Original Merrily We Roll Along Star Lonny Price on Capturing 'Mind-Blowing' Memories in New Documentary Our Time
The 1981 Broadway premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along lasted a total of 68 performances (52 of them previews!), but it’s a production that lives on in memory and lore. As Encores! gets ready to launch a new staging of the beloved show, original star Lonny Price is hard at work on Our Time, a 30th anniversary documentary in which the 25 cast members assembled by Hal Prince look back at what Price calls “the show that has informed our lives.”
Merrily aficionados will recall that Prince made the daring decision to cast the musical—which moves back in time with the BFF trio of Franklin Shepard, Charley Kringas and Mary Flynn—with inexperienced actors in their teens and early 20s. “Hal’s idea was that by the time you got to the end of the show, you would think that these actors are the generation who will not make the mistakes of the characters they play,” explains Price, who played Charley. “It’s a thrilling, theatrical idea, but it was tricky for it to come through.”
Now an in-demand stage director, Price began thinking about assembling a Merrily documentary while participating in an emotion-packed 2002 reunion concert. “It occurred to me as I was onstage singing ‘Old Friends’ to Jimmy Walton [Franklin] and Annie Morrison [Mary] that they in fact were my old friends—that we had traveled this period together and that we weren’t just singing the characters’ lives, we were singing our own lives. There’s that wonderful new song Steve [Sondheim] wrote, ‘Growing Up,’ about reshaping your dreams; I wanted to take the themes explored in the show and explore them with the people in the original company.”
Although the young cast endured some brutal reviews, Price says that good memories far outweigh the bad. “There are some people who felt responsible for the failure of the original production, but largely it was just a mind-blowing, very positive experience for everyone,” he says. “We all really did get how lucky we were. It was a rarefied place to be, and the roller-coaster experience we had together was so meaningful to everybody. We’ve all done different things with our lives: We’re architects and teachers and writers; I’m a director, and Jason Alexander and Tonya Pinkins became stars. We went in our own particular directions, but the show informed all of our lives.”
Price, who has already filmed interviews with Sondheim, Prince and several actors, is currently seeking funding to complete and distribute Our Time. "Steve has very graciously and generously given us the score to use, and the documentary will have footage from the 1981 original production and the 2002 concert, so you can watch us grow through the performing of the songs. It's life reflecting art reflecting life.”
On Valentine's Day, Price and 15 of his original co-stars will be front and center to see the Encores! staging of their show, starring Colin Donnell as Franklin, Celia Keenan-Bolger as Mary and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Charley. “I think he’s going to be spectacular,” Price says of the In the Heights composer and star. “He’s an astonishing performer and a great writer, and I know he will have great success with it.” As for his own 30-year journey with Merrily, Price says simply, “The memories are very vivid, and the emotions are very vivid. All of us feel that way.”