Published in The Orlando Sentinel on June 18, 2000.
 

It's a case of life imitating art.

 In the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical Merrily We Roll Along, a little group of friends right out of college gets together to try to make it in show biz.

 Ditto at the Civic Theatre complex in Orlando's Loch Haven Park, where a little group of friends, just leaving college, has come together to put on a show.

 The show? Merrily We Roll Along, a musical they say defines them at this particular point in their lives. It will open at the Civic's smallest theater, the Tupperware, at 8 p.m. Thursday.

 "All of this started about five years ago when I first saw the show," says Todd Eskin, a University of Central Florida theater student who will graduate in December.

 "It really changed my life. It's a story about people's lives and the choices they make. One day we said, 'OK, we gotta do this.' "

 With Robert Miller Jr., who graduated from UCF this spring, Eskin is co-directing and co-producing the musical with a cast of 18, most of them students at or recent graduates of UCF or Rollins College. They're working at the Civic thanks to Jeff Revels, director of the Civic School of Theatre Arts, who is eager to give them a chance because he remembers what a similar opportunity did for him.

 "I know the importance of allowing students to direct," Revels says. "I was the first student allowed to direct at my university. That's what got me started."

 They're working under the name Opening Doors Theatre Company, a phrase straight out of the Sondheim-Furth show. In the song "Opening Doors," the musical's three main characters sing of starting out in life:

 We're opening doors,

 Singing, 'Here we are!'

 We're filling up days

 On a dime.

 That faraway shore's

 Looking not too far.

 We're following every star -- 

There's not enough time!

 That kind of youthful enthusiasm is at the core of this new theater company, where one of the directors can't complete a sentence without the other one's chiming in.

 And it's at the core of Merrily We Roll Along, a seldom-performed show by the composer and lyricist who is at the forefront of today's musical theater. The author of Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Company and Follies, among many others, Sondheim is not known for his hits. But even for Sondheim, Merrily We Roll Along is a special case, a show that bombed in its first production but one that theaters keep bringing back in the hopes of finally getting it right.

 One of the attractions is the show's lovely songs, which are among the most accessible Sondheim has written. But what makes the show difficult is its peculiar structure, which starts in the characters' cynical middle age and moves backward in time to their idealistic youth.

 In Merrily We Roll Along, which is based on George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's 1934 drama of the same name, the characters Frank, Charley and Mary start out as quarreling, world-weary near-strangers and end up, 25 years earlier, starry-eyed and the firmest of friends.

 "It has the unconventional style of moving backwards," Miller says. "Broadway wasn't ready for it. And another thing I noticed -- originally it was billed as a musical comedy. It's anything but a comedy."

 "It's not a heavy drama," Eskin says, "but it's very sad. It's hard to know what emotion you're supposed to leave with in the end."

 Still, it's the excitement and zeal of the young characters at the end of the show -- and at the beginning of their adult lives -- that seems to have replicated itself in this production at the Civic.

 Eskin and Miller started out with a cast largely made up of UCF students and graduates but wound up, after several performers had to drop out, with actors from several schools (including Seminole Community College and Florida State).

 Nearly half of them, Revels points out, also are alumni of the Civic School, which takes kids from preschool age all the way up through those who have just graduated from high school. Eskin himself, who is interning this summer for the Civic School, spent six years there.

 The Opening Doors experience, he says, is bringing together actors of the same age who had never met. Most theater students, he says, don't have time even to see productions at other schools.

 "Most of them don't get the chance to see each other's shows, much less work together. Every school's teaching you something different, and it's interesting how it all works together."

 Opening Doors will perform the show for two weekends at the Civic and on June 28 at Lake Mary High School, with that night's proceeds going to the Jennifer Leah Kairis Memorial Foundation for theater scholarships. Jennifer Kairis, who died last year, was a theater student at Rollins.

 After that, the producers say, who knows? If Merrily We Roll Along is a hit, they would like to do another production in the fall. But Eskin still has to graduate from UCF and figure out what he will do afterwards. Miller, too, doesn't know where he will be in the fall.

 "I'm in the same limbo predicament," he says. "You can't guess more than a day at a time."

 At the Civic, Revels originally hoped to continue the Opening Doors experience for college-age actors every other year or so.

 But with the Civic's current financial uncertainties, even he doesn't know whether he will have a job.

 All the trio can do, they say, is keep opening doors.