Revisiting Merrily We Roll Along and Sondheim’s First Attempt to Fix His Broadway Flop

Here, Rubinstein shares the first awkward moment he met Sondheim while staying in a friend’s apartment while performing in a show in New York.

John Rubinstein: And one day, I was sitting in their living room playing a piano, which I tend to do, you know, just fooling around, not practicing anything serious, just playing. And suddenly, there was a ring at the doorbell. So I stopped playing, and I went downstairs where the front door was, and I opened it up. And there, absolutely recognizable, was a man I’d never met but I knew immediately, Stephen Sondheim. And I said, “Yeah?” And he said, “Are you the one playing the piano?” And I said, yes. “You’re driving me crazy. Could you please stop? I’m trying to like music, and all I can hear is you. So just cut it out, would you? I’d be grateful.” I said, “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m really sorry. Okay, sir. Thank you.” And then he left.

Now it’s 3 or 4 years later. I have done a couple of Broadway shows in the meantime, and I get a call from my agent saying, “Mandy Patinkin is leaving Sunday in the Park with George, and they’re considering you to take over. And could you audition for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine?” I said, “Oh well, yeah, sure.” They sent me 2 songs. One was “Finishing the Hat”—great solo, very difficult to sing. I’d seen the show, of course. And the other one was the big duet at the end, “Move On”—big love song, we do not belong together. You know, really a big deal.

So I learned/memorized “Finishing the Hat,” which was the solo. But I was doing a television series out in Los Angeles at the time, and so I didn’t have a lot of time. I was working 14, 15, 16-hour days, and I was memorizing the Sondheim song. And then I flew to New York, and I didn’t memorize the duet. I figured, “Okay. Look, I’ll hold the music, and I’ll sing it. I know it. I’ve learned it. I know the music, but they’ll understand, and I’ll just sing it off the page and whatever.” So I go and I show up at the audition, and there’s Sondheim–we don’t we don’t talk about our 1st meeting.

And I sing “Finishing the Hat” and I think I did a decent job of it. Got all the words and hit all the notes and meant what I was saying, which is basically what we do. And then they said, “Okay, now would you sing the duet? And I said, well, I’m so sorry that I didn’t have, I couldn’t memorize this one just in the time I had. But, yes. Of course, I’ll sing it for you. And they said, “Oh, good. Bernadette!” And then Bernadette Peters comes out. She’s not leaving the play. She’s still in. She’s been doing it for a year. So suddenly, there’s Bernadette on stage with me.

This is before the days where everything was on computers and printed up and all that. So I had this oversized, bigger than legal size, just large pages of score, which were taped together, accordionated. So that if you opened them up, they they they would be 35 feet long. But you folded them up so that you could turn the pages. So I had that in my hands, but there she is standing, looking at me, ready to sing her song that of course she sang last night and got a standing ovation for with Mandy in his last performance. So I’m terribly intimidated and frightened, But, you know, I’m game. I’ll do anything.

So they start the music, and I start singing, and she’s looking at me, and she’s singing with me. But suddenly, I’m flipping the pages, and they fall out of my grasp, and they unaccordionate themselves onto the stage in this massive sort of train like a bride. And now I don’t know the words, so I have to stop singing. She stands there, and I’m fumbling around on the floor trying to pick up the pages and fold them back into a usable thing, and the pianist stopped to look at me. And then finally, Lapine screams out, “That’s okay. That’s fine. That’s good. That was good enough. Thank you, John. Thank you very much. Bye.” And that was the end of my audition. I didn’t get the part.

Patrick Oliver Jones: Right. Oh my gosh. Yeah, something like that happens, there’s really no recovery.

JR: No, I mean, I could have picked it back up and done it again.

POJ: You could you try. Sure.

John Rubinstein: They’d seen enough of me, by the way. They wanted to put me out of my misery. And I was really disappointed, because I wanted to do that part, and I think I could have done it really well. I couldn’t have sung it as amazingly as Mandy, but I could have sung it. So I was very disappointed.

And now it’s a year and something later, like 14 months later. I happen to be in Europe with my wife and kids on a sort of vacation, and we’re in this weird hotel in Switzerland in the middle of nowhere, and I get a message from the desk. There’s a phone call for you from America. This is, of course, before cell phones and all that. I go to my phone. “Hello?” And it’s my agent from New York, and he’s saying, “Lapine and Sondheim and George Furth are reworking Merrily We Roll Along for the first time. They wanna bring it back, and they’ve rewritten a lot of it, and they wanna continue to rewrite it. And they want you to play the lead, Franklin Shepherd, in California at the La Jolla Playhouse.” First time it’s been done again since it closed on Broadway. And James Lapine now is gonna direct it. And I said, “Yeah!” No audition. Just come and do it. So they gave me that part based on my horrible audition for Sunday in the Park.

POJ: Well, I’m sure based on a few of your other projects that they probably saw.

JR: Well, I don’t know. Though, yeah.

POJ: But one thing that I was reading–and I didn’t realize–that Stephen Sondheim also wrote plays. We all know his musical work, but Getting Away with Murder lasted a couple of weeks on Broadway, and you were a part of that as well. What was that experience like? Because obviously we know his musical genius, but what was it like without his music in in a production?

JR: He was always well known as a lover of puzzles and games and mysteries. And he wrote a movie script years before that, that Richard Benjamin was in...[The Last of Sheila]…it was a murder mystery, and he wrote the screenplay [with Anthony Perkins], and he loved that genre. He just loved murder mysteries. And He and George Furth had written Company together, so they were pals. And they decided to write a mystery play together, with Sondheim writing the story–what happens and who does what to whom–and George writing the dialogue, writing all the play. And they worked very well together. And it was a blast. We did it first at the Old Globe in San Diego, and it was called The Doctor Is Out. And then we did it again on Broadway about a couple of months later, and it was called, Getting Away with Murder. And we didn’t.

The critics, as though they had been waiting for the moment where they could excoriate something by Sondheim, they had just given the Pulitzer Prize to him and Lapine for Sunday in the Park, and Into the Woods had opened and that had been quite successful. And so they figured, “Okay. You know? This was Jack O’Brien directing it, but this was Sondheim, and maybe it’s time we gave them a little beating.” And they did. And we closed quickly. But it was a hilarious, great play.

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This transcription was lightly edited for clarity and brevity. You can listen to the full interview on the award-winning theater podcast Why I’ll Never Make It, which is part of the Broadway Podcast Network and is hosted and produced by Patrick Oliver Jones.

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