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Even Jonathan Groff Had To Win Over Audiences: How ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Went From Sondheim Also-Ran To Runaway Smash – Deadline Q&A
Director Maria Friedman’s staging of Merrily We Roll Along, both on Broadway and its previous run Off Broadway, just might be the most unexpected success in the long, glorious career of composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Long considered all but unstageable, with its hard-to-crack reverse chronology and characters whose flaws are front and center at […]
Of course, it hasn’t hurt the production that those three lead actors are some of the most likable, even beloved young stars of stage and screen, with individual built-in fan bases that might have gotten the show to sell-out status even if the critical reviews hadn’t been universal raves. GROFF: I think Sondheim was writing something almost painfully personal, and so how that relates to my reaction to the Tony nomination is that I’m deeply introspective right now, and the morning of the nominations, I was sitting on my couch in the living room of my apartment watching the TV, waiting to see what might happen for us, and it was celebratory and calling and texting all of our friends on the show, and it felt quite joyful and exciting, and then we got to the theater that night and it felt like a rock concert, quite celebratory and amazing and exciting, and we were all jumping up and down backstage and screaming and all of that, and then I was in the middle of singing the song Growing Up, which is that song I was referring to earlier that Frank sings maybe 30 minutes or so, 45 minutes, into the first act, and I got to the line “so, old friends, don’t you see we can have it all?” And I started to cry, and I could not stop crying. But it’s still just very emotional right now, because I think it’s the introspective nature of the show, and that we’ve all been working on this together for two years so there’s a real kind of familial energy with the whole company, and then, on top of it all, it’s just a f*cking miracle.
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