Merrily We Roll Along (1981 Original Broadway Cast)
It's a shame thatMerrily We Roll Alongwas such a flop on Broadway, for it contains some of Stephen Sondheim's best, brightest, and brassiest music. The reasons have been well documented: a youthful, inexperienced cast; cheesy sets and costumes; and, most of all, a confusing plot structure that starts in 1980 with bitter, cynical characters and winds its way backward to 1955, when a high school graduating class is dreaming of making its mark on the world. The main focus is on three friends (Jim Walton, Ann Morrison, and Lonny Price) who share musical ambitions but are gradually driven apart by the turbulence and fragmentation of their lives and the America around them. (You'll also hear a pre-SeinfeldJason Alexander, and even a young chorus girl named Liz Callaway.) Sondheim almost imperceptibly reworks his themes as his characters develop, and the score includes the infectious "Old Friends," the driving title tune, the ballad "Not a Day Goes By," and "Our Time," an uplifting anthem of hope when performed out of the show's context, but emotionally devastating within it. And if the backward structure--inherited from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1934 version of the show--really bothers you, you can run it almost completely chronologically by reprogramming the CD.--David Horiuchi