The film will star Beanie Feldstein, Ben Platt and Blake Jenner
Richard Linklater will direct an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, set to be filmed over a 20-year span.
The director of Before Sunrise and Last Flag Flying tried the approach in the past for Boyhood (2014), his 12-year project, starring Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, which earned the american filmmaker several awards, including an Oscar as a supporting actress for Arquette.
Merrily We Roll Along is a famous musical based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. kaufaman and Moss Hart. The musical ran on Broadway for 44 previews and 16 performances in 1981 and it has been staged across America and abroad in the last 30 years with many changes. Merrily We Roll Along follows Franklin Shepard, a Broadway composer, who leaves his friends and career to become a film producer in Hollywood.
The new cast will include actors Beanie Feldstein, Ben Platt and Blake Jenner, starring Jenner in the leading role.
“I first saw and fell in love with Merrily in the ‘80s, and I can’t think of a better place to spend the next 20 years than in the world of a Sondheim musical” said Linklater in a statement to Variety. “I don’t enter this multiyear experience lightly, but it seems the best, perhaps the only way, to do this story justice on film.”
Ginger Sledge, Jason Blum, Jonathan Marc Sherman and Linklater himself will produce the film for Blumhouse.
