Good Things Go in Threes

Lindsay Mendez, Jonathan Groff, and Daniel Radcliffe in "Merrily We Roll Along" at New York Theatre Workshop. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's contested 1981 flop, Merrily We Roll Along, may now be getting the Broadway revival it has long deserved, as the starry New York Theatre Workshop staging just announced a transfer for next fall with stars intact. For various reasons, I find this new production less convincing than the last two I saw; like Assassins, I think Merrily may be one of those Sondheim shows I change my mind about almost every time I see it. But hey, Sondheim is canon and it's all must-see, and this is a music blog; for my theater criticism (though not of this show) you might look here and here (and for theater coverage in general, yes, here).

So, the music. It's hardly news that the Merrily score is among its composer's tightest; it has been much noted the way Sondheim uses motifs to parallel the reverse time structure of the story, or at least to help tie its parts together, in a way he often did but here in a uniquely clever and resonant way. I've written before that the main thesis of this blog is that the music tells the story, and I think that's true even of the songs and scores of a prodigious wordsmith like Sondheim—perhaps especially so.

And that's achingly true of Merrily, with sneering brass figures to highlight glib cynicism, anxious chorales to suggest nagging doubt, chugging showtunes for chin-up ebullience, bruised lyricism to index loss, and so on. I would argue that the show's key song, though, is the gentle, straight-ahead ballad "Good Thing Going," as simple-seeming a tune as Sondheim ever wrote. It's played at a key point near the beginning of the career of the songwriting team of Shepard and Kringas as they audition it at a fashionable party (a ritual song-plugger Stevie knew well) for potential backers, and hence it comes late-ish in the show. Yes, I appreciate the fact that apart from the Kennedy sketch we see in full, it's only one of two diegetic Shepard-Kringas tunes we hear in the show, both of which have essentially the same melody (later/earlier in "Opening Doors," we hear it as a jagged uptempo number, "Who wants to live in New York?," whose tune is then repeated by the producer, with unwitting irony, as he sings back to them, "There's not a tune you can hum"). And of course its lyrics, regretting the breakup of a relationship (ostensibly for a political show called Take a Left, apparently later interpolated into a show about divorce called Musical Husbands), neatly presages/summarizes the show's story of three friends who fell out with each other.

But it's something more basic that seals this song for me: It's the way Sondheim subtly but unmistakably, and to my ear wrenchingly, changes the harmony in one spot, in the chord under the seventh note of the melody, which, as it's an AABA song, we hear three times. It might be easiest to show you. The song is in F, and the first time through, the chord at that spot is a sort of smudgy variation on F, though it could also be read as a C chord over an F:

Second time through, there's a slightly jarring dissonance as a B-natural note in the chord hits on the word "wrong." As such I would notate this chord as CMaj7 over an F, but with that A note in the left hand it could also be seen as a sort G6 over an F:

Finally, and perhaps appropriately given that the motion of the show is from complexity to simplicity, complicity to innocence, the chord in this spot is a simple suspension; I've notated it as a B-flat over an F but it arguably registers more viscerally as an Fsus4. It's such an openhearted, tentatively hopeful sound—and, of course, it accompanies a forward-looking lyric—it wrecks me every time:

Obviously there are other interesting harmonies in this song—the weird A-over-F chord on every fourth measure here, the spidery bass accompaniment that connects the A sections, the singularly twisty and unsettled bridge. But nothing hits quite like these three chords, which, however you notate them, are inarguably distinct each from the other—as interlinked yet separate as Mary, Frank, and Charley, the friend-love triangle at the unstable center of Merrily. Whatever quibbles I have with this or that staging choice in any given production, with Sondheim no less than Mozart or Weill or Puccini, it's the music that's the best thing going.