Casting Announced for City Center's "Merrily We Roll Along"

This article by Scott Heller appeared on the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog under the title "Hey, Old Friends: Casting Announced for ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ at Encores!"


Colin Donnell, currently going toe-to-toe with Sutton Foster as her dapper leading man in “Anything Goes,” will play the ambitious songwriter Franklin Shepard in the Encores! production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” the show’s creative team announced on Tuesday.

A short-lived musical with a much-loved score by Stephen Sondheim, “Merrily” follows a trio of friends making their way through two decades in show business. In a classically Sondheimian twist (though George Furth’s book is based on a 1934 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart play), the story is told backwards, beginning when the friends are middle-aged and disenchanted, and ending with them on the cusp of promise in 1957. The Broadway run in 1981 lasted only 16 performances, but the show spawned such Sondheim standards as “Not a Day Goes By,” “Good Thing Going,” and “Old Friends.”

James Lapine, a frequent Sondheim collaborator, will direct the run, which will be 15 performances, twice as long as this season’s other productions from Encores!, which specializes in scaled-back renditions of forgotten or flawed musicals. Though many of Mr. Sondheim’s major works have been revived on Broadway recently, “Merrily” has not, and the Encores! production is seen as a prelude to a possible Broadway engagement.

The character of Charley Kringas — Franklin Shepard’s songwriting partner and oft-frustrated best friend — has not yet been cast. But Celia Keenan-Bolger (“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” “Bachelorette”) will play Mary, a magazine writer and loyal helpmate to the songwriters. Betsy Wolfe (“Tales of the City”) is Franklin’s wife, and Elizabeth Stanley (“Million Dollar Quartet”) plays the star of the songwriters’ first Broadway hit.

“Merrily We Roll Along” runs Feb. 8-19 at City Center.