Track Listing

1. Overture
2. Hills Of Tomorrow
3. Rich And Happy
4. Old Friends
5. Like It Was
6. Franklin Shepard Inc
7. Not A Day Goes By
8. Now You Know
9. It's A Hit
10. Good Thing Going
11. Bobby And Jackie And Jack
12. Not A Day Goes By
13. Opening Doors
14. Our Time
15. Hills Of Tomorrow
16. Darling
17. Honey
18. Thankyou You For Coming

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29955 in Music
• Released on: 2007-05-28
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Extra tracks, Original recording remastered, Soundtrack
• Dimensions: .21 pounds
• Running time: 76 minutes

From Amazon.com
It's a shame that Merrily We Roll Along was such a devastating flop on Broadway, for it contains some of Stephen Sondheim's best, brightest, and brassiest music. The reasons have been well documented: a youthful, inexperienced cast; cheesy sets and costumes; and, most of all, a confusing plot structure that starts in 1980 with bitter, cynical characters and winds its way backward to 1955, when a high school graduating class is dreaming of making its mark on the world. The main focus is on three friends (Jim Walton, Ann Morrison, and Lonny Price) who share musical ambitions but are gradually driven apart by the turbulence and fragmentation of their lives and the America around them. (You'll also hear a pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander, and even a young chorus girl named Liz Callaway.) Sondheim almost imperceptibly reworks his themes as his characters develop, and the score includes the infectious "Old Friends," the driving title tune, the ballad "Not a Day Goes By," and "Our Time," an uplifting anthem of hope when performed out of the show's context, but emotionally devastating within it. And if the backward structure--inherited from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1934 version of the show--really bothers you, you can run it almost completely chronologically by reprogramming the CD. --David Horiuchi