It's Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday year and many music and theatre organizations have been marking the milestone. Joining them, on Labor Day Weekend, at the Brandon Fradd Theatre at Whyte Hall, was the Fire Island Pines Arts Project (FIPAP), presenting a high-level production of "Merrily We Roll Along," which confused audiences and failed on Broadway in 1981, but has since been reconsidered and appreciated. In George Furth's book for the musical, after George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's play, the story is told in reverse chronological order, with the leading trio of friends, Franklin Shepard, Charley Kringas and Mary Flynn, already estranged, embittered, selling out, and veteran of multiple marriages and divorces, as the show begins, and only at the end, set 19 years earlier, shown as young, creative and idealistic. It's cynical, pessimistic outlook, depicting the erosion of principle and perversion of artistry for financial gain, makes "Merrily" a hard sell, with characters seemingly clearly divided into unsympathetic 'bad guys' and sensitive 'good guys,' but the alluring score, which made the original cast album a cult favorite, carries it through to the later scenes, when the hardened are limned as once starry-eyed and the virtuous revealed to have compromised as well.

The first time we see the three friends together, three scenes into the work, is the last time they will all be together, the occasion of musical partners Frank and Charley's final and very public falling out. Frank is leaving Broadway for Hollywood and Charley, having realized that his soul mate has morphed into a corporate entity, denounces him during their television interview. Steven Alan Black was riveting in Charley's 'mad scene,' "Franklin Shepard, Inc.," unburdening himself and unraveling personally, even as the friendship unraveled with finality. Writer Mary, who, unbeknownst to Frank, loved him in more than a friendly way, and is driven to drink, as she sees him enter into less and less worthy relationships, already denounced him and his new cronies in an earlier scene, at a Bel Air A-list party, all brittle and bitchiness, declaring, caustically, "You are all crap-and [to Frank] you deserve them," a line scorchingly delivered by Nicole LaFountaine, who added to the trio's now-souring rallying cry, "Old Friends," a plangent, rueful "Like It Was." It's hard to make ambitious Frank sympathetic in Act One, but Daniel McDonald did his best, playing the hand he was dealt.

In this act, we also met the women in Frank's life, again in reverse order, the ingénue, Meg (Amanda Ferguson); the glamorous Broadway musical star Gussie Carnegie, played archly and with vocal fire by Broadway singer Gaelan Gilliland; and Beth, who comes into focus as she and Frank are getting their high-profile divorce, with the torch song "Not a Day Goes By," with which Mary Catherine McDonald tugged heartstrings.

In Act Two, we heard three incarnations of Frank and Charley's song, "Good Thing Going"-the razzmatazz version Gilliland sang with flash in their sellout Broadway show, soon to be a sellout movie, "Musical Husbands;" the simple, unspoiled familiar version Black sang with sincerity at Gussie and soon-to-be ex-husband Joe Josephson's (Scott Marshall) fancy party in New York, encored by Black and Daniel McDonald to a now-inattentive crowd, as fickle as the first act California one; and the melody-in-embryo, as the artists, at their most fertile, are creating it. We also saw Joe, later Gussie's lapdog, as the big shot, offering know-nothing music criticism, of the sort once leveled at Sondheim, and Gussie as the unknown; Beth, taking Franklin away from Mary, using a ruse-or not; Charley being complicit in allowing his and Franklin's energies to be diverted from political project "Take a Left" into money-maker "Musical Husbands;" and Frank, with sweet-voiced McDonald finally a sympathetic figure, performing a clever Irish jig tribute to the Kennedys, "Bobby, Jackie & Jack," with Beth and Charley, and optimistically anticipating the future in anthem "Our Time," with Charley and Mary, as they watched Soviet spaceship Sputnik in orbit.

James Duus was K.T., grown into diplomatic television newsman, in 1973, from one of the obnoxious paparazzi, in 1967. The veteran Lichtensteins, Jack and Rita, made cameo appearances, as did seven-and-three-quarter-year-old Jack Wolfman, capturing hearts in his debut as Frank, Jr.

Effectively guiding the company were pianist and conductor C. Colby Sachs and director and designer Glen Wielgus.

At this writing, performances on September 4 and 5 at 6 and 9 p.m. remain. Tickets are priced at $60.