A Conversation with Ann Morrison

"I've learned the gift of living backwards." We speak to Merrily's original Mary Flynn

Ann Morrison made her Broadway debut as Merrily We Roll Along’s original Mary Flynn. Needless to say, it was a genuine honor to speak to her. Our conversation begins below:

It’s so wonderful to meet you. I’d love to take my lead from Merrily itself and work backwards, if that's okay.

I don't know anything about going backwards!

We’re speaking just a few weeks after the final performance of Merrily’s enormously successful Broadway revival. So much has been written about the journey of this particular show. How has it felt to see people of all ages continue to connect with Merrily all these years later?

Since the revival of Merrily just recently on Broadway, history has changed. For years and years and years, it's always been referred to as Sondheim's flop, which is a really painful thing to have to carry with us for 43 years. The beauty of Merrily We Roll Along, and what people forget, is that in 1981, those of us on stage were helping create it. When you're in the trenches at the beginning of something, you are a part of the creative process. And I cannot begin to tell you how much we loved Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim. Both of those men have become my mentors through my life.  Every time I was in New York, I was always in Hal Prince's office having coffee and chatting. He brought me back to Broadway to do LoveMusik. They both brought me back to do a workshop of Bounce, which is now Road Show. At the time I did it, it was called Gold! They always felt like family, and so there's a tremendous love and respect for those two men.

The other beautiful thing about Merrily is that you become friends for life. I'm hoping that Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe have been bitten by that bug too, and they’ll be friends forever. After 43 years, the entire original cast of Merrily We Roll Along are still old friends. We go to see things together. We want to hear about somebody's wedding, or who’s just been born. We are really very, very tight and close to this day.

I have a one-woman show called Merrily From Center Stage. That particular show is, again, a tribute to both Hal and Steve. I spent a lot of time looking at the six weeks of previews that we went through in 1981. I can only tell my stories—I don't think it's fair to tell other people's stories—but I have a lot of them. For some reason, I was a confidant for a lot of things. And I love Lonny Price [Merrily’s original Charlie] doing Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened. But we found that wonderful documentary that we thought was lost forever, so it changed the narrative of his piece—and a lot of things were left on the cutting room floor. It didn't really go into the six weeks of previews, which to me is the most important part of the story of Merrily in 1981. 

Those six weeks were when we saw Hal Prince work his magic. It was fascinating to watch. We wanted it to work just as much as they did, and we just said yes to everything. So those six weeks of previews were a masterclass of musical theatre development. Hal Prince really wanted it to be accessible. The top ticket price in ‘81—and everybody grumbled about how expensive it was—was $35. For $5 you could stand at the back of the balcony during previews, and for $10 at the back of the orchestra. We just recently found out there was a gentleman who did an audio recording of 11 of those shows, plus he has our opening and our closing, and I am privy to them now. I want to spend some time where I can just listen to all of them and maybe do a lecture on the development of that show. But it's really quite something to see audience members leaving during our show at first, and then towards the end not doing, because it looked like we were going to finally make it work. In those days, the New York Times could kill a show like that, and it did.

There's a lot to be learned from that experience. It was sad. But it was a golden experience of working with those people. We would get new pages every day. You have to understand that every show was a different show during the previews. We’d do five hours of rehearsal that day, and then we would do that version of the show, knowing that we have cheat sheets everywhere, because they may throw those pages out and something completely new the next day—and then we would do that show. We gave up our days off, so we were always in rehearsal. It was fascinating to watch several people that I highly admired, who are musical theatre gods, make mistakes. How humbling and beautiful that was. Our gods become humans and much more lovable. And to watch how they recover… Steve will tell you that the 1981 production was the best fun he ever had, and how devastating it was for Hal and Steve to have to break up their working relationship for a while.

Jim Walton, Ann Morrison, and Lonny Price

But you have to understand that 21 years later, the original cast got together and we did a reunion concert, which you can see online now. Someone finally put the entire thing up. And so 21 years later, we get to see everything heal in many, many ways. We got to see Hal and Steve hug each other and announce their next project. In ‘81, I made my Broadway debut in a sweatshirt, and 21 years later, I'm in an evening gown. And 21 years before, watching the audience walk up the aisle and leave, and 21 years later, they're screaming on their feet like they're at a rock concert. It was magical in so many ways.

Steve said towards the end of his life, “It's a flawed show. Just have fun trying to make it work.” 

I'm invited to a lot of productions of Merrily, and I make myself very accessible for people. In fact, I have a thing called the Mary Flynn Club. And anytime I know someone's playing Mary Flynn, I invite them into the club. In fact, good old Maria Friedman, I didn't get a chance to invite her back in 1994, so I came to the opening night of their off-Broadway run and gave her her plaque, and Lindsay Mendez at the same time. And because I’m so accessible, I've watched a lot of changes. And when they made their first major change in the La Jolla production out in California, I thought, “Oh, they're just changes. They're not really improvements.”

But there was a production of Merrily off-Broadway before the Maria Friedman revival, that the Fiasco Theater company did at the Roundabout Theatre, and it's been swept under the carpet. You never hear anyone talk about it now, which makes me sad because it's one of my favorite productions of Merrily, ever. They did an experiment of distilling it down to just six actors, and Steve worked on it with them. And Steve said towards the end of his life, “It's a flawed show. Just have fun trying to make it work.” The Fiasco company did “Behold the Hills of Tomorrow,” and they took away “That Frank” and put “Rich and Happy” back in again, which to me is a better setup for Frank. And they honored Hal Prince by doing what Hal originally thought, which was to have the kids come in with racks of clothing, and pulling everything out of trunks. In ‘81 he chickened out because he thought that, if it's a Broadway show and we're spending all this money, the audience is not going to accept that. I think he was wrong. I think that would have been delightful. So they honored that by having the six actors always on stage at dressing tables, watching the whole thing. And the whole set in the background was every tribute to Merrily you could possibly think of, all the way up to the ceiling. It was spectacular. And I cannot believe that more people don’t talk about it! 

Now, the lovely thing about what happened with the revival on Broadway is when I did Merrily From Center Stage at first in New York, I thought it was a one-night-only thing. And then they asked me to come back, and now I've expanded to a full 90-minute show. But Jonathan Groff came to see it, because he wanted to learn everything he could about Merrily. And that's when he and I became very, very dear friends. He said, “You’ve got to do this everywhere. It's a very important piece of history that you're telling.” And the lovely thing about their revival is that we went from being a flop to a short-lived show.  The nice thing about Maria Friedman and people like Jonathan Groff, who actually paid tribute to Lonny, Jim and I at his acceptance speech for his Tony, is that they always felt that Merrily was a masterpiece from the very beginning. So all of a sudden you're hearing that verbiage change, which is lovely, because we have for 43 years been holding on our shoulders, “We are a part of a Sondheim flop”—and I don't want to think that way anymore. We were just part of history. And now Jonathan and Lindsay and Daniel will always be part of history. It's lovely.

You described your reunion concert as healing, and we know that after healing can come growth. Is that how you see Merrily now, as being in a place where it can continue to evolve?

I think so. One of the things that I love about Steve is he loves when people try new things with his shows—to a point. I mean, you have to sell him on it. He was very adamant that Company can't be done with all men, for example. Very adamant about that. But he does like when you try exploring things, and I know he was having so much fun working on the Fiasco production of Merrily. And now they're doing a movie version of it, directed by Richard Linklater, which is being done over 20 years—so I will be dead by that time and never be able to see it.

I’m sure they’d let you see some of the earlier scenes that they’ve filmed!

Well, I'll tell you a little secret, and let's see if it really happens. Jonathan Marc Sherman is a wonderful writer. In fact, he just collaborated with Jason Robert Brown and Daisy Prince, who is Hal's daughter, and now a fantastic director. She was 16 in our production of Merrily. They just did an off-Broadway show called The Connector.  It's just beautiful. And Sherm is one of the writers of the film of Merrily. He's a huge Merrily fan. Of course, he's a fan of the 1981 version. So when I got to see him at The Connector, I said, “Hey, we're all going to be dead by the time that comes out. Don't you think that you should have the original cast just hanging out in the background of certain scenes?” And he held up his phone and he said, “You’ve just auditioned for it.” So we'll see. I don't know what will happen. I think that they're thinking of going closer to the original in a lot of their storytelling of it, so who knows what'll happen.

Working backwards a little now, you clearly remained close with both Sondheim and Hal Prince over a period of several decades. I’d love to know how those relationships developed in the years after the show.

It surprised me, actually, how much Steve was connected. The beauty of both Steve and Hal is they come from a different generation where if they got a letter, they answered it. Now, you may only get one or two words, but they always answered. And then when things switched to emails, they still did that. You would write Steve something, I'd ask him a question about something, and he would always answer back, right up through to when he was 90. Not everybody's that good anymore. I have in my folders cards that say, “Thanks. That was wonderful, Annie. I’d love to hear more about it.” And he would know stuff. He would keep track of things. You would mention something and he’d say, “Oh yeah, I read about that.”

During Merrily, one of our cast members, David Shine, created this thing called the Merrily Press, because there were going to be six months before we would go into rehearsal after being cast. It came out weekly, and it would be the news, and we'd all do everything together. So by the time we went into rehearsal, we were all friends. By the end of the show, we were old friends. So I thought, “Oh, I can contribute to this. I'm going to create this thing called Annie’s Cooking Corner,” and I would put recipes in there. Well, for some reason, I missed one. And Steve wrote David and he said, “What happened to Annie’s Cooking Corner? Why didn't she write anything?” And it turned out he was collecting my recipes. And he would come to Central Park for picnics. He would come on his bicycle, and he’d have a little basket of molasses cookies that were made by his neighbor, Katharine Hepburn. He surprised me all the time.

A reunion at Encores! in 2012

And then we were at Hal Prince's memorial, and Daisy wanted Jim, Lonny and I to come and do “Old Friends.” And we thought, “Really? “Old Friends” at Hal’s memorial?” Because it wasn't a successful show for him. And she said, “But Annie, that show is him and Steve and Mary Rodgers.” So we came out as a surprise on the stage and everyone was all excited, and we remembered all our choreography. Steve was sitting in the front. And Lin-Manuel said to me later, “Annie, I’ve got to tell you. I was watching: when you guys came on stage, tears came down Steve's face.” So I came around, and I wanted to thank Daisy Prince and Judy Prince for having us come. And Steve was shuffling, trying to not fall, because he was now an older man. And the last image I'll ever have of Steve is him going, “Annie!” and just beaming.

That’s really, really beautiful. Returning to Merrily itself, could you take us inside that rehearsal room? You not only created a major Sondheim role, but, as you mentioned, this is a character and a show that was changing night after night.

It’s a beautiful thing to be a part of a show in its infancy and at its beginning—but it was stressful vocally. In fact, I have a permanent cyst on my vocal cord from that show, but that started because I was allergic to the drying agent. In those days, because this was the early ‘80s, they would put a drying agent on all the music because they were cranking it out so fast with the changes that were happening, and that dried out my vocal cords. For the first two weeks, it was really hard. Thank God Liz Callaway, who was my understudy, would sit in the front row during our daily rehearsals and sing the songs for me, so at least I could sing at night.

I sat with Steve on the first day of rehearsals to figure out the keys of the show. It was my idea that, since Mary is 42 at the beginning of the show and an alcoholic who probably smokes, she should probably sing low. And as the show goes backwards in time, she should sing higher and higher and higher. I have to apologize to all the Mary Flynns out there, because when you're doing eight performances a week, you want it to go in the opposite direction. I'm so sorry, everybody. It's my fault.

Lonny only got the last third of “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” the afternoon before our first preview. And you know what a monster that is. I mean, Daniel Radcliffe will tell you that every night before he went on, he would go over those lyrics, over and over and over. And once he went up on stage, he just grabbed a hold of Jonathan Groff and wouldn't let go for dear life because he thought, “I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die.” Because that's a bitch of a song to do. Luckily, Lonny knew the tune and where it was going, but he still had to learn the rest of those lyrics in one afternoon. But we were young, and we were in the trenches with them, and we believed in them, and so we just said, “Yes!” And we did it. Songs were being cut. Characters were being cut and rearranged. I was finding more load on me, especially in “Rich and Happy,” with cast members losing some of their lines, which were now going to Mary. All kinds of things like that were happening.

And I know you sang for Sondheim on your 25th birthday…

Yeah! I auditioned for Hal Prince and his assistant, Ruth Mitchell, on the set of Evita. It was a very high rake in those days. It was before they regulated it. In fact, I think those regulations might have happened because of Evita. I came out in heels, so it wasn't that I was terrified I was auditioning for Hal Prince. I was terrified I was going to fall into the pit. But Hal said, “Annie, can you come back in two weeks? Steve's in Majorca.” And so I did come back two weeks later, and that was my birthday. I was turning 25. I had to lie about my age. New York thinks I'm good five years younger than I really am.

So I'm standing on the stage, this time in flats, and Steve's the other one out there. I was terrified at one point, but he was just like a kid himself. He laughed at things I said. He asked questions. He wrote everything down. And he said, “How high do you sing?” and I did a high C, because I could in those days. He said, “Terrific, because I’ve got one more song to write for Mary Flynn.” And then he said, “Alright, see you first day of rehearsal,” and he leaves. And it finally occurred to me, did I just get a Broadway show for my birthday? And Stephen Sondheim's writing me a song. And of course, he's writing a song for the show. But David Loud, who was in our show and is now a Broadway conductor and arranger, he pulled me aside one day. He said, “Well, Annie, he did write that for you. He was watching your delivery, your sense of humor, how Annie and Mary are alike, so that he could write that song.” And that song was “Now You Know.”

It’s been such a thrill to meet you. Let’s end at the beginning, like Merrily itself. If you met your 25-year-old self now, about to embark on this extraordinary journey, what would you say? And what might you say to someone about to play Mary for the first time?

I've learned the gift of living backwards because of Merrily. But let me just say this, and I say this whether you are starring on Broadway or if you're doing a high school production of it: always remember the rooftop. That's the jewel of the show. It's what the show's really about: friendship, and all the changing values that they have to navigate for their passions. The show's really about friendship. It's not about selling out. And for some people, they think it's a sad, tragic show. And for some of us, we see it as a hopeful show. If you're smart, and Jonathan Groff got this, you know that to follow him back, you have to see him innocently making decisions throughout his life.

When we all went to New York, we had our theatre families. They were the best things that we ever had, those friendships. And then some of them grow apart. That's what happens. That's the sad thing about friendships breaking apart. That's what the show's really about. But if you remember the rooftop and remember that that's what the show’s about, when you're going backwards, you go, “Oh, we just watched these people make decisions in their lives.” They could have made other decisions. That's not a tragedy. It's what we do as human beings.

Live your life backwards. Don't forget your youth. Don't forget the importance of friendships. They're going to change. And who's to say that after the beginning of the show, which is later, that Frank and Mary and Charlie don't find each other again and heal those relationships? Because we did in real life.

That's what I would say. Just don't forget the rooftop.