Seascape with Frieze of Girls

By T.E. Kalem

The frontier of the American musical theater is wherever Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim are. Last season, the producer-director and composer-lyricist collaborated on Company, which focused a diamond-cutting laser beam on marriage, Manhattan-style. With Follies, Prince and Sondheim, together with Choreographer and Co-Director Michael Bennett, have audaciously staked out some unknown territory. They have put together the first Proustian musical--an act of dramatic creation even more daring than making a Proustian film (see CINEMA).

Compacted of memory, dreams and desire, the illusions and disillusions of love, the shifting structure of the self, Follies fuses all into one of the great haunting themes of the Western mind: Time. Follies is a triple-edged title. It means the Ziegfeld Follies, the follies of people in love, and the follies one commits by not fully knowing who one is or what one wants.

Valiance & Tenacity. Like Proust's madeleine, the tea cake that summoned up for the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past his childhood world of Combray, Follies has its touchstone of memory. The interiorized past is brought to life by an outward object, one of those old, ornate Broadway theaters. Designer Boris Aaronson has made of it a poignantly dilapidated shell where the spectral applause of a thousand opening nights hangs palpably in the air. The showplace is in the demolition phase, as are the people who enter it: chorus girls back for "a first and last reunion."

Among the guests at the party are Ben Stone (John McMartin), lawyer, author and diplomatic bigwig, who married Phyllis (Alexis Smith), an ex-Follies girl; and Buddy Plummer (Gene Nelson), an oil-rigging salesman, who married Sally (Dorothy Collins), also an ex-Follies girl. We swiftly learn that both marriages are empty failures. Younger versions of the foursome sing, dance and mime their yesteryear courtship rituals. Sally has always worshipped Ben, but we see him making a drunken pass at another old flame (Yvonne de Carlo). Buddy rather brutally tells Sally that he has a girl in Dallas who is everything to him that Sally is not. Phyllis is essentially the married widow of the philandering Ben.

While these sour truths seep in, the old Follies girls (De Carlo, Fifi d'Orsay, Mary McCarty) do their thing. Ethel Shutta siphons pure delight out of a number called Broadway Baby and reminds us, as do the others, of how much more verve, authority and presence the older stage professionals possessed than do many of their flaccid present-day counterparts. A campy show might have mocked the old stars, but Follies shows an un-American respect for age by honoring their skill, valiance and tenacity.

Top Hat, Hot Pants. The replica of a Follies show highlights the evening. The re-creation is titled Loveland, and there is a shivery moment as the tall, lovely girls descend the traditional staircase. Beauty dapples the stage like a cascade of roses. Each of the four principals does a song or dance number denoting his or her folly: Buddy's is self-hatred; Sally's, being in love with love; Phyllis', a blurred identity; Ben's, self-proving quests, no satisfying goals.

Rarely have such searching, unsentimental questions and answers been put to a Broadway audience with such elegance and expertise. Sally's number Losing My Mind is the torch-singing peak of the show, but Sondheim's entire score is an incredible display of musical virtuosity. It is a one-man course in the theatrical modes of the '20s, '30s and '40s musicals, done not as parody or mimicry, but as a passionately informed tribute. Michael Bennett's dances have a charged, steely precision, a top-hat, hot-pants staccato rhythm. James Goldman's book lacks the dry, winy brilliance called for by Prince's direction, yet still evokes the mood of Proust's closing words: "I would describe men, even at the risk of giving them the appearance of monstrous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater place than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure, because, like giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their lives--separated by so many days--so far apart in Time." Apart from Proust, few men have been equal to that task. The makers of Follies do not succeed completely, but even to approximate it in a Broadway musical is an indelible achievement.

T.E. Kalem

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