“Merrily We Roll Along” might be the most fun you can have at an existential crisis.

A repeated question forms the heartbeat of this musical, Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and George Furth’s (book) piece about friendship and love, art and show business, selling out and growing up: “How did you get to be here? What was the moment?”

A hugely successful Broadway revival, filmed for theatrical release live at New York City’s Hudson Theatre in June 2024, is now landing on screens nationwide.

It’s the story of three best friends: composer Franklin Shepard (Jonathan Groff), playwright Charley Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe) and novelist Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez). At least, that’s who they were — or thought they were going to be, back when identities were straightforward and uncomplicated by the passage of time.

This show’s moments run backward in time, from the trio’s cynical, fractured middle age in 1976 to the moment they all first met on a New York rooftop in 1957, assembled in the middle of the night to watch Sputnik in orbit and witness the beginning of a new, idealistic era in American culture.

But in 1976 Frank is producing movies and on his way to a third wife, Mary’s drinking too much and Charley … where is Charley? Who knows, but he’s written a Pulitzer-winning play. Mary was once a bestselling novelist, and Charley and Frank wrote hit musicals together. Before that, they were just three talented kids determined to make it big.

In between they have moments of success and failure, love and betrayal, weddings and births and unrequited loves. There’s the disastrous TV interview where Charley finally blows up his relationship with Frank, their first big Broadway hit and the satirical revue in a basement theater that first got them noticed.

“Merrily” is also inextricably linked to, perhaps burdened by, its own history. The show has long been famous among Broadway flops, for how quickly it closed in 1981 (though it did win a well-deserved Tony Award for best original score) and for closing a yearslong collaborative chapter between Sondheim and director Harold Prince — a painful irony considering that the show was, at least in small part, based on the friendship between Sondheim, Prince and Mary Rodgers.

It’s been revived semiregularly over the years, but never to such rapturous response as this production, which opened off-Broadway in 2022 before moving to Broadway in 2023.

Translating a work staged in a theater — particularly a musical — onto film without losing its structure is exceedingly tricky. And it is an act of translation, because the two forms use different artistic languages and dictate a viewer’s focus in entirely different ways. Stage and screen director Maria Friedman focuses this story tightly on Frank (both figuratively and literally, on film), cursed with overwhelming talent and overweening ambition. From the opening frame this is his story, a close-up on his numb face an acid contrast to the upbeat music picking up around him.

But it’s the trio that gives this story liftoff, thanks to spectacular performances from Groff, Radcliffe and Mendez as friends who have seen each other through their best and worst moments. Broadway veterans all, they have incredible facility with Sondheim’s difficult music and deliver performances with such interiority that they read well on camera and reach the back of a Broadway theater.

Also excellent are Katie Rose Clarke as Frank’s first wife Beth, Krystal Joy Brown as his second (more glamorous) wife Gussie and Reg Rogers as Broadway producer Joe Josephson. (And, not for nothing, the variety in voices throughout the cast is marvelous, and not a lineup of identically bright tones that sound run through what I like to call the BFA garlic press.)

Sondheim favored the bittersweet over the black and white, but not bittersweet in a soft-focus nostalgia way, more a twist-of-the-knife way. When we hear the ballad “Not a Day Goes By” sung during Beth and Frank’s wedding vows, we’ve already heard it sung during their divorce. That’s not wistful, that’s agonizing.

So, how did you get to be here? Ask your friends. Life is a million tiny choices, and a person who changes rarely notices how far they’ve gone; it’s those waiting at home who feel the distance. And both firmly believe their version of events, as Mary well knows:

“Trouble is, Charley, that’s what everyone does: Blames the way it is on the way it was — on the way it never, ever was.”

———

'MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for drug use, some strong language and smoking)

Running time: 2:30

How to watch: In theaters Dec. 5

———

© 2025 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.