This past weekend, the first theatrical film version of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along opened in theatres. And there is no doubt that anybody who's been waiting for this will not be disappointed. It was absolutely magnificent. If you don't know the show, it tells the story of the collapse of a three-way friendship, told in reverse chronology. The opening scene is a cocktail party in which the friendship has its final collapse, ending with one of the three leads wondering what went wrong, how he managed to be phenomenally successful in a material sense, and yet totally unhappy. And so the next scene takes us back to the focal point in time -- the scene transitions are very explicit about what year it is -- in which the final collapse began. And each successive scene takes us back further, showing how somebody unwittingly made the worst possible mistake, until the show ends, twenty years before it began, on the roof of a New York City tenement in 1957, three young people filled with optimism, seeing Sputnik I pass overhead, seeing it not as a threat of Soviet domination, but as a promise of infinite possibilities. At every scene, the suspense is about what that "worst possible mistake" was. The conventional wisdom with bringing stage musicals to the screen has always been that unless you expand the scope of the production, and hire Hollywood stars, re-orchestrate the score, and so forth, you end up with a flat, lifeless, record of the show: the worst of both worlds. In 1972, Jack Warner bucked this conventional wisdom when, at his own personal expense, he did the movie version of Edwards & Stone's 1776. He wanted to reproduce the experience of seeing a live stage production, and so he kept almost the entire Broadway cast. He took them into the soundstage, and out on location, but still tried to be as faithful as possible to the original. I've seen HBO and Showtime videos of Pippin and Sweeney Todd, and they seem to confirm the conventional wisdom: they're just flat, relatively lifeless records of the stage productions. And I've seen theatrical films of Thorougly Modern Millie, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and (I think) the film version of the Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera, (and I think I also saw at least part of the sequel, which I found largely unwatchable). They're conventional film treatments: they work, but they're not all that faithful to the originals (I will note, though, that some ideas from the movie Millie, most notably the conceit that "Mrs. Meers," the big bad, was only pretending to be Chinese, have made it into stage productions, generally improving them.) This outdoes Jack Warner in terms of defying the conventional wisdom. I'm told that not only was it done with the entire cast from the most recent (and most successful) Broadway run; it was directed by the director of that revival, and shot, multi-camera, on the actual Broadway stage, over the course of three performances, at least one of which appears to have been in front of a live audience. And it is no mere record; it's a real movie, worthy of theatrical release. No location shoots, nothing scaled up. Just close-ups (presumably shot without an audience in the house) to make an already intimate show into an even more intimate movie.
