Merrily We Roll Along opened to enormous fanfare in 1981, and closed after sixteen performances.
To most who pay attention to such things, Merrily We Roll Along is an oddity of Broadway history. The Stephen Sondheim musical was a notorious flop that ran for only 16 performances when it premiered in 1981. But to a smaller subset of that group (former theatre students, mostly), Merrily We Roll Along is a beloved cult classic with which one identifies perhaps a little too strongly.
Based on a 1934 play by George F. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the plot concerns a trio of friends and creative partners who grow and split apart as they achieve different levels of success. The gimmick, however, is the plot is told backward, so we witness the characters' dematuration from embittered showbiz fortysomethings to earnest dreamers fresh out of school rhapsodizing about how there's "so much stuff to sing" (you can see why it gets those former theatre students right where they live).
Director Harold Prince's concept was to focus on the youthful dreaminess aspect of the show by casting young actors (some still teenagers) – almost all of whom would be making their Broadway debuts.
Lonny Price was one of those kids, and to him, Merrily We Roll Along was a profoundly formative life experience.
In 1981, Price was a young actor at the beginning of his career. Merrily We Roll Along was supposed to be his big break.
Thirty-five years later, he has produced and directed Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, a documentary about the making of the show that serves as equal parts love letter and thank-you note to Sondheim and Prince, and an emotional postmortem as he checks in with his fellow former castmates and the rest of the creative team about how being involved in Merrily affected their lives, what happened to them when that big break fizzled into a Broadway embarrassment and how they've been doing since.
It sounds indulgent, but Price is aided by the gift of some long-lost footage of the show's original audition and rehearsal process (leftover from an abandoned news documentary project for ABC, and miraculously left intact in an archive somewhere). This footage alone makes Best Worst Thing a must-watch for any fan of Broadway history, offering a rare glimpse of legends Sondheim and Prince in their element, including moments that feel as if they're classic show-business anecdotes, such as when Prince tells a roomful of nervous actors, "the good news is, you're all in the show."
The footage also features interviews with the young cast members (including a pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander), which Price cleverly sets up against his own present-day interviews. The whole first half of the movie is infused with a sort of "How lucky can we get?!" sense of wonder, with the now aging cast recalling these glory days like the alumni of the best summer camp in the world.
In one particularly enviable moment (captured on audio tape by Price himself), Price lives out a dream come true for any theatre nerd: Sondheim comes to his birthday party. Not only that, but Sondheim proceeds to sit down at the piano and play, for the first time, one of the songs Price will be singing in the show.
Price capitalizes on the themes of Merrily We Roll Along, and lets the musical's evocative score do its work. With songs about growing up and readjusting your dreams and "bending with the road," it's a natural – and moving – transition when Price checks in on his fellow actors in the second half of the movie – many of whom have long since gotten out of show business and had their own surprising career turns.
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a celebration not just of a remarkable production of an underappreciated musical, but of the unexpected journeys that people's lives take. And it's fitting Price gives the last word in the film to the performers' 1981 selves, still looking forward to opening night and to the lives that have yet to unfold.