LOS ANGELES – Prior to becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits, Mark Umbers, star of “Hotel Portofino,” was part of a previous cast that reexamined the show “Merrily We Roll Along,” which flopped in 1981.
Convinced that there was a hit hidden in the jumbled story, director Maria Friedman collaborated with composer Stephen Sondheim to refine the production.
The revised version, which premiered in London in 2012, featured Umbers as Franklin Shepard, a writer who abandons his composing career (and friends) to pursue a Hollywood movie producer role. The musical, told in reverse, found its success, Umbers notes, when the roles were cast with older actors. In the original, which lasted only 16 performances on Broadway, actors in their teens and 20s played the characters, lacking the necessary experience to grasp the essence of the older years.
Mark Umbers plays Cecil Ainsworth in “Hotel Portofino.”
While working on the show, Umbers had the opportunity to ask Sondheim questions about his character’s motivation.
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“He was incredibly gracious and very kind to me about it,” Umbers says. The role was loosely based on Sondheim’s life “and I was kind of playing him in a weird sort of way.”
At one point, Umbers played the piano as the character “and I could see him in the background. I was so nervous…and I messed up.”
Sondheim didn’t mind. “It was one of the great thrills of my career to meet him and talk with him. There were lots of emails.”
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