Feels Like An Ending, But It’s Really A Beginning

Structural musings on Merrily We Roll Along

📸: Norman Jean Roy

When we consider the first-act finale and second-act opener of Merrily We Roll Along, we can ask ourselves an unusual question: which is which?

At first this might seem a little absurd. We clearly cannot help but experience these numbers as they are written: Act I closes with “Now You Know,” and Act II begins with “Gussie’s Opening Number.” But when a show unfolds backwards, as Merrily does, might it be valuable to think about its structure in more ways than one?

At the very least, it seems reasonable to pursue the idea that each of Merrily’s numbers occupies a kind of dual structural space: first, its position in the show that we actually see; second, its place in an imagined, chronologically “correct” version of the show. And, given that Merrily’s first-act finale contains the words, “Feels like an ending, but it’s really a beginning,” this line of inquiry becomes almost impossible to resist.

Imagine a version of this show in which time flows forward. Our two act openers would then be “Our Time” (the show’s final number) and “Now You Know.” From this new vantage point, we might think of the second number as being a distant relation of the first—an estranged cousin, perhaps. In “Our Time,” embodiment of youthful optimism that it is, Charley, Mary, and Frank are this show’s blank canvas. As Sunday’s George might say, “So many possibilities…” In “Now You Know,” it is not so much that all hope has evaporated, or that any sense of bonhomie has disappeared entirely. The reality is subtler but no less bleak: these formerly positive qualities have been twisted and channelled into an increasingly frantic kind of damage control, fashioned into a last-ditch sticking plaster for a near-suicidal Frank. 

Throughout “Now You Know,” the assembled characters make several attempts to spin the grim reality of Frank’s wife leaving him (with good reason) as the “best thing that ever could have happened.” This repeated refrain has all the sincerity of Glinda’s “I couldn’t be happier” at the top of Wicked’s second act. Mary has it right when she earlier (in the show, so later chronologically) says, “These are the friends of Frank. Each one a perfect blank.” The protagonists of Into the Woods all have their more self-absorbed, short-sighted moments during that show’s first act—but at least they are ultimately able to break the chains of their initial superficiality. There is no such redemption for these sycophants and hangers-on: in Merrily, the Blob remains just as shallow as it ever was.

Mary is this number’s sole realist, doing her utmost to shatter the pernicious fiction that all is well:

It’s called flowers wilt,
It’s called apples rot,
It’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot,
It’s called God don’t answer prayers a lot.

Elsewhere, Sondheim twice uses flowers to warn of hidden peril. Into the Woods’s Little Red Riding Hood, after meeting the Wolf, wisely notes that “even flowers have their dangers.” In Passion, Fosca speaks of “a flower which offers nectar at the top … and bitter poison underneath.” When Mary references flowers here, however, the metaphor is one of decay. It is not so much a warning about the seductive qualities of such things, but rather a reminder of their impermanence. And when we consider the forward trajectory of our central trio’s friendship throughout Merrily, decay seems a particularly apt analogy. We can even extend the floral metaphor a little further. Mary, Charley, and Frank start out as a single bud, tightly bound and full of promise; they bloom and grow together; but as this flower matures, its three petals grow further and further apart, reaching out in different directions, until finally each petal falls, withered, faded, and alone.

And how moving it is to watch this process unfold in reverse throughout Merrily. How heartbreaking too that Frank and Charley cannot save themselves from this fate, yet in their own song they are able to articulate the very same process with exquisite clarity and concision:

It could have kept on growing,
Instead of just kept on.
We had a good thing going,
Going,
Gone.

In our imagined chronological Merrily, “Gussie’s Opening Number” would occur at the end of Act I. It is intriguing to observe the extent to which this number aligns dramatically with the first-act finales of several other Sondheim shows. For Mary, Charley, and Frank, this number represents the pinnacle of all they have been working towards thus far. Though the path towards it is far from straight, the success of their show, Musical Husbands, is akin to George Seurat’s completed La Grande Jatte at the end of Sunday’s first act. But it also represents victory no less pyrrhic than that of “Ever After,” Into the Woods’s first-act finale—and because of Merrily’s reverse chronology, we already understand it as such. The success of Musical Husbands will bring out the worst in Frank, both professionally and personally. From this moment on, he becomes as blinded by ambition as a certain Fleet Street barber is hungry for vengeance. And Gussie herself comes to embody Frank’s moral decay, as party to his first extramarital affair and—once they themselves are married—victim to his second. These words, from Into the Woods’s “First Midnight,” spring to mind here, for Frank in particular:

You may know what you need,
But to get what you want,
Better see that you keep what you have.

As we approach its climax, “Now You Know” grows increasingly cacophonous. The “best thing that ever could have happened” refrain mingles with Merrily’s very first words—“Yesterday is done”—and very nearly its last ones too. “It’s our time!” cry several of those on stage, words we will hear again at the end of this show and the beginning of its story. At Merrily’s formal midpoint, it is as if the past and the future are converging on Franklin Shepard. And who can say for sure which is which?