Nineteen years ago, Will Gartshore was playing Franklin Shepard in Signature Theatre’s first production of Merrily We Roll Along, and a young assistant choreographer named Matthew Gardiner was watching and working at the back of the rehearsal room. Matt’s twin brother, James, was in the Signature ensemble, understudying Gartshore.
Matt Gardiner runs the joint now — he’s been artistic director at the Tony-winning regional since 2021 — and he’s brought Merrily back for the first time since that 2007 staging. Both men have plenty to say about Merrily then and Merrily now, about who Frank and his friends are, and about other topics from Sondheim’s language to Sondheim’s men. Seemed like it might be worth getting the two of them in a room together.
Also in the fray: Signature’s current Mary Flynn, the delightful Melanie Field. Shakespeare Theatre Company audiences will remember her as Gina Ekdal in The Wild Duck and Emilia in Othello — two grounded, practical women, each in her own way. Field came willing to play and ready to think on her feet about what’s going on in Mary’s arguably less grounded head and heart — and why being a tired mother of two sometimes works for that angry drunken confrontation that opens the show.
What came out of all this is a conversation about Sondheim and more, one that’s a bit like the show: old friends, big talent, roads taken and not. Merrily closes November 1, and the reviews have been pretty stellar, so don’t dawdle.
Oh, and I mentioned some recommended reading about the women in Merrily, so here you go:
Jenna Russell, the Mary in Maria Friedman’s West End staging, digs into how illusions imperil not just Mary and Beth in Merrily, but women across the Sondheim landscape. She leads off with a meditation on Follies, which is coming up at the end of Signature’s current season.
You’ll need an academic or library login of some sort to access Andrew Buchman’s scholarly essay on “Mary’s Well of Loneliness in Merrily We Roll Along.” Go for the Radclyffe Hall reference, stay for the unpacking of Mary’s real-life antecedents, including Mary Rodgers. (Whose memoir Shy, as I mentioned, is a helluva ride.)
Stacy Wolf’s “Keeping Company with Sondheim’s Women” is a foundational feminist reading, situating Mary as one of Sondheim’s great complicated women among flashier characters like Mrs. Lovett, Desiree Armfeldt, and the Witch. It’s collected in The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies.
One last heads-up: If you don’t remember seeing Will Gartshore onstage in a while, there’s a reason — and it’s not your attention span. He and I stayed in the studio after this episode for a one-on-one conversation about that reason, and about what it’s meant in his life over the last decade or so.
That story is coming as a bonus episode soon; watch for it.
Next time,
tg
