On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide (17 page)

And the first guest has arrived: Sally, the one with the most to gain, or lose, this night. Either she will claim her knight and trade now for then, or he will reject her, trapping her in her wretched now. Phyllis, by contrast, has the ability to adapt, to fashion a now that suits her. But Sally is forever the little bundle of wounded feelings that she was at twenty, and that’s her salient quality.

As Sally nervously chatted with a party official, one of the six dancing girls broke out of line and came up to look at Sally. It was
then
staring at
now
: Sally’s ghost, marveling at what happens when time makes the choices. You lose the Vietnam War. You lose Jerome Kern and Cole Porter. You lose your way.

Follies
ran giddy with ghosts. Some of the pastiche performing spots featured then and now actors, as when an operetta waltz maven was followed by her younger self, in so much better voice; or in that Mirror Number, choreographed for an intricate interlacing of old and young. Of course, the musical as a form was ontologically centered on the young, and
Follies
is secretly, deceptively, filled with youth. It is
Young
Ben who really starts the story when he makes his life’s choice, setting off on the Smart Career with the Correct Partner. Will it be Sally? Typical man, he loved what she was: sweet and pretty. Typical woman, she loved what he represented: strength and authority. Halfway through the show, the older Ben sings the love song “Too Many Mornings” to her—both of her, Sally and her ghost. Because it’s really the Young Sally that he wants, even now. The older Sally is as ruined as he is. Yet she’s the only Sally there “is.”

The quandaries of
Follies
. It’s a very difficult show for some, because, despite the high-powered show biz that guides it, it is indeed depressing. Further, James Goldman’s book is completely unlike all other books, not only concise but gnomic and allusive. It often suggests that characters are somehow or other voicing unspoken thoughts. Or they utter extremely important statements in passing.

Thus, Ben and Sally are chatting about the fascinating world of the bigwigs Ben hobnobs with. “Your life must be so glamorous,” she tells him. Yes, it looks that way from a distance. And now he’s going to explain to her, in “The Road You Didn’t Take,” about free will. Cut into the music are two flashback vignettes pivoting around Young Buddy lending Young Ben his jalopy for a date with Phyllis. A few lines fix the two boys for us: Buddy takes life as it comes (“It’s only money”), while Ben needs to arrange it (“Some day I’m going to have the biggest goddamn limousine”).

But a satisfying arrangement is elusive, so be careful what you wish for. Just before launching “The Road You Didn’t Take,” Ben observes, “It’s knowing what you want, that’s the secret”—and this might be the script’s essential line. However, it typifies Goldman’s wily writing that these words slither past us as a song cue, so we don’t realize how telling they are. And Sally isn’t listening: she’s drinking him in, her daddy and redeemer. In fact, knowing what you want—even getting it—isn’t enough. Time takes it all away, so nothing’s enough. And that’s
Follies
.

Music emphasizes everything, so
Follies
’ score adds to
Follies
’ disenchantment. There are plenty of key numbers, built around
Follies
’ various themes, but “Waiting For the Girls Upstairs” stands out for its odd conflation of youth and age, joy and regret—and those contrary feelings inhere in the music as well as the words. The four young people are off on a night on the town while their older selves look back with inexpressible sadness. It was wonderful, but it was nothing: like being homesick when you were raised in an orphanage. The kids thought they lived in Loveland, but Loveland is a Ziegfeldian fantasy, pure show biz. There is no Loveland.

But why is American life so saturated with this fantasy? Boy Meets (or Re-meets) Girl creates our art, from
The Great Gatsby
to
Porgy and Bess
, from
Casablanca
to
Cabaret
. “Waiting For the Girls Upstairs” starts and ends with a melody associated with the four young people, a jumpy five-note pattern repeated four times, the musical equivalent of flickering light. Ghost music. “Hey, up there,” Young Buddy calls out, to the girls in their dressing room. It’s Boy ready to Get Girl.

Or, later, Phyllis tears into Ben with “Could I Leave You?,” the enraged waltz of a would-be gay divorcée. The music bears the same breathless calm that we hear in the lyrics, that of a wife trying to fight with a husband who apparently doesn’t care any more. Could she leave him? Will she? She answers her own question with a deeply helpless “Guess!”—because she won’t. Girl got Boy, and she’s keeping him.

Follies
is an ambivalent work, though Americans like finality in their musicals. They don’t ask it of
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
or
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, but, as I’ve said, the musical is still struggling to escape from its antique mandate to divert with essentially carefree art—the very sort of thing that
Follies
reveals to be a sham. Yes, Loveland is a nice place to visit. But they don’t let you live there. Or they do but your stay leads to the blues, the torch song, the split personality, the fraud: the four
Follies
numbers that close the score in defeat.

Many of the other
Follies
numbers are guiltless evocations of the great old defunct entertainment world that
Follies
explodes. “I’m Still Here,” an autobiography (which Sondheim says he modeled on the life of Joan Crawford) has become an unofficial anthem to go with “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “That’s Entertainment.” Another
Follies
solo, “Broadway Baby,” crackles with ambition, and “Who’s That Woman?,” for all its misgivings about the hedonistic lifestyle, is exuberant, reveling in our right to mess up our lives with wicked fun.

Besides
Follies
itself, there is as well the original Broadway staging, which has become a thing-in-itself, perhaps the most famous Original Production in the musical’s history. Ask a younger musical buff what title he or she would like to go back in time to see and, believe me, it won’t be
Show Boat
or
Guys and Dolls
. It’s this one. One of the most costly mountings in Broadway history at something like $750,000,
Follies
rehearsed for two weeks longer than the usual four, to work out the intricate deployment of partygoers and ghosts and the elaborate musical numbers. Designers Boris Aronson (for the sets) and Florence Klotz (for costumes) toyed intriguingly with the show’s driveline, for, until Loveland took over in the “dream”
Follies
, the stage looked as barren as you’d expect of a building about to be torn down. Yet the ghosts kept wandering through the action in their gala outfits, contextual signifiers of the opulence of show biz.
Follies
was a rare case of a musical “wearing” its themes; it really looked like a comparison of now and then.

The original four leads were so well cast that
Follies
buffs declare them hors concours, though many distinguished performers have graced the roles in revivals and concerts: Lee Remick and Barbara Cook with the New York Philharmonic; Donna McKechnie, Ron Moody (creator of Fagin in
Oliver!
), Julia McKenzie, and Denis Quilley for BBC radio. McKechnie switched from Phyllis to Sally at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, then went on to the “I’m Still Here” character (rather like an opera soprano tackling Sophie, then Octavian, then the Marschallin in
Der Rosenkavalier
) in a Reprise! concert, in Los Angeles. The party-guest minor roles, originally played by such professional has-beens as Ethel Shutta (pronounced Shut-
tay
), a singer and dancer who actually worked for Ziegfeld; Fifi D’Orsay; and Mary McCarty, who had played leads on Broadway around 1950 and who later created the amiably corrupt prison Matron in
Chicago
, have become star cameos. At times, these supplementary functionaries out-headline the leads: Dolores Gray, Ann Miller, or Polly Bergen for “I’m Still Here”; Elaine Stritch; Grover Dale and Carol Lawrence as Vincent and Vanessa, who lead the “Bolero d’Amour,” a recreation of the ballroom specialty and composed by not Sondheim but John Berkman; Edie Adams (as, improbably, the old operetta star; one would have anticipated her “I’m Still Here,” though she was strongly considered for Cunegonde in the original production of
Candide
, Leonard Bernstein’s “comic operetta”); Elizabeth Seal; and eerie-Incan-goddess-with-four-octave-range Yma Sumac.

Still, when speaking of
Follies
performers, one has to start with the movie-star radiance of Alexis Smith’s Phyllis; the startlingly down-to-earth, and so friendly, and so bitter Gene Nelson as Buddy; Dorothy Collins’ pert little mouse of a Sally; and John McMartin’s Ben, McMartin having been all but unknown at the time and thus the surprise of the quartet, so serene at first but later so anguished, the essential figure in this show-biz version of the Fall of Man.

Aren’t these characters well named? They’re almost comparable to the Lady Wishfort (in
The Way of the World
) and Snake (in
The School for Scandal
) of old English comedy, for Ben Stone is hard (at least on the surface), a ruthless achiever in the world of ruthless achievers—the Nixons and Kennedys. Buddy Plummer, his opposite, is everybody’s pal and a “plumber,” a low man in the order of things. Phyllis, a name common in the 1940s to writers and actresses, is glamorous—or she will be, once she learns the art of giving dinner parties that will be the talk of those in the halls of power. And Sally is simple, nothing but happy and cute. And note that when she first spots Ben at the reunion party, she calls herself by her maiden name, Sally Durant. She discards the “Plummer” as she intends to discard Buddy. It’s knowing what you want, that’s the secret.

Came the premiere, and
Follies
’ reviews were mixed, for it’s not an easy show to take in cold; those layers of meaning are hard to absorb amid the pageantry, and, as I’ve said, Goldman’s book is deliberately downsized from the explanatory texts most musicals work within. Rodgers and Hammerstein deconstructed the staging of musicals in
Allegro
, but its book is lengthy and character motivations are underlined.
Follies
is the opposite, with a complex staging plot but a deconstructed libretto.

Nevertheless,
Follies
was a New York town topic—even a national one, as Alexis Smith got the cover of both
Time
and
Newsweek
in the smashing red number she wore for her
Follies
spot, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie”: the young, lively Phyllis versus the older, elegant Phyllis, with all the fun kicked out of her. Musicals didn’t get a lot of magazine covers by 1971, so there was an air of smash hit to
Follies
’ talkabout. And, yes, “Everyone thought it was a success,” Hal Prince said in
Six By Sondheim
, “until it closed one day. And then they suddenly realized, ‘My God, it never was a success.’ ” The show lost most of its investment, but it did run 522 performances and won most of the important Tony Awards, losing Best Musical, amazingly, to the near-amateurish
Two Gentlemen of Verona
.

Michael Bennett, among many others, blamed
Follies
’ mixed reception on its secretive, evasive book, especially its downbeat ending. But then, Bennett didn’t like intellectual material in musicals. To him, song and dance were visceral pleasures, even within a sad narrative. The musical by definition required zip and dazzle, especially at the evening’s end. All three of the shows Bennett had complete control of at the height of his power,
A Chorus Line
(1975),
Ballroom
(1978), and
Dreamgirls
(1981), conclude their storytelling in something less than euphoria. (Respectively: some are Chosen and some Denied; the Girl gets the Boy only on the back street; and the act breaks up.) Still, even if he had to shunt it into the curtain call, with his cast in evening clothes, Bennett made sure to top off the entertainment on a high note.

This failure to understand why James Goldman wrote an above all ambiguous libretto has led to constant revision of the script and even the music. In 1987, Cameron Mackintosh “tried to fix the second act of
Follies
” (to redeploy his own comment), giving London a tamed version. Sondheim and Goldman prepared this revisal themselves, so it presumably represented how they felt the show should go, though the uncomfortably blatant dialogue made the book seem like a schoolboy sitting in the corner under a dunce cap. Still, the show played very well and ran for a year and a half in a big house, the Shaftesbury Theatre. Further, it boasted a great cast, with Diana Rigg and Daniel Massey as the Stones and David Healy and Julia McKenzie as the Plummers, with Dolores Gray (later replaced by Eartha Kitt) for “I’m Still Here.”

Nevertheless, book modifications cannot disguise the essentially dejected nature of
Follies
, its After the Fall. The scenery for the closing Follies sequence of Mackintosh’s production was more elaborate than in the original, created by Maria Björnson (who had as well designed Mackintosh’s stupendous
Phantom of the Opera
set constructions), but these are optics, not content. Nor did the new songs alter anything, though the new “Loveland” was, strange to say, even more beautiful than the one used in New York. There was one miscalculation, in a rare—perhaps the only—Sondheim song that lacks melody, “[How about a] Country House,” for Ben and Phyllis. It seems designed to give their cold war of a marriage a touch of warmth, but it doesn’t sound like the rest of the score. Worse, it replaced Ben’s “The Road You Didn’t Take.” This is like omitting “I Could Have Danced All Night” from
My Fair Lady
: a number that instantly connects the public to what is happening under the show’s surface. Eliza is falling in love with Higgins; Ben is rationalizing his opportunism. Or: Ben is wondering if he should have married Sally after all (because she wouldn’t see through him the way that terrifying Phyllis does). Or: Ben was never going to be happy because some people are too smart to be content.