The Once and Future Follies

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

--Peter De Vries

THE newest hot ticket on Broadway these days--$55 a pair from scalpers --is an admission to a haunted house. Elegiac strains of the '20s, '30s and '40s hover in the wings. Ectoplasmic chorines, all beads and feather boas, wander across the stage like Ziegfeld girls come back to life. Characters are at once 19 and 49. Time bounces off the walls, like sound and light brilliantly altered and distorted.

The show at the Winter Garden Theater* is called Follies, a title self-consciously suggesting irony and double meanings. At its worst moments, Follies is mannered and pretentious, overreaching for Significance. At its best moments--and there are many--it is the most imaginative and original new musical that Broadway has seen in years.

At first look Follies would seem to be part of the nostalgia boom, which has America glancing myopically backward at its own past (see TIME ESSAY, page 77) and has turned the Manhattan stage into a revival revival. The trend toward old goldies began on Broadway in May 1969 with a production of the Hecht-MacArthur war horse about a journalism that never was: The Front Page, starring Robert Ryan. The play whetted the theater audience's appetite for aging stars and graying gags. After it galloped Three Men on a Horse, Our Town with Henry Fonda, Noel Coward's Private Lives, the adventures of the Marx brothers in Minnie's Boys, Helen Hayes and James Stewart in Harvey. Some musical comedies, like 1968's Dames at Sea, were a pastiche of the past, filling off-Broadway with tinkling resonances of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Some took old movies, tricked them out with old stars and called themselves new--like Applause, which is a face-lifting of All About Eve, plus orchestra and Lauren Bacall.

A Sense of Freshness

No, No, Nanette, of course, outnos-talgiaed them all. The hell with getting someone like Ruby Keeler and Patsy Kelly; they went out and got Keeler and Kelly, plus good old Busby Berkeley to go through his bag of geriatric routines. The show is a collage of ricky-ticky-tacky, but it shines because of the adroit staging of Burt Shevelove and the even more adroit hoofing of Helen Gallagher and Bobby Van.

The genuine surprise in the nostalgia nonsense is not the durability of the vehicles or the performers, but the sense of freshness emerging from all this wallowing in memory. That, precisely, is the delight of Follies. Superficially, its cast may appear to be just another line-up of Late Show dropouts; and its theme could have been one more excuse to laugh or cry at the kind of song and dance that dazzled a less sophisticated generation. But in its staging, and above all in its music and lyrics, Follies is astonishingly futuristic--more modern, really, than that calculated rock-beat ode to the counterculture, Hair.

Full of Ghosts

Follies is almost sans plot. Just before his old Broadway theater is to be torn down, Impresario Dmitri Weismann (read Flo Ziegfeld) orders a first and last reunion of his celebrated personnel. All the familiar types attend: Phyllis, the leggy brunette (Alexis Smith) who married well; Sally, the third-from-the-left blonde (Dorothy Collins) who didn't. The bolero-dancing couple (Victor Griffin and Jayne Turner) who bought a Fred Astaire franchise ("Styles change; you never can tell"), the wisecracking queen bee (Yvonne De Carlo) with her hive of young drones; the feathery Continental (Justine Johnston) who remembers Franz Lehar dedicating a waltz to her (" 'Liebchen, it's for you.' Or was it Oskar Straus? Facts never interest me. What matters is the song").

Unlikely ingredients for forward-looking theater. But around these stereo-and monotypes the past swirls and. flickers, a tincture of antique dreams and topical allusions. Follies is a play full of ghosts. The young hopefuls whom Weismann nurtured scatter their lines across the stage and run unseen by their older living images--a double exposure in three dimensions. The principals are, literally, beside themselves with grief. For, as it happens, the Weismann theater is not the only institution awaiting the wrecking ball. The other is marriage. Sally and her glib, skirt-chasing husband Buddy (Gene Nelson) have become pathetic caricatures of the Andy Hardy couple they once were--naivete swallowed by facts. Phyllis and her acrid WASP's-nest of a husband Ben (John McMartin) are glamour gone dry, a wasteland with wedding rings.

If youth knew, if age could: the theme resounds in the crossfire between past and present until, in a series of an-tinostalgic metaphors, each of the stars takes off the public mask and appears in his own Folly. It is a vaudevilification of their benighted circumstances, in which the truth shines like a spotlight. For the first half of the evening, the stage has been shrouded in melancholy: dim lighting, failed hope, blunted ambition. But in the intensely personal, Ziegfeld-like "Loveland" sequence, lights and color suddenly challenge the eye, an umber paintbox opened in the sun. This visual dazzle is reminiscent of Vincente Minnelli's movie musicals --notably the focal ballet in An American in Paris. Onstage, it has never been mounted with such unfailing skill.

An Old Tradition

Every musical aims for at least one showstopper. Follies can count on two. The first is Who's That Woman? Seven of the aging Follies girls, led by that infallible comedienne Mary Mc-Carty, re-enact an old routine, ostensibly to mirrors. From the indistinct background, their youthful selves emerge --backs to the audience, as if a reflection: new vamps for old. The symmetry of the ballet--choreographed by Follies Co-Director Michael Bennett--is never violated for a quarter-note. When an old girl turns, her "reflection" makes the selfsame move in reverse, a feat whose parallel can only be found in the trickery that cinema allows. The second crescendo is Alexis Smith's Story of Lucy and Jessie, a flame-red, high-kicking number in the old top-hat-and-tails tradition, an echo of a Cole Porter patter song:

Lucy is juicy

But terribly drab.

Jessie is dressy

But cold as a slab.

Lucy wants to be dressy,

Jessie wants to be juicy.

Lucy wants to be Jessie,

And Jessie Lucy. You see

Jessie is racy

But hard as a rock.

Lucy is lacy

But dull as a smock.

Jessie wants to be lacy,

Lucy wants to be Jessie.

That's the sorrowful precis,

It's very messy.

Critics and audiences alike have responded with enthusiasm to Follies' stylistic inventiveness. There is less unanimity of feeling about the theme. Some --including TIME'S T.E. Kalem--found in it Proustian resonances. Some contend that James Goldman, whose screenplay for The Lion in Winter won a 1968 Oscar, has supplied less of a book than a book jacket. For Phyllis, he wrote some pseudo-sophisticated, Manhattanite monologues that are better read than said.

Such speeches are mercifully few --remnants, perhaps, of the play that never was. Follies took shape more than five years ago when nostalgia was a euphemism for camp. In those days it was called The Girls Upstairs, a backstage murder mystery set in melody. Producer David Merrick (Hello, Dolly!) held the first option; he loved the score, loathed the book. The project was jettisoned. One producer later, it ended in the court of Hal Prince, who agreed to produce and direct.

At 43, bearded like the pard, Prince is one of the theater's most formidable figures. At 26 he co-produced his first show, Pajama Game. Four years later he was enough of a Broadway inside joke to be lampooned as the hyperthyroid boy-wonder impresario of Say, Darling. The producer of such hits as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof, and producer-director of Cabaret, Company and Follies, he is not treated like a figure of fun any more.

With unnecessary modesty, Prince describes his role in the shaping of Follies as "a moderator, a mediator, someone to take the blame." Not quite so. If writers had the final play on words, it was Prince who enjoyed the ultimate word on plays. He discovered what came to be the show's essential conception in Eliot Elisofon's picture of Gloria Swanson amid the ruins of Manhattan's Roxy Theater, a barococo movie palace that was demolished in 1960. "That sparked the whole notion of rubble--how it relates to the past and present." Prince set Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with him on Forum and Company, to work emulating typical mid-'20s and '30s show tunes for the "Loveland" sequence, and devised the flowing, cinematic style of the play. He also gave Costume Designer Florence Klotz one great illumination: Follies was to be a "Fellini musical."

Writer Goldman turned out no less than 13 drafts for his new producer. The story began to take on dimension and life when Prince suggested that the title be changed. "Before, the play was full of action," Prince recalls. "The new script was as close to plotless as you can get." So plotless, in fact, that roles were inserted when socko auditions were delivered by Actresses Ethel Shutta and Fifi d'Orsay--who premiered in 1925 with Gallagher and Shean in the Greenwich Village Follies. They were found subjects as, in a way, was Yvonne De Carlo, who seemed wrong for the role of Phyllis but fit perfectly the rebuilt part of Carlotta, the mantrap. Prince also was the man who finally decided that Alexis Smith as Phyllis would lend the show a permanent radiance that does not acknowledge the movement of the clock.

At that point Prince had acquired the show's two greatest assets, disparate but complementary: Smith and Sondheim, the star of another era and the lyricist of today; the enduring actress and the volatile writer; the svelte woman and the stylish wordman.

Alexis Smith is the living, dancing refutation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's axiom that there are no second acts in American lives. At 49 she is in the best second act of her life. Her blue-green eyes catch the light and the audience's rapt attention; her body seems beyond the aspiration of girls half her age. She is simultaneously a source of awe, envy and consolation. Middle-aged men see her as carnality enshrined: the girl who stayed as young in life as in memory. Their wives think, if she can do it, I can do it. Just a few weeks of dieting and a little exercise . . .

And intelligence. And unbeatable, unbeatable cool. And a celluloid background that started unreeling 30 years ago. A graduate of the starlet's academy, Hollywood High, she won her first lead in the war film Dive Bomber, but failed to land either Co-Star Errol Flynn or Fred MacMurray; both loved flying more. Late Show buffs can catch her around, but not quite in, movie musicals. She was Mrs. Cole Porter in Night and Day and George Gershwin's gal in Rhapsody in Blue. Customarily, though, she was Warner Brothers' snow queen, a frosty beauty about as seducible as the Statue of Liberty.

Made for the Role

In 1944 Alexis married Craig Stevens; as her career faded at the box office, his bloomed in the Nielsens. Craig's urbane TV detective series, Peter Gunn, lasted three years, and the show is still rerunning; neither of them needs to work. Still, Alexis was never successfully cast as Mrs. Front Porch. She dabbled in summer stock, took lessons in French, Italian, dancing, yoga, singing, speed reading. "Once I studied to get a realtor's license," she recalls. "If things didn't go well, I thought I could sell real estate." With legs like that? No way. Last year she began taking singing and dancing lessons in Hollywood. She needed them. The first time she auditioned for Follies, she was less than impressive. After her instruction, she auditioned again. Said Prince: "She's made for the role."

Her performance proved a triumph, demolishing even those reviewers who held the show at arm's length. Walter Kerr in the Times boomed: "Yes, Yes, Alexis! No, No, Follies" Even Curmudgeon John Simon fell for the star at the expense of an early 19th century English clergyman: "Alexis, and not Sydney," he burbled in New York magazine, "is the Smith of Smiths." Says she with the obligatory amount of modesty: "The acclaim is not that important. Listen, how many people's opinions do you really respect? Four or five? More than that is just pleasantry." But it is something more: the ovations of total strangers who agree that Alexis is proof of the pop poster's bottom line, TODAY is THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

As with Alexis, the musical has given new life to a handful of other ex-luminaries:

DOROTHY COLLINS. Remember her? The singing companion of Snooky Lanson on television's Your Hit Parade. The put-on artist of Candid Camera! A local talent contest winner from Windsor, Ont., she was discovered by her first husband, Bandleader Raymond Scott, 17 years her senior. Her second, Tony Award Singer Ron Holgate (1776), is ten years her junior (she is 44). She has two children by her first marriage, one by her second. All three live with the Holgates in a pleasant Dutch colonial house in New Jersey. Dorothy's homebody role in Follies, like Alexis Smith's elegant one, seems perilously close to typecasting. She is delighted to be in a smash, she says, but she would be just as happy to stay at home as the maturing Girl Next Door. "I like to clean house. I know. Crazy Sally, crazy Dorothy. But help is such a problem these days."

YVONNE DE CARLO. She played Lola Montez, Calamity Jane, Salome and Moses' wife. She was the Flame of the Islands, the Buccaneer's Girl, the River Lady, the Scarlet Angel and the Captain's Paradise. Best cleavage forward, Yvonne De Carlo (real name: Peggy Middleton, of Vancouver, B.C.) steamed her way through Hollywood, sometimes seriously but often as conscious self-parody. The wife of Hollywood Stunt Man Bob Morgan and mother of two boys, De Carlo, 48, is an exemplar of the John Wayne philosophy: go west and turn right. "The whole company kids me," she says. "They call me the fascist rightwinger of the cast. One day Hal Prince and Alexis and I were talking about how expensive things could be. I said I knew what they meant because I was buying a box of Luger bullets in Virginia City, and I was amazed at how expensive they were. There was this shocked silence. I love to shoot, a lot of people do; so what? It's just target practice. I would never shoot an animal. Only targets --or people if they were attacking my house."

ETHEL SHUTTA. At 74 she could collect social security. Instead Ethel Shutta (pronounced Shuh-tay) gives her all as the old firecracker who makes Broadway Baby an incendiary number. "I'm the only woman in the cast who remembers Ziegfeld," she says. "In 1925 I was in the Follies as the comedienne." Her song: I'm in Love with Eddie Cantor. When her two sons were attending school at Horace Mann in The Bronx,

Harold Prince was their schoolmate. Retired from Broadway for eight years, she was persuaded to stop playing grandmother and start playing Follies' superannuated swinger. "I don't think Ziegfeld had as many beautiful girls as we have in Prince's show," she says. "Of course, in Ziegfeld's time the girls were rounder. The men then liked a little more hip and a little more breast --thin at the waist, though."

With the kind of cast whose savvy spans a half-century of show business, Prince could do enough of what David Merrick calls "flimflam and legerdemain to cover an awful and gloomy book about nothing at all." Fortunately, the Prince and his Follies have that other talent: Stephen Sondheim. For the musical, he has written some of the glossiest, wittiest lyrics in Broadway history. His melodies gracefully genuflect to Kern and Gershwin, Berlin and Arlen. His words bow to no one. With Follies he has established himself, beyond doubt, as the theater's supreme lyricist.

An American Noel Coward

At 41, Sondheim is a spent youth. The son of a wealthy New York dress manufacturer, he literally learned his first lessons in the craft of songwriting at the feet of an old family friend, Oscar Hammerstein II. Stephen was then eleven; Oscar thought his first pubescent musical "terrible--although not without talent." Sondheim proved to be a good learner. He has written the lyrics (and often the music as well) for seven shows, five of which were hits. Only his 1966 musical, Anyone Can Whistle, a precious fable about a smalltown miracle, and 1965's Do I Hear a Waltz? (with music by Richard Rodgers) failed to pay box-office dividends. The rest of the time has been a steady climb, built on internal verse, infernal verse, trip-hammer rhyme schemes and time schemes, sublime schemes, which began their ascent at about the time South Pacific dominated Broadway.

After graduating magna cum laude from Williams (where he majored in music) and studying with Avant-Garde Composer Milton Babbitt, Stephen, at the age of 25, decided that Broadway was ready for him. Broadway decided otherwise. Through no fault of the author, his first effort (Saturday Night) expired along with its producer. For a time, Stephen knocked out scripts for the television sitcom Topper and honed his skills as an amateur gamesman. Sondheim is one of the world's fastest cutthroat anagram players, and the walls of his Manhattan town house are covered with antique game boards. (Between shows, he used to concoct the tantalizing puzzles on the back pages of New York magazine.) Thanks to the theatrical interests of his mother, an interior decorator known to friends as "Foxy," Stephen easily became a social caterpillar on the Manhattan show-biz party circuit. At one affair he met Playwright Arthur Laurents, who was reworking Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. Lenny Bernstein was doing the music, said Laurents. The lyricist? There was none at present, but . . .

Comedic Commentary

At 27, Sondheim became co-author of West Side Story and an established Broadway lyricist. "Steve always wanted to be an American Noel Coward," Foxy recalls fondly. The lyrics for Sondheim's next show, Gypsy, with music by Jule Styne, revealed a Lorenz Hartfulness. He rhymed Mazeppa and schlepper, and the progression "he goes, she goes, egos, amigos" could have come from the master himself. Despite his growing reputation as a lyricist, Sondheim yearned to be recognized as a composer, although his credentials as a musician were skimpy. In 1962, though, he wrote the music as well as the words for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which Prince was persuaded to produce. Composer Sondheim has often been accused of writing dissonances that deliberately elude the listener's ear. But for that show he created a host of thumpingly singable tunes to match the simple-minded hilarity. Everybody Ought to Have a Maid, Comedy Tonight and Lovely could have been hummed by a stone. With Forum, Sondheim finally proved that he, like Noel Coward, could indeed go it alone.

In last year's musical hit Company, Composer Sondheim seemed cloned from Lyricist Sondheim. Indeed, the score packed so many syllables and notes into each bar that it gave the sensation of a double-crostic for the ear. As Pianist Artur Rubinstein observed: "A most brilliant score. I couldn't hear all the words, but then I don't hear all the words at the opera, either."

Rubinstein's observation has been echoed by many audiences, who find that the record of the score yields new rewards at each exposure. Far more than George Furth's book, Sondheim's lyrics express the hip, urbane tone of a play about an uncommitted bachelor who watches the games married people play. The songs are an ambush of witty skepticisms:

[It's the] concerts you enjoy together,

Neighbors you annoy together,

Children you destroy together,

That keep marriage intact.

and:

Good things get better,

Bad get worse.

Wait--I think I meant that in reverse.

As with Follies, Company audiences (and critics) were divided into those who felt it was a sociological musical, a comedic commentary on urban ills, and those who believed it only signified that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw parties. "It's the most pro-marriage show in the world," protests Sondheim, who has never been married himself. "It says, very clearly, that to be emotionally committed to somebody is very difficult, but to be alone is impossible."

Both Sondheim and Prince--and the women who star in Follies--vehemently deny that their musical has anything to do with Broadway's yearning to remember things past. Nonetheless, the success of Follies and Nanette has quickened the pulse of every Broadway grave robber who has read the grosses and misinterpreted them. Now on their way are musicals based on such memory-soaked epics as Come Back, Little Sheba, National Velvet, The Great Gatsby and Some Like It Hot--plus revivals of New Faces of 1952 and the 1944 hit On the Town.

Squeal of Approval

To many people, the theater's backward look is not only normal but necessary, at a time when Broadway is constantly worried about its fifth season --slack. Says Veteran Director George Abbott, who worked with Sondheim on Forum: "It's so difficult to get to the Broadway theater, plus there is the cost of eating dinner out and the fear of being mugged. People have to believe they're going to see something priceless." What better show, then, than one already granted a squeal of approval? What happier tense than the past perfect? Furthermore, notes Nanette's Ruby Keeler, "people have seen everything. We almost have to go back the other way. Audiences want to come to the theater for entertainment."

True enough. But in fact there is no going back; to gaze at the rearview mirror guarantees a crash. The best of Follies indicates that the art of the theater, like all art, must renew itself by destroying tradition or by using it in fresh ways. Follies amply demonstrates that the musical--America's single greatest contribution to the history of drama--need not become the exclusive province of the antique dealer or the rock group. In style and substance it can be as flexible as a film, as immediate as a street scene. Lyrics need not be laundry lists; melody need not be cacophony or syrup. Sondheim's experiments with sonority may sound tentative to the trained ear, but they are bold charts for himself--and for future composers as well. And his words demonstrate that the great tradition of Broadway songwriting, from Berlin through Porter and Hammerstein, is still alive.

Audiences interested only in nostalgia should not see Follies now. Let them wait until it is revived in, say, the mid-1980s. Then this imperfect but glittering production will be an item of genuine nostalgia--the show that turned the American musical theater around and pointed it forward.

-Now in its 60th year, the theater was once the home of the original Ziegfeld Follies.

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