What: The current Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along.

When: The 77th Annual Tony Awards on June 16. The show earned seven nominations, including nods for director Maria Friedman and stars Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe, who will perform live at the Tonys.

But Is It Texan? If it’s not yet, it will be soon. Consider the performance an indirect sneak preview of Richard Linklater’s film adaptation, which the Austin director is shooting over a period of twenty years.

Based on the 1934 play of the same title by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Merrily We Roll Along was an infamous and unexpected Broadway flop. It was Sondheim and director Hal Prince’s first show after 1979’s Sweeney Todd, which won eight Tonys and played for 557 performances and 19 previews. Merrily We Roll Along opened on November 16, 1981, and played for just 16 performances (along with 44 previews, a number that was apparently insufficient to work out the show’s kinks).

Merrily tells the story of three friends—songwriting partners Frank Shepard and Charley Kringas and author/critic Mary Flynn—and the cracks in their relationship that form amidst success and failure (on Broadway, in Hollywood, with romance) over two decades. It tells that story in reverse chronological order, following the characters from middle age back to college, a structure that audiences found both confusing and dramatically inert (among other quirks, the “reprises” happen before their “first” appearance in the show).

The narrative was further muddled by Prince’s choice to cast particularly young actors, who we then see in Act 1, Scene 1 as the unconvincingly middle-aged versions of their characters. Lonny Price, who played Charley, was just 21, while costars Jim Walton and Ann Morrison were 25.

But as a commercial flop that took artistic risks, Merrily had staying power, along the lines of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk or Elaine May’s Ishtar. The original cast recording—cut the day after the final performance—was especially beloved, with many songs becoming Sondheim standards. And it found unlikely fans: “Merrily’s my favorite Sondheim,” Linklater told GQ this month. “I just love the score.”

Sondheim and Furth rewrote the show over several years, and multiple productions over the next three decades burnished its cult following. Those audiences at least came into theaters ready for the concept, while subsequent casting choices skewed much older (Victor Garber, for instance, was 40 when he played Franklin in the 1990 production, while a 32 year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda played Charley in 2012).

Reviews were typically still mixed. “On the evidence of its umpteenth unsatisfactory revisal,” the New York Times’ Jesse Green wrote of a February 2019 production, “I’m sorry to say that it’s still not Merrily’s time. Maybe it never will be.”

But then came Maria Friedman. The British actor and director played Mary in the Haymarket Theatre’s award-winning 1992 production, which also became the definitive cast recording.  She then directed a revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2012, which eventually led to the current production with Groff, who’s now 39, Radcliffe (34), and Mendez (41). It opened off-Broadway at the end of 2022 and came to Broadway in October of 2023. It got great reviews (including, yes, from Jesse Green) and is almost guaranteed to dominate the Tonys. “It’s always been a problematic production,” Linklater noted in his GQ interview. “Although now, it’s probably the best production ever of it.”

Linklater had already begun to make his film before the show’s big comeback. The project was first announced in August 2019, when shooting was already underway. The director’s plan to make it over twenty years is of a piece with his previous “longitudinal” movies Boyhood, which was made over twelve years, as well as the Before trilogy, which revisited its characters in nine-year intervals. Sondheim, who died in November 2021, was reportedly on board with the long-term template.

“It seems the best, perhaps the only, way to do this story justice on film,” Linklater has said. The director’s approach means that his Merrily will not only avoid the pitfalls of its predecessors, but it will also become a distinct work, separate from any and all theatrical productions.

Linklater’s Merrily stars Paul Mescal (Franklin), Ben Platt (Charley) and Beanie Feldstein (Mary). Platt (Dear Evan Hansen, Parade) and Feldstein (Hello, Dolly!, Funny Girl), both of whom are 30, are old friends—and confirmed Sondheim nerds. Irishman Mescal, 28, was a late addition to the cast after the departure of Blake Jenner. With the film’s first year and sequence completed, another member of the cast has been confirmed: Woodlands native Mallory Bechtel, another Dear Evan Hansen alum.

Bechtel’s role has not been announced, but it stands to reason that she plays Beth, Franklin Shepard’s first wife (and a Houstonian herself). That’s the only other character who features in Merrily’s second (which is to say, second-to-last) sequence. “[It] is an absolute dream come true, first of all,” Bechtel told Texas Monthly’s Aisling Ayers during an appearance at the ATX TV Festival. “And there are so many weird little coincidences that make it feel like it was just written in the stars. The first one being the Texas association. Obviously Richard is a Texas man. He is truly the first director I ever became obsessed with. It could have been anything that had Richard’s name on it, I would have wanted [it] so, so bad. And then you tack on the fact that it’s a musical. And that it’s a Sondheim musical.”

The Big Question: Will Linklater Live Long Enough To Finish It? Yes, people are asking this, along with wondering, as Indiewire’s Christian Blauvelt noted at last year’s Texas Film Awards, whether they’ll live long enough to see it themselves.

If the timeline sticks, the movie is a mere . . . seventeen years away. When interviewer David Marchese of the New York Times Magazine pointed out that the 63-year-old Linklater would be 83 when the movie was finished, Linklater was quick to correct him. “80. I’ll be 80.” Let’s hope there are still Alamo Drafthouses by then, and that it’s not 125 degrees in Texas on the day of its release (or five degrees, if it’s a Christmas movie).

While some shooting time was clearly lost to COVID-19, the replacement casting of Mescal, and the Screen Actors Guild strike, when Platt was at the Sundance Film Festival with his movie Theater Camp in January 2023, he confirmed that the first (which, again, is the last) sequence had been shot. By now, the second should be close (if not already done).

So why force us to wait almost two decades, when as the film historian and critic Mark Harris noted, prosthetics and special effects could age up the cast just as well? One answer is that makeup and special effects are still imperfect, and we’ve already got enough movies and TV shows that rely on them.

But more important, Linklater is not just looking to make any old movie of Merrily We Roll Along. He’s making his movie, and his now-signature approach is neither a gimmick nor solely about the authenticity of aging and appearance. As with the Before movies and Boyhood, the duration and intensity of the creative partnership and personal relationships between the actors—and with Linklater himself—shape the characters and story. There’s no special effect for that. “Content dictates form” was Sondheim’s maxim, and so it also is for Linklater. “Telling a well-told story the right way is what means the most to me,” he told the Times. “Finding the form that meets the content. That’s what a director does . . .”

Additional reporting by Aisling Ayers.