Weekend Watch: ‘Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened’ Is a Melancholy Must for Broadway Fans

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At one point near the end of the documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, one of the original cast members of the infamous Stephen Sondheim musical flop Merrily We Roll Along muses about the nature of getting older. “The most frustrating thing about getting older and looking at younger people is that they don’t know what they’re missing. They don’t know that they’re building something.” It’s a sentiment that could apply to the characters in Merrily We Roll Along itself, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of director Lonny Price’s touching, almost familial film, which looks back on the creation, casting, sputter, and ultimate failure of the 1981 Broadway production of Merrily through the eyes and experiences of the people who made it.

In 1981, Merrily We Roll Along was seen as a theater project that couldn’t miss. The latest project from composer Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince, whose legendary partnership had already produced shows like Company, Follies, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Sweeney Todd. The story was about a trio of ambitious friends looking to make it as writers in the entertainment industry, told backwards from their resentful schisms back to their hopeful beginnings. By this time, Sondheim and Prince were icons in the business, and it’s evident in the way their cast members react to (and recollect) being cast in the show. It’s their big break and their Broadway fantasy camp all rolled up into one. One of those cast members was Lonny Price himself, who was cast as Charley, one of the show’s three leads.

Any sufficiently Broadway-obsessed fan of musical theater likely knows the story of Merrily We Roll Along, which confounded audiences upon its debut and was carved up by many critics, closing after only 16 performances and 52 tortured previews.”We were at the pinnacle,” says Abby Pogrebin, who was 16 years old when she was cast in Merrily, “and we watched our idols stumble.” The failure was devastating enough that it ended the Sondheim/Prince professional partnership for over two decades, but Price’s film doesn’t really dive into that. Instead, he spends a lot of time talking to his fellow cast members. Bolstered by recovered archive footage from an ABC documentary on the making of Merrily that never saw the light of day, Price gets a good look at who they were then and who they are now.

The most famous of the cast, afterwards, was Jason Alexander, who escaped the failed production to go on to win a Tony Award and then become enshrined in TV history forever as George on Seinfeld. But aside from Tony winner Tonya Pinkins and Emmy nominee Giancarlo Esposito in smaller roles, the Merrily cast never saw huge stardom after the show. This makes for a rather fascinating look at what happens when these youthful ambitions don’t reach their pinnacle. These cast members have gone on to careers in and out of the theater. Some are teachers, some are writers, some have continued to gig in small roles, some have left the business altogether. They all speak with a mixture of affection and regret, their faces lighting up when telling the stories of the production and their eyes welling up when the melancholy kicks in.

A film like Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is the kind of film that could only be made by someone with real affection for not only the show at its center but also Broadway as a way of life. It would make for a great companion to a documentary like Every Little Step, which followed the casting process for the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line. Both films track the fragile thread that stage performers walk, knowing that jobs and opportunities are so hard to come by. And while the desperate striving that suffuses A Chorus Line gives so much meaning to the actors in Every Little Step, so does Merrily We Roll Along‘s air of hope and regret weave its way through its cast members’ reminiscences.

The film builds up to one of the more affecting scenes I’ve seen in a movie about the entertainment industry, a reunion of the principal Merrily cast at the Neil Simon theater, standing around a piano, singing a song from their show, walking like ghosts through the dressing rooms and backstage corners they used to be so intimately familiar with. You can actually see the memories lap over them in waves, it’s quite astonishing. It’s sad and it’s beautiful and it’s fleeting, and that’s as fitting for this movie (and the musical it celebrates) as anything.

Where to stream Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened