by Kim Brown help differentiate both the many characters and many specific time periods. (Theatre nerds will remember that the original Broadway production featured the cast in baggy sweatshirts with their character names on them; two of those shirts appear in the final scene as an Easter egg.) Among the twelve-person ensemble, Missy Moreno and Corwin Stoddard pop as Beth's coarse, rural parents, and Matt Fawcett gives the kind of arch, icy smarm to his various yuppie-adjacent roles that Glenn Shadix would have envied.

There's almost a tangible moment of hope in the show's final moments, when we see all of these characters at the beginning of their journey. It could so easily feel bleak, but as the whole cast sings "Our Time" together, and Franklin concentrates on that moment of possibility, it feels like things could change. Like the story doesn't have to be cynical and cyclical, but could somehow have a new ending if it just tried hard enough. It takes a great production, and a brave company, to make Merrily feel like it had a happy ending, but somehow, this time, it truly does. I can't wait to see what next season holds from this spectacular company.

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