Mary's Well of Loneliness in Merrily We Roll Along

This chapter applies insights from Ken Plummer’s Intimate Citizenship (2003) and other works to Stephen Sondheim’s musical settings for the character of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along (1981), one of his last collaborations with director Harold (Hal) Prince adapted by author George Furth from the eponymous 1934 stage play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. As directed by Maria Friedman, the current version of the musical returned triumphantly to Broadway in 2023. Sondheim’s lifelong close friend Mary Rodgers’ recent nonfiction memoir SHY and related autobiographical comments by Sondheim have added new pieces to the puzzle of completing and understanding the backstory of one of Sondheim’s many memorable unconventional female characters. The character Mary, the only female in the trinity of central characters, emerges as an accomplished, faithful, suffering figure. To paraphrase Rebecca O’Rourke’s assessment in 1989 of the character of Stephen Gordon in Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness , Mary is ‘the perfect hero . . . [except for] one flaw – that she is a woman’. Sondheim’s treatment of Mary’s loneliness and singleness, memorably expressed in the song ‘Like It Was’, is also compared with the solitary focus of the title character in Sondheim’s next show, Sunday in the Park With George as expressed in the song ‘Putting It Together’. George and Mary’s embrace of modern city life, close friendships, and deep wells of personal loneliness were portrayed sympathetically by Sondheim and his collaborators, perhaps not least because they were also talking about themselves in these two musicals about the art of making art.