Merrily We Roll Along 2025 Movie Review
A live recording of the 2024 Tony Award winning Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical, filmed at the Hudson Theatre in New York City. Merrily We Roll Along follows three close friends, composer Franklin Shepard, lyricist Charley Kringas and critic Mary Flynn, as money, fame and bad choices slowly pull them apart over the course of twenty years. The story is told in reverse, starting with broken friendships and moving backwards to their hopeful beginnings on a New York rooft
Opening to catastrophic reviews on Broadway in the early 1980s, Merrily We Roll Along brought an abrupt pause to Stephen Sondheim’s partnership with director Hal Prince, the team that had defined serious American musicals in the previous decade with Company, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd. Audiences struggled with its story told in reverse, and with an original production that asked very young performers to play jaded show business veterans. It was so confusing at the time that a revision had characters wearing sweatshirts with their names printed on them so audiences could keep track of who was who. Over the following decades the piece was repeatedly tweaked and revived, as Sondheim and a series of directors kept trying to clarify the storytelling while preserving a score many already considered among his most emotionally intricate.
The cast was aged up, the scenery changed, but it was not until Maria Friedman’s 2012 staging in London that critics and audiences finally began to connect with the story. Her approach kept the staging lean, minimized costume and behaviour shifts, and focused on making the reverse structure feel clear and emotionally direct. That version eventually evolved into the 2023 Broadway revival, which cast Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the trio, broke sales records and won multiple Tony Awards, including Best Revival and acting prizes for Groff and Radcliffe. A separate film adaptation directed by Richard Linklater is also in the works, designed to follow its cast as they age over the years, but in the meantime, to preserve Friedman’s achievement, RadicalMedia, the company behind the live captures of Hamilton for Disney+ and Come From Away for Apple TV+, was brought in to give this production a similar permanent record.
As a strong defender of recording and distributing more Broadway musicals (producers never seem to understand that more visibility would help the struggling business get more butts in the seats), it really feels like a privilege that a capture like this exists. The close-ups can be thrilling: seeing the smallest changes in Jonathan Groff’s glances or Lindsay Mendez’s sad look hiding behind the widest smiles really helps cement this cast and production as one for the ages. The issue is that this is almost all the film gives us. It cuts from close-up to close-up, often disorienting when other characters enter, rarely allowing audiences to understand the stage’s geography. Were the other characters already on, listening, or did they just appear from nowhere? What else is happening around them as the camera lingers on one face? With so few wide shots, you can rarely tell.
There are moments that suggest this might have been a rushed shoot rather than a carefully planned effort, unlike the captures of Hamilton and Come From Away. Some edits clumsily break the 180 degree rule, and a few shots even expose backstage work lights. The film will probably work better for those, like me, who have seen the production live and want to focus on the songs and performances instead of discovering the staging for the first time.
The songs themselves are, as expected by Sondheim standards, extremely intelligent, full of complicated and fast rhythms where performers are asked to juggle several feelings at once. They mostly succeed. The weak link is Krystal Joy Brown as Gussie, playing the role in a broad, overly cartoonish, villainous register that clashes with the more grounded approach of the rest of the cast. Daniel Radcliffe might not be the sharpest Broadway singer, yet he knocks his pivotal number “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” out of the park, the song that rightly earned him so much praise and his award. Lindsay Mendez is heartbreaking, while Jonathan Groff makes the often unlikable protagonist compelling, not an easy task in a script that has him making bad choices again and again. The three shine individually but are at their best when they share the screen, convincing us that they are, or once were, truly “old friends.”
Because of the reverse order, the big moments, both musically and dramatically, are front loaded. The actors start the performance already giving everything. Katie Rose Clarke, for example, makes her first appearance almost one hour in, crying and sobbing while singing the lovely “Not a Day Goes By (Reprise).” Unpacking these moments as we are given more information makes for a very compelling first act. As the second act moves further and further back into these characters’ lives, though, it can grow tiring. There are at least one, but probably two, time jumps too many. But this is an issue with the source material, and there is only so much a recording can do to soften it.
On stage, the 2023–2024 revival finally showed how strong Merrily We Roll Along can be when the storytelling is clear, and the roles are played by actors who can live in the songs as well as sing them. Some of the numbers are genuine earworms, and the structure fascinates at first, even if the material still has its limits and the second act repeats a few too many beats from the first. The filmed version, however, offers only a partial sense of the show itself, leaning too heavily on close-ups and ending up more of an actor’s showcase than a definitive Merrily We Roll Along on screen. Maybe Linklater will get us there in 2040.
