In the following review of a revival of Merrily We Roll Along, Simon offers a negative assessment, focusing on Sondheim's lack of melody, the absence of character likability, and the weakness of the retrogressive structure of the musical.

I suppose the question most frequently asked around town these days is why Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim should have risked trying to fashion a musical out of "Merrily We Roll Along"…. In effect, Prince and Sondheim were starting out with a known quantity: a weak book. (p. D3) I think they picked "Merrily We Roll Along" because it was precisely what they wanted to do, precisely what they had been doing for most of their distinguished, if not always rewarding, collabor...

The story of Merrily We Roll Along reaches backward in time to retrace the lives of several people attending a class reunion, and Sondheim's score is typically inventive and complex. Perhaps the clearest explanation is Sondheim's own, as he presents it in the album booklet: "Since Merrily We Roll Along is about friendship, the score concentrates on the friendship of Mary, Frank, and Charlie by having all their songs interconnected through chunks of melody, rhythm, and accompaniment. And...

"Merrily We Roll Along," which closed after sixteen performances …, was a blunder, all the more mysterious because it was carried out by some of the least blunder-prone people on Broadway—Hal Prince, who produced and directed it; Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics; and George Furth, who wrote the book. What on earth could have drawn them to this old play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart? It is a work remarkable only for the fact that its plot unfolds by starting i...

Two things set ["Merrily We Roll Along"] apart right away. It is a Hal Prince-Stephen Sondheim collaboration and it tells its story backward…. The notion of moving backward comes from the 1930s play by Kaufman and Hart from which the musical is derived. Unfortunately, this pedigree does not help. Neither the impressive talents of its creative team, nor the device of reversing the chronology can camouflage the commonplace nature of the story….