Capturing the Broadway revival with vigor, 'Merrily We Roll Along' is again reborn

Coming to you from the other extremity of the movie philharmonic spectrum from wherever “Wicked” perches is Maria Friedman’s compact, propulsive movie of her acclaimed revival staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”

The revered composer’s 1981 philharmonic is that canon rarity: a flop (as in, it closed 2 weeks aft opening) that implicit clip became a treasured classic. That’s an apt crook of luck for a communicative deploying reverse chronology. Captured astatine the Hudson Theatre past twelvemonth during its Tony-winning Broadway run, this “Merrily” is stirring grounds of a deed production, which starred Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez arsenic the tight-knit trio of New York creatives whose friendship, depicted backward crossed decades, feels similar a shattered vase being reassembled truthful that we admit the cracks and cohesion.

At times it’s arsenic if you’re onstage with the cast. And yet that elemental approach, successful assured hands, reflects the magic that lone cameras and cutting tin do: illness region and clip into a peculiar intimacy, letting beardown actors with expert-level songs beryllium the top of peculiar effects.

Filmed theatre gets a atrocious rap but it shouldn’t erstwhile it’s much than conscionable a recording, and, for now, this mentation fulfills. (It must, since Richard Linklater’s upcoming cinematic rendering, which he’s filming “Boyhood”-style implicit 20 years, is genuinely a “faraway shore,” to punctuation Sondheim.)

Think backward: Where things statesman is the bitter end, astatine a glitzy Hollywood Hills enactment successful 1976 afloat of showbiz hangers-on. Frank (Groff), erstwhile a motivated composer, has abandoned euphony to beryllium a hotshot movie shaper and two-timing husband. Mary (Mendez), a sharp-witted writer, is an alcoholic nary longer tolerant of the sellout Frank has become.

As contiguous becomes past, we spot tense breakdowns first, past the teetering points that predate them and lastly those archetypal blooms of camaraderie, occurrence and love. We’ll conscionable spotlight-averse lyricist Charlie (Radcliffe). It’s a dainty to ticker the magnetic Groff hint an unlikable feline to his idealistic origins, Radcliffe’s look soften from judgmental workfellow to wide-eyed hopeful and the fantastic Mendez peel backmost layers of unrequited love. No little almighty successful rolling backmost years are Krystal Joy Brown and Katie Rose Clarke arsenic the talented wives who go collateral harm successful Frank’s soulless quest for fame and riches.

It’s fitting that the trajectory leads not toward a splashy crescendo but the softer, melancholy landing of the finale “Our Time”: starry-eyed dreams sung connected a rooftop successful 1957. In an property erstwhile truthful galore filmmakers person forgotten however to marque movies retired of a fewer radical successful adjacent quarters, determination are lessons to beryllium learned from the humble goals of this “Merrily We Roll Along”: to bring a movie assemblage to the beingness of the signifier and, successful truthful doing, to those thorny stages of life.