John Doyle
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Just when you thought perhaps John Doyle had left Stephen Sondheim—or, at least, Sondheim as performed by actor-musicians—behind, along comes the Tony Award-winning Scotsman with a new Sondheim revival at the out-of-town U.K. venue where his ever-ascending career first began: the charming Watermill Theatre in Newbury, Berkshire. The theatre, which is an hour and a half or so west of London, is currently hosting Doyle's take on
Merrily We Roll Along through 8 March.
Not that the director will have inordinate amounts of time to linger, monitoring audience reaction. Within a day of its 21 January opening, he was on a plane to New York to rehearse his Metropolitan Opera debut in March, directing the mighty Benjamin Britten piece, Peter Grimes. And as soon as that is up and running in the Met repertoire, Doyle segues back to Broadway to unveil A Catered Affair, following its tryout last fall on the West Coast; Faith Prince and Harvey Fierstein are the stars.
But none of this activity would have happened—and certainly not Doyle's stewardship off-Broadway next fall of the Sondheim show that used to be called Bounce and before that Wise Guys (it's getting yet another name change, he says)—if the director hadn't staged so revelatory a Sweeney Todd at the Watermill four years ago. That production, with its cast toting—and often tooting—instruments so as to make up an orchestra on stage in the absence of one in the pit, subsequently transferred to London for seven months across two theatres and from there, of course, to Broadway. In New York, it was a sizable critical and commercial success and answered a very important question: Yes, Patti LuPone can play the tuba.
Raúl Esparza in Company
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Company followed, winning the Best Musical Revival Tony that had been denied Sweeney the year before, and by then Doyle was well on his way, which makes it doubly laudable that he has chosen to return to his Watermill roots. That he has done so is his way of honouring Jill Fraser, the former artistic and executive director of the Watermill, who died of cancer in February 2006, two months shy of her 60th birthday. "I promised her I'd do this before the whole Sweeney thing took off," Doyle says, speaking by phone one Friday lunchtime during Merrily previews. "This was to be her last show and she was to retire; unfortunately, she didn't live to see that time. But Jill did make it to Sweeney on Broadway against all the odds and with great discomfort." That Doyle is moved by the memory is evident in his voice.
The Watermill Merrily, directed in a 220-seat horseshoe-shaped auditorium worlds away from—say—the Metropolitan Opera stage, marks both a farewell and a beginning. On the one hand, he speaks in full awareness that "this will be my last production here; it's time to move on." At the same time, Merrily isn't the acknowledged masterwork that Sweeney and Company are both widely acknowledged to be, so that's a first for Doyle in terms of what he's dealing with. Arguably its most successful production to date was at the end of 2000 at London's comparably intimate Donmar Warehouse, in a staging from Michael Grandage that Doyle says he never saw—one which, against the odds, went on to win three Olivier Awards, including Best Musical. The director talks of his interest in "looking at one of the shows that is deemed not to have been successful for whatever reason, at least in the mythology that grows around any theatre but particularly musical theatre." How does his cast see it? "I got to know the songs from Merrily before I knew the piece," says Sam Kenyon, the 34-year-old Cambridge-educated Englishman who plays the weak-willed, unhappy Franklin in the show. (Kenyon was also the outstanding Tobias in Doyle's Sweeney.) "They're some of my favourite songs; they're just works of genius." He laughs. "I didn't know there was a problem until after that. As far as I'm concerned, Merrily is part of the canon, and to me a masterpiece is necessarily flawed; some of my favourite works of art have rubbish bits about them."
Sam Kenyon in Merrily We Roll Along
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And though every
Merrily almost by definition seems to be a tiny bit different from the next—for this one, Doyle is using the version developed with James Lapine at the Old Globe in San Diego, after the original production's Broadway crash-and-burn—it is doubtful that any previous staging had its cast doubling as its orchestra. While it's not a huge leap to find Kenyon on a baby grand piano—his character, after all, is a songwriter—Rebecca Jackson's sinuous, flaming-haired Gussie plays sax, "which is sexy and sensible," says Doyle, while Elizabeth Marsh's notably severe Mary plays sax in the early stages of the musical, which are the embittered and angry later stages of her life, and flute as the show goes on, rewinding its way toward innocence and youth. The backward chronology of George Furth's book, meanwhile, is made literal by the presence at the rear of Liz Ascroft's set of an ever-unspooling tape, an image picked up by cast members who at various points turn smaller tapes of their own. "What's interesting for John," says Kenyon, "is that he has a real sense of how this fits in with the rest of his Sondheim work, almost as a partner project to
Company. In that, Bobby is learning to play the piano, and you've got a central character who ironically is often seen as a cipher. And that's what he's doing with Frank, as well. Where Franklin often is seen as a very difficult, odd character that you can't quite pin down, John and Cathy [Catherine Jayes, the orchestrator] wanted [
Merrily] to feel very much conceptually as if this were a show that Frank was actually writing, so that by the end of the evening, he has got the idea for something that would tell the story of his life."
One obvious performer qualified to comment on the project is Broadway's Raúl Esparza, who had a career- making triumph as Bobby in Doyle's Company , for which he was nominated for a Tony, but who has also appeared in Merrily, in a Kennedy Center production unrelated to the British director. "It intrigues me," Esparza said by telephone from New York, where he is currently appearing in the Cort Theatre revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, about this latest Doyle/Sondheim experiment. "Merrily's greatest strength is its most subversive quality—that it's a straightforward classical musical comedy that happens to be told in reverse, so it's already a show that's been taken apart." As for Doyle, says Esparza, "John has a way of working that he started with and he's playing with it and seeing where it takes him. There were moments in Company that could never have been as gorgeous or as rewarding done any other way." (He cites by way of example the number "Sorry-Grateful.")
Doyle, for his part, speaks in full awareness of an approach borne initially out of a lack of resources and funding ("you go to someplace like the Met, they're not going to be holding instruments") that also appeals to him as an artist. "I like the puzzle of this approach; I really enjoy it as a theatrical form." But will Merrily journey westward as did Sweeney before it? The West End producer Howard Panter has money in the Watermill production, so who's to say? (Reviews so far have been mixed to favourable.) "It's hard to hide now, really," says Doyle only a shade ruefully, his own success thankfully by no means the canker that acclaim within the predatory, competitive world of Merrily itself proves to be for Frank. Doyle laughs. "His came when he was 25, mine came when I was 55. The implications are different at my stage of life." Let's just say that Doyle is rolling along still, and the contemporary musical theatre is that much happier for it.