Director: Maria Friedman
Merrily We Roll Along is a 2025 filmed musical directed by Maria Friedman, bringing the Stephen Sondheim and George Furth stage work to the screen. Running about 145 minutes and produced across the United States and the United Kingdom, it preserves a live theatrical staging of the show as a feature-length film for home viewing.
What is Merrily We Roll Along about?
The story tracks three friends across roughly three decades of a shared creative life: a composer who moves toward commercial success, a writer who becomes a theatre critic, and a lyricist and playwright who works alongside them. Its defining feature is structural rather than dramatic. The narrative runs in reverse, opening at a later point of professional achievement and personal distance, then stepping backward year by year through the disagreements, career decisions, and quiet turning points that separated the three. Because the audience sees each outcome before its cause, familiar scenes gather new meaning as the timeline rewinds toward the group's earliest days in New York, when the friendship was new and the ambitions still shared. The reverse chronology is presented plainly here, without twist or concealment, and the film keeps the songs and staging of its source production intact.
Cast & crew
Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe lead as the central trio at the heart of the story. The supporting company includes Krystal Joy Brown, Katie Rose Clarke, Reg Rogers, Sherz Aletaha, and Leana Rae Concepcion. Maria Friedman directs, having previously staged the production on which the film is based.
Context & significance
The musical originated in 1981 with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth, itself adapted from a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. This 2025 version records a later theatrical revival and carries an IMDb rating of 7.6. It is categorized as a musical and sits within a long line of stage-to-screen adaptations that capture a specific production rather than reimagining the material as a conventional film.
Where & how to watch
Merrily We Roll Along is available to watch on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can follow the dialogue and lyrics in Farsi. Watching requires a free K-Time account login, while this page is free to read. K-Time is a Persian-focused streaming service for the Iranian diaspora, with a Farsi interface built around subtitled and dubbed international titles.