What makes “follies” a classic? 7 answers and 1 big problem.

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It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, a gun. What it became was an entirely different kind of mystery: a musical that had prominent pans, alienated much of its audience, and lost most of its investment – but survived.

Not only is “Follies”, which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still around 50 years later, following a series of covers, revisions and gala concerts, it is also now recognized. as the culmination of serious musical “concept”, that genre in which form and function are aligned as closely as possible. The score, by Stephen Sondheim, is a wonder and a minefield of superimposed meanings. Comments And in the original production, by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, even frivolity had to serve a purpose.

Not that there is a lot of frivolity in James Goldman’s screenplay; the gun disappeared but the two couples were still very dysfunctional. Both wives had been showgirls in the Weismann (think Ziegfeld) Follies at the end of its series of annual extravagances in the years between the two world wars. Both had been in love with Ben, a Stage Door Johnny with big ambitions. But Phyllis was smart enough to catch him; they are now rich and miserable sophisticated. Sally – romantic, conventional – had Ben’s flawless boyfriend, Buddy; never for a single moment over the next 30 years was she satisfied with the compromise.

At a Follies reunion at the decrepit Weismann Theater the day before it will be razed to make way for a parking lot, the two couples reunite and quickly disintegrate. As they do, their past selves appear alongside them as living characters. At the same time, former Follies stars relive memories and stumble upon old, magically ventriloquist numbers of Broadway’s past in Sondheim songs.

As the ghosts gather together, the couples’ tangled history is unearthed, bringing them to the point of a group mental breakdown in the form of a 30-minute mini “Madness”. To see them crumble, to dissolve in a fantasy world accompanied by a score of the golden age, is to see American optimism crumble with them.

But its large canvas isn’t the only reason “Follies” remains important. (See seven more reasons, and one caveat, below.) In his seriousness and intelligence, in his fit of style to substance, in his use of a medium to comment on himself, he does has hardly ever been improved. In any case, an ambitious musical theater would never be the same again; we wouldn’t have “Fun Home” or “Hamilton” or “Dear Evan Hansen” without “Follies” hovering behind them, the most beautiful ghost of all.

“Follies” is about two lousy marriages. Digging through their mind games and betrayals, it is more easily reminiscent of the mid-century drama than any other element of the musical canon. (Imagine “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Directed by Busby Berkeley.) But it’s also the lousy marriage of American ideals and American reality, a union of near opposites polished and preserved by the shellac of the nostalgia.

The brilliant concept was to use the two stories to inform each other, letting the Faulknerian past that “didn’t even past” creep into the present. So Sally’s ghost makes love to Ben while hers makes love to him; later, she sings a torchlight song that sounds as if it dates from 1941. Reunion, if they bring one couple together, destroys another. Even the songs we love are dangerous. This paradox is crystallized in “One More Kiss”, mumbled by an old Viennese soprano while her young self casually casts its color. “Never look back,” the lyrics warn. “Follies” is what happens if you do.

The ghosts from Follies’ past who live in the theater had to be both ethereal and imposing at the same time. The casting was done among Las Vegas showgirls who were already six feet tall before their huge headdresses turned them into giants. Even so, a Who Was Who of middle-aged and older women stole the show: Dorothy Collins, 44; Mary McCarty, 47; Yvonne De Carlo, 48 years old; Alexis Smith, 49; Fifi D’Orsay, 66 years old; and Ethel Shutta, 74, among them. Although chosen for the nostalgia sparked by their names, they made survival itself vital and sexy, as the cover of Smith’s Time magazine demonstrated.

All of the performative songs from “Follies” – the ones sung as if they were real numbers from the past – are pastiches, sampling Harold Arlen (“I’m Still Here”), George Gershwin (“Losing My Mind”) , Irving Berlin (“Beautiful Girls”), Sigmund Romberg (“One More Kiss”) and many others. With this catch: in almost all cases, they are better designed and richer than their models. Which makes their salvation in the past a wonderfully complicated and sometimes cruel gesture.

Stella Deems, an old school belter, had a specialty “mirror” number in the Follies. Now at the reunion, she and six alumni from the choir line, including Phyllis and Sally, try to play it, even though the dance (as one of them puts it) “made me breath when I I was 19 ”. Soon you see why, as the choreography, which initially involves simple poses and mirroring gestures, turns into a grueling extravaganza, courtesy of Bennett. But the mindblower comes halfway, when strange bursts of rotating light emerge from the darkness behind the panting middle-aged women. These are the ghosts of their old selves: glamazons in mirror encrusted costumes performing the act relentlessly and perfectly.

As the real and remembered choruses merge into a thrilling finale, the idea of ​​mirroring has taken on greater significance. “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!” Stella sings of wonder and horror to the person she sees in her mirror. “This woman is me!”

De Carlo – a movie star of the 1940s and 1950s but Lily Munster for everyone afterwards – had the biggest name in the cast but one of the smaller roles. She needed a showstopper; the one Sondheim originally wrote didn’t work. During the tests in Boston, he replaced it with “I’m Still Here”, a number of five minutes which lists with a tangy good humor a life of showbiz (based on that of Joan Crawford) in which you “make a career. from career to career ”. It couldn’t have been staged more simply: De Carlo simply stopped at the bottom of the stage and let it rip. Yet it was (and remains, in many interpretations since) a knockout blow, highlighting the fact that long-term professional survival, and perhaps emotional survival as well, is often about failure. .

At $ 800,000, “Follies” was a very expensive show at the time, but you saw where the money was going. Boris Aronson’s ensemble, which exploded in lace and frills for the final sequence, was technically complex; Florence Klotz’s costumes are some of the most lavish seen on a Broadway stage since Ziegfeld himself. And with all the major roles dubbed by “ghosts”, the cast was huge: 47 performers, not counting the liners and standbys.

“Almost anything that could go over budget for a Broadway musical,” says Ted Chapin, now president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization but then Prince’s apprentice – and author of “Everything Was Possible,” a memoir by that. experience. “If it were produced today, I imagine it would connect to almost $ 30 million.” Alas, it’s an amount no one would spend on such a risky show, which means we’ll never see its like again.

In 1971, graphic designer David Edward Byrd was best known for his rock posters, including one for the original Woodstock and one for Jimi Hendrix. But he had also started designing for theatrical productions, and when an “aesthetic argument” led Prince to abandon one of his Art Deco-inspired sketches, Byrd came up with the now famous face of “Follies”: an impassive beauty with flowing Technicolor hair and a branched crack from chin to eyebrow. (The face was based on Marlene Dietrich’s, in a photo from “Shanghai Express.”) For Byrd, it represented the end of an era, but it also conveyed, with powerful concision, the crackle of an American fantasy. endless tranquility. And, no coincidence, a Broadway show sounds as cool as Woodstock.

“Follies” is awesome and “Follies” is a mess. It upsets me perhaps more than any other musical, but I have never been fully intellectually satisfied with it. Look under the unparalleled packaging – the score, the costumes, the casting, the directing – and you’ll find plenty that don’t match. As Frank Rich noted in his 1971 Harvard Crimson review, it is “a musical about the death of the musical” – a wonderful paradox that undermines the experience. If musicals are dead … is that too?

Sometimes – even when Carlotta sings “I’m Still Here” – the touted concept seems a bit opaque. (If this is his own life, how could that be his Follies number too?) And don’t look too closely at the main characters, either; self-conscious dialogue mouthpieces, they are only fully credible when they sing. For this Goldman is generally blamed – but if so, he should also be credited with providing the backbone of everyone else’s historic achievement. It may be the death of musicals, but “Follies” led the way in bringing them back to life.

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