Merrily We Roll Along (musical)

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Merrily We Roll Along is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth. It is based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The show tells the story of how three friends' lives and friendship devolve over the course of 20 years; it focuses particularly on Franklin Shepard, a talented composer of musicals who, over those 20 years, abandons his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies. Like the play on which it is based, the show's story moves in reverse chronology, beginning in 1976 at the friends' lowest moment and ending in 1957, at their youthful best. Merrily premiered on Broadway on November 16, 1981, in a production directed by frequent Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince, with a cast almost exclusively of teenagers and young adults. However, the show was not the success the previous Sondheim–Prince collaborations had been: after a chaotic series of preview performances, it opened to widely negative...

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