Growing Up

Introspection and seduction in Merrily We Roll Along

Krystal Joy Brown and Jonathan Groff as Gussie and Frank (📸: Matthew Murphy)

It started out like a song…

Franklin Shepard sits alone at his piano. We do not know it yet, but the song he plays as “Growing Up” begins will take many forms during Merrily We Roll Along. It will feature in “Gussie’s Opening Number” at the top of Act II, a glitzy showstopper that cements Frank and Charley’s Broadway show Musical Husbands as a surefire hit. Before that (chronologically speaking, so later in Merrily), it charms Joe and Gussie’s cocktail party guests in a simpler, purer guise; Frank and Charley perform it to them in full as “Good Thing Going.” Earlier still, during “Opening Doors,” we hear it in a more primitive form as “Who Wants to Live in New York?” 

Producer Joe Josephson, after hearing this earliest version, complains that “there’s not a tune you can hum.” He disproves his own point even as he makes it, of course: his admonishment is set to precisely the melody to which Frank and Charley have just introduced him. It would certainly seem that this tune is a catchy one. But here now sits Frank at his piano, all these years later, humming that very same tune. In the reverse chronology of Merrily, Joe’s claim is proven false long before he makes it.

And so begins “Growing Up,” a number which starts as an echo of a song we have not yet heard, its composer reviewing a series of events we have not yet seen play out. It is fitting that, in this number, we never actually hear the song in question sung. Its tune, which Frank hums a little of before it passes into his piano accompaniment, becomes something more akin to a countermelody to the first verse of this number. It is a memory which flickers and then fades, as Frank muses on a past which, in the show we see unfold, is still to come.

What follows is a rare moment of genuine introspection on the part of Frank. Yes, he remains frustrated by what he sees as the intransigence of his two closest friends (“Mary is a purist, Charley’s a judge,” and so on). But, for once, he makes his own case thoughtfully, and frames it convincingly:

So, old friends,
Don’t you see we can have it all,
Moving on,
Getting out of the past?
Solving dreams,
Not just trusting them,
Taking dreams,
Readjusting them,
Growing up,
Growing up…

The tragedy here is that Frank says what he most needs to say to others only to himself. And then Gussie enters. With Frank seemingly on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, indeed of actually growing up himself, it feels like even more of a gut-punch when she arrives, announces she has left her husband, and presents a very different vision of maturity:

Life is knowing what you want, darling.
That’s the only thing to know.
As I told you moons ago, darling,
Nothing wrong with wanting…

Nothing wrong with wanting me, darling.
Also nothing wrong with not,
Thought it’s only fair that
You should be aware that
I want you a lot.

Gussie’s passage in “Growing Up” has a twin of sorts in Act II. This is one of several reverse reprises which occur in Merrily, reprises that we hear before the ‘original’ moment to which they correspond. The show’s clearest example of this is “Not a Day Goes By,” which we first hear sung by a heartbroken Beth in Act I, divorcing Frank after his infidelity and yet still in love with him. In Act II, so earlier in the show’s timeline, it is sung by Beth and Mary, both of whom are in love with Frank. To hear this number first as the final bruise of a broken marriage, and then as a pair of heartfelt expressions of love (one requited, the other not), is deeply affecting. As Sunday in the Park with George’s Dot says to George after the breakdown of their own relationship, “We lose things. And then we choose things.” How gut-wrenching to see this play out in reverse.

In the lyrics of “Not a Day Goes By” and its reprise, Sondheim shows us what it can mean for everything and nothing to change. And there is something particularly subtle and exquisite about the shift from the hurt and anguish of Act I’s

But you’re still somehow part of my life.
And you won’t go away. 

to the hope and promise of Act II’s

But you somewhere come into my life
And you don’t go away.

Gussie’s contributions to “Growing Up” and its reprise make for an equally striking contrast. In the first act, as we saw, what she says serves explicitly as a seduction. Compare this to her words in the “Growing Up” of Act II. Not only is there hardly any of the first-act seduction, but what Gussie says here amounts to precisely the opposite: a reminder to be patient, restrained, to think more carefully, not less. In this passage she could almost be Sweeney Todd’s Mrs. Lovett in “Wait,” with her steadying advice that “Soon will come. Soon will last”:

You’ll get everything you want, darling,
Have a little patience.
Climbing mountains can be slow, darling,
Take it easy as you climb.
I’d say you’re a winner,
Also a beginner—
One step at a time.

The insight, usually attributed to Mark Twain, that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” is so familiar that we can all too easily dismiss it as a truism. It is, though, a useful idea to keep in mind when thinking about Merrily, as we watch as those on stage wrestle with a past that for us is still yet to come. In “Growing Up,” Frank glimpses a redemptive path that we already know he does not take—and that makes watching this number play out all the more devastating.

Listening links:

There are three widely available professional recordings of this number. They are from 1994, with Malcolm Gets as Frank and Michele Pawk as Gussie; 2012, with Colin Donnell as Frank and Elizabeth Stanley as Gussie; and 2023, with Jonathan Groff as Frank and Krystal Joy Brown as Gussie. Here they are, presented (of course) in reverse-chronological order: