The full video! Pardon the shaky quality. This was shot at some point during the two weeks the show was open on Broadway (a video of an early preview performance exists but I haven't seen it, though I'd give just about anything to). Starring Jim Walton as Franklin Shepard Lonny Price as Charley Kringas Ann Morrison as Mary Flynn Terry Finn as Gussie Jason Alexander as Joe Josephson Sally Klein as Beth History Yes, the show you see in this video is messy, clumsy, and not very good-looking. Even as an ardent Merrily fan I acknowledge this, but it's important to know why it came out this way. Hal Prince, in producing Sweeney Todd, made the bold choice to preview it in New York, particularly given Eugene Lee's gigantic atmospheric factory set, which was too big to economically be transported to Boston for preview performances. But with Sweeney Todd this wasn't too much of an issue - a great deal of the show is sung-through and therefore was laid down and pieced out on paper. Prince decided to do the same for Merrily, and this was the cause of almost every issue the show had. Merrily, unlike Sweeney, takes after traditional book musicals, in which talky scenes are interspersed with musical numbers that mostly stand on their own. The show that Merrily was going into previews was, as far as Broadway was concerned, pretty experimental and high-concept, not only moving backwards but employing a conceptual framework: the "show" was being put on by high-school kids, and thus everything was filtered through their eyes. The actors had lockers in the gymnasium the play was set in, at which they'd do quick changes, donning wild, creative costumes, the sets were purposefully clumsy (in the original opening party scene Beth was pushed into a "pool" of water, which was simply a circle of blue butcher paper), and the higher social strata were represented in an almost parodic fashion. Unfortunately this proved to be too much at once and, finding themselves under the enormous pressure of irritable New Yorker audiences, Prince, Sondheim, and Furth (producer, composer, and book-writer) worked furiously to make the show more palatable, simplifying the story, replacing the lead actor, slicing up musical numbers, trying to make Frank more "likable", and unfortunately this lead not only to the show that you see here but to the neutered, chilly, and purposeless 1986 revised version. But, as it is, we have what we have. The original production closed after two weeks to almost entirely negative reviews. Note: for whatever reason, "It's A Hit" is absent from this recording.

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