It was by no means assured {that a} Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Alongside would succeed.

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical about how three buddies’ lives, goals, and relationships change over the course of 20 years has a considerably infamous popularity. Initially staged in 1981, between the successes of Sweeney Todd and Sunday within the Park With George, Merrily was a uncommon flop in Sondheim’s oeuvre. After a rocky sequence of previews, the present opened to scathing evaluations—a lot of which praised the rating however lambasted the ebook’s cynical tone—and closed after 16 performances.

Greater than 40 years later, the first-ever Broadway revival of Merrily has change into the most popular ticket of the season. First mounted with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez on the New York Theater Workshop within the winter of 2022, the manufacturing acquired a rapturous response and rapidly offered out. And now, what was purported to be a restricted 12-week run on Broadway has been prolonged a number of instances, giving audiences ample alternative to rediscover one in every of Sondheim’s most misunderstood masterpieces. (The present’s remaining efficiency is ready for Sunday, July 7.)

“This materials is so transcendent, it’s educating me one thing new on daily basis,” says Groff. “Each single particular person within the forged is a genius, and our director [Maria Friedman] has stripped the complete factor again to its purest kind. What Stephen Sondheim and George Furth wrote is so extraordinarily private, and she or he has made it private for all of the performers, and subsequently, the viewers.”

Beneath, the forged of Merrily We Roll Alongside takes Vogue behind-the-scenes on the Hudson Theatre.