That's not as paradoxical as it sounds, because the emotional trials and tribulations of this melancholy show's four post-menopausal main characters, lightened by Sondheim's mordant wit and peerless craftsmanship, make "Follies" a marvelous contradiction: The most high-concept of musicals, "Follies" has another built-in twist that helps rescue the creaky and uneven but affecting new Reprise!
Production running at the Wadsworth Theatre. Set in a crumbling Broadway theater that's soon to make way for a parking lot, "Follies" tracks the bittersweet reunion of a gaggle of aging showgirls who formerly sang and danced together in the glittering Ziegfeld-style spectaculars that once ruled the Great White Way. Worn faces and weathered voices are the essence of "Follies' " brutally anti-nostalgic point of view.
'Follies' Remains Marvelous Contradiction
And though there's more graying talent here than in a seniors' golf tournament, Father Time has bestowed his blessings and burdens on the cast unevenly, just as he does in "Follies. So while it's easy to marvel at how Carol Lawrence the original Maria in "West Side Story" has retained her willowy elegance through the years, or at Amanda McBroom's va-va-voom playfulness in "Ah, Paris!
What this short-run production lacks in polish it mostly compensates for in pathos. Happily, of the four principal performers, three are keepers. Vikki Carr, a three-time Grammy winner, gets the plum role of Sally Durant, the preternaturally perky ex-hoofer who still pines for dour ex-beau and current Manhattan power broker Ben Stone Bob Gunton.
Sally's husband, Buddy Harry Groener is a boyish good-time Charlie, expert at keeping his darker emotions at bay with rim-shot ripostes.
Supple in voice and spirit, Groener and Carr shed years before our eyes. Gunton has a suave insouciance on numbers like "The Road You Didn't Take"--until his haunted gaze gives away his crippling and deeply moving despair. Less captivating is Patty Duke, who's cast against good judgment if not against type as Ben's long-suffering wife Phyllis.
But Duke's raspy earnestness and old-school grit may finally win you over as they did me , singing and dancing be damned--which is no slight on Kay Cole's snappy choreography. In a smart Brechtian conceit, the four aging leads are trailed throughout the show by youthful versions of their plumper, richer, more overtly neurotic older selves well played by Jean Louisa Kelly, Tia Riebling, Kevin Earley and Austin Miller.
The old couples flirt, fight, reminisce, get sloshed and reunite with their respective mates just in time for Phyllis to utter a doozy of a platitude about how "hope doesn't grow on trees, we have to make our own. Fortunately, such triteness is atypical of "Follies' " life lessons about the delusions we too often mistake for love and success.
First Listen: 'Follies (New Broadway Cast Recording)' | WNIJ and WNIU
It says much for Reprise! As future New York Times critic Frank Rich noted 30 years ago in reviewing the show's pre-Broadway tryout, these over-the-hill chorines and balding stage-door Johnnies are basically attending their own funeral, witnessing the death of a popular art form and a worldview that hailed from a sunnier, less self-conscious America.
Apart from a couple of solemn stretches, director Arthur Allan Seidelman and company manage to keep the evening from turning into a wake. Ray Klausen's set design conveys the correctly elegiac mood, framing the Wadsworth proscenium with a tattered Art Deco curtain and a truncated staircase buttressed by a pair of golden caryatids straight out of an Erte catalog.
She does seem to have husbanded her resources for Sally's most stirring number, "Losing My Mind," which comes across affectingly, if not quite devastatingly. Happily, the album does well by the show's embarrassment of supporting riches. Elaine Paige, the London theater legend who created iconic roles in Evita and Cats, hip-checking her way knowingly through "I'm Still Here? Ron Raines sounds fantastic as Sally's romantic fixation, Ben, his big baritone soaring over Jonathan Tunick's swoony orchestrations in "Too Many Mornings.
As her ice-cold, sophisticated Phyllis finally lays all her cards on the table for Ben, the husband who's first molded her in his image and then grown bored with her polish, the studio performance builds fast from fake-sweet to taut and fierce to strip-the-paint wrathful, without losing the undertone of profound hurt that makes Maxwell so indelible onstage. Partisans will bicker about whether Peters' Sally is a triumph or a missed opportunity; the greedy may complain that an already richly upholstered set didn't go further and include alternate songs added to or dropped from the show over the years.
The analytical might suggest that Follies can only really work on the stage, where personality and atmosphere and the thrill of showmanship and the inescapable ache of the passing moment all speak so eloquently to the show's themes. I think I'm in that last camp — but that said, I'm profoundly glad to have this document of a revival that's a milestone by anybody's measure.
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View the discussion thread. View Slideshow 1 of 3. Where everybody lives to love: In Act 2 of Follies, what's been a relatively dark story explodes into a riot of color in what's known as the Loveland sequence — an homage to the spectacular Broadway follies staged between the World Wars. View Slideshow 2 of 3.
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- First Listen: 'Follies (New Broadway Cast Recording)'.
View Slideshow 3 of 3. Ron Raines and Bernadette Peters sing passionately of a less cynical time, while their younger selves Lora Lee Gayer and Nick Verina hover in the half-light. Audio for this feature is no longer available.
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