Robert L. McLaughlin

“Based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Merrily We Roll Along tells the story of three friends—Franklin Shepard, a composer; Charley Kringas, a playwright and lyricist; and Mary Flynn, a novelist—who meet in the enthusiasm of youth, when everything seems possible. The play traces what happens to their dreams and goals as time passes and they are faced with life’s surprises, travails, successes, and disappointments. The trick here is that the play moves chronologically backward. It begins on an evening in 1976 at a party for the opening of a movie Frank has produced. The movie is apparently a hit, but Frank’s personal life is a mess. His second wife, Gussie, formerly a Broadway star, was supposed to have starred in the movie but was deemed too old; she resents being in the shadows and suspects, correctly, that Frank is having an affair with the young actress who took over her part. Frank is estranged from his son from his first marriage. He is also estranged from Charley, his former writing partner—so estranged, in fact, that the very mention of his name brings the party to an uncomfortable standstill. Mary, unable to re-create the success of her one and only novel and suffering from a longtime unreciprocated love for Frank, has become a critic and a drunk; the disturbance she causes at the party results in a permanent break with Frank. The opening scene reaches its climax when Gussie throws iodine in the eyes of Frank’s mistress. The ensemble, commenting on the action much like the Greek chorus in Allegro, reprises the title song, asking, “How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?” (F 387). The play then moves backward in time as it looks for the turning points, the places where multiple possibilities morphed into narrative necessity.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical

“The “some people,” of course, the ones Rose says “sit on their butts” (F 58), are the people devoted to the dream of home and family. For them, having a secure place to live and secure family relationships is the goal at which their work and dreams are aimed. In the early-twentieth-century context of the completion of Manifest Destiny and onset of the Great Depression, during which most of the action of Gypsy takes place, the dream of home and family seems to be a watered-down version of the frontier myth—the process of moving west and claiming and settling land replaced by stasis and the desire for safety. This replacement suggests an entropic degeneration whereby the myth that for good or bad created the United States became empty, a myth without meaning.”
― Robert L. McLaughlin, Stephen Sondheim and the Reinvention of the American Musical