| re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Will the Original Version Ever Be Performed Again? | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 10:10 pm EDT 03/24/24 | |
| In reply to: re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Will the Original Version Ever Be Performed Again? - Ann 07:33 pm EDT 03/24/24 | |
|
|
|
| My experience of seeing it twice plus two second acts after it had all been set is that audiences did not reject it by that point. At least the audiences with whom I saw it seemed to mostly like it. I'm sure some people, perhaps some of them in part influenced by things that they had read or heard earlier when the show was in previews, did not like it. I guess I was lucky or something because even the first couple of times I saw it, there were not many walkouts. I'm not saying that most people at the Alvin loved it those times. Certainly, I think few people loved it when I saw the third preview, although even then the second act clearly worked much better and people were crying by the end. By the third time I saw it, three days before the originally scheduled opening, when much had been changed but much had not yet been changed, it seemed to get a generally good audience response and few if any walkouts. The two friends I went with that time both liked it a lot. Of course, many of the people who saw it during the two-week official run may have been predisposed to like it, but the responses seemed to me genuine. I will add that when the original licensed version was done by students of the Guildhall School for Music and Drama in London in 1983, it was so well-received that both Cameron Mackintosh and Bill Kenwright expressed interest in moving it to a commercial run, but Sondheim and Furth, having by then decided to revise it, wouldn't allow that. It was also well-received in Los Angeles that same year. It came very close to being published by Dodd, Mead that year. Galleys were prepared. I think bad word of mouth and bad press killed it with the critics in 1981. By the time it opened, I think it played well. And there were some favorable reviews, including from Barnes in the Post and Feingold in the Voice, which is rarely mentioned. Michael Billington in The Guardian was also among those who wrote favorably about the original production, and he saw a fairly early preview. Had Barnes still been the Times critic, I wonder what would have happened. Had he written his Post review for the Times, at minimum it would have run longer. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Will the Original Version Ever Be Performed Again? - Ann 07:33 pm EDT 03/24/24 |
| Next: | re: MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG -- Will the Original Version Ever Be Performed Again? - BroadwayTonyJ 09:45 am EDT 03/25/24 |
| Thread: |
|
Time to render: 0.020572 seconds.