Like the sharp-witted, no-filter Mary Flynn, the role she created in Broadway’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” Ann Morrison doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable truths. “Good truth is uncomfor…
“Good truth is uncomfortable,” says Morrison. “It allows itself to be vulnerable. If everyone likes my show, then I’m doing something wrong.”
“Merrily We Roll Along” began as a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It unpuzzles the mislaid dreams and fractured relationships of its midlife principals — a playwright, a painter, and a novelist — by traveling back through time, exhuming every missed chance and wrong turn along the way. The play spans the years between World War I and the Depression, or rather, the reverse, given the narrative’s backward-running clock.
“I suggested to Steve that he come watch rehearsals,” she says. “Let the grown-ups sort it out among themselves.” But it was an awful spot to be put in, and Morrison didn’t tell anyone about it. Before long, Field was fired by Prince and replaced by Larry Fuller. The extended preview period became a non-stop cram session for the cast, who were flooded with daily rewrites and got through performances by hiding crib notes on the set. Bewildered audience members walked out in droves. When the show finally opened, the reviews were almost uniformly brutal. Frank Rich,, called it “a shambles.” “Merrily” closed on Broadway after 52 previews and 16 performances.
Tepper is among the new generation of Broadway tastemakers and producers who had not yet been born in 1981, and “Merrily” is without question her favorite show. It was Tepper who nudged Merrily From Center Stage into existence, when, not long after, she contacted Morrison about appearing at Feinstein’s/54 Below.
Still, the cutting room floor was littered with gold. Morrison said yes to Tepper’s offer, but the show she had in mind would be theater above all. Not a Sondheim show, but an Ann Morrison show, centering, finally, on the stories only she could tell.
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