Review: Capturing the Broadway revival with vigor, 'Merrily We Roll Along' is again reborn

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Coming to you from the opposite end of the movie musical spectrum from where “Wicked” perches is Maria Friedman’s compact, propulsive film of her acclaimed revival staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”The revered composer’s 1981 musical is that canon rarity: a flop (as in, it closed two weeks after opening) that over time became a treasured classic.That’s an apt turn of fortune for a story deploying reverse chronology.

Captured at the Hudson Theatre last year during its Tony-winning Broadway run, this “Merrily” is stirring evidence of a hit production, which starred Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the tight-knit trio of New York creatives whose friendship, depicted backward across decades, feels like a shattered vase being reassembled so that we appreciate the cracks and cohesion.At times it’s as if you’re onstage with the cast.And yet that simple approach, in confident hands, reflects the magic that only cameras and cutting can do: collapse distance and time into a special intimacy, letting strong actors with expert-level songs be the greatest of special effects.Filmed theater gets a bad rap but it shouldn’t when it’s more than just a recording, and, for now, this version fulfills.

(It must, since Richard Linklater’s upcoming cinematic rendering, which he’s filming “Boyhood”-style over 20 years, is truly a “faraway shore,” to quote Sondheim.) Awards Prohibitive costs and an uncertain market have made filmed versions of Broadway shows a rarity in movie theaters.But new dynamics on Broadway and in Hollywood might change that.Think backward: Where things begin is the bitter end, at a glitzy Hollywood Hills party in 1976 full of showbiz hangers-on.

Frank (Groff), once a motivated composer, has abandoned music to be a hotshot movie producer and two-timing husband.Mary (Mendez), a sharp-witted writer, i...