MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

"What do you do?" "I drink." "What do you really do?" "I really drink!"--Merrily We Roll Along

Last night I saw Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa for the third time, at the Event Screen.  Beautifully made and intelligent, thought the central romance feels rather weary. (Robert Redford is the weak link as Meryl Streep's love interest.) I planned to see it with the Movie Meetup group, but didn't realize they were seeing it at the Yonge & Eglinton!  I also ordered popcorn with butter just for variety, which I won't be doing again for a while:  it made me a bit unwell.  Two mistakes in one night!

This evening I saw a special Digital Theatre broadcast of a West End revival of Stephen Sondheim's 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along.  This was another Event Screen presentation, but was so popular that they showed it one of the bigger rooms.  It tells the story of a threesome working together in musical theatre--a commercially ambitious man writing melodies, a more artistic man writing lyrics, and a woman writing scripts--with lots of showbiz cynicism.  Curiously, it tells the story in reverse chronological order, starting at the end and moving back and back to their beginnings in the age of Sputnik.

I can see why the show's first production failed:  this kind of story is hard to get into.  But I got more and more into it as the show went on, and by the time it was over I wanted to see it again.  It's a lively, faultless London production.