• Follies (NT Live)

9/22/18 (Mon), Tokyo

A full-scale production of Follies is always an event given the huge cast, glamorous setting and the show’s complexity, and the National Theatre production had been widely praised. It also featured one of my favorite British stage actresses, Imelda Staunton, so I wasn’t going to miss it. But the pleasures of the production need to be separated from the dreariness of what’s on stage. A bit of background.

In this downer of a musical, two couples meeting after many years at a reunion of former Follies dancers realize that they’ve been paired off all this time with the wrong mate, provoking angst-filled reflections on the choices they’ve made, the wretched courses their lives have taken and so on and so forth. The ghosts of the past are made visible here as these couples and the other Follies veterans are shadowed on stage by their younger selves, so that past and present – dream-filled youth vs. reality-battered middle age – are a single piece. The couples’ energetic and idealistic younger selves in particular are an implicit criticism of what they have eventually become, supposedly a metaphor for the American dream (the show takes place in then-contemporary 1971 during the Vietnam mess). I’m not sure I buy that – there is always a new generation of youngsters with their own aspirations, and while our lives may not go as our wide-eyed teenaged selves had imagined, most of us simply adjust and get on with it. But not, evidently, in Sondheim-land. (The book is by James Goldman.)

Sally, the most irritating of the leads, is a neurotic woman who has apparently been pining for forty years for the guy who dumped her. You’d think she’d have worked this out by now – what’s her problem? Are we supposed to sympathize with her, pity her, despise her (my choice) or what? And would her husband Buddy really go home with her after she has openly expressed her preference for someone else, apparently after years of making him miserable? A lot of the tragedy seems manufactured here, the fantasy of NY or Hollywood writers. The play has both of the husbands philandering, albeit for different reasons (Buddy for lack of love at home, Ben for selfish pleasure), and Phyllis, the cynical other wife, has a fling with a young kid before our eyes. To paraphrase an old Follies-era line: Is anybody happy?

I’ve always been struck by one lyric in “One Last Kiss”, my favorite number, that goes, “All things beautiful must die.” All things ugly die too, so what’s the point? My answer would be to look for the new beautiful things being born, but I’m a famous old bore. (Sondheim’s Company, written around the same time, has a similar line about ladies of leisure: “Look into their eyes / And you’ll see what they know / Everybody dies!” I wonder if he was having issues then.) I assume critic Frank Rich’s famous observation that this is “a musical about the death of the musical” (meaning the traditional musical) refers to the innocence embodied in those old shows, but the attitudes on display here just seem fatalistic. These characters have learned nothing in the end, and we’ve just spent two-and-a-half hours with them for nothing. Adult-oriented musicals are fine, but that doesn’t have to mean nasty people with weak personalities.

The younger versions of the leads sing at one point, “You’re gonna love tomorrow”, an ironic moment given that we know what tomorrow has brought. It was only five years after the original Follies that Little Orphan Annie sang, “I love you, tomorrow!”, but I’m having trouble imagining her at a reunion of orphans in 40 years complaining how life has let her down. And I know which of these characters I prefer. I wonder why the Follies writers, who could have created anything in this rare original piece, landed on such pitiful people. The authors similarly explored young dreams crashing over time into disillusionment in their later piece Merrily We Roll Along. Didn’t work there either.

But then there’s the production itself, a technical wonder with its skillful mixture of old partygoers and their former selves, the glittering past versus the pathetic present. It’s helped immensely by an astonishing score by Sondheim. His pastiche of Follies-era musical styles (which he would have grown up with) plays with our notions of the past while adeptly, if bitterly, commenting on the present.

Not that the score is perfect. I’ve always been bothered by the opening of “Losing My Mind”:

The sun comes up,

I think about you.

A coffee cup,

I think about you.

The mixture of a verb phrase (“comes up”) with a noun (“coffee cup”) is clumsy – was the writer trying to channel the Follies-era writer Lorenz Hart, a lyricist he famously accuses of just this sort of awkward writing? Johnny Mercer did this better:

I took a trip on a train,

And I thought about you.

I passed a shadowy lane,

And I thought about you.

But that’s being petty. The score in context, even from the perspective of his later career, remains one of Sondheim’s greatest achievements, and it would have propelled him instantly into the pantheon of great Broadway songwriters if Company hadn’t already done that a year earlier.

The show got the production it needed from Dominic Cooke. The National Theatre has been criticized for spending taxpayer money on musicals (and American musicals, at that), but this musical is exactly the kind of show that a public entity should be tackling since it’s far too expensive and risky for commercial producers on this scale. (It’s evidently transferring to the West End, but I predict a relatively quick end.) And they spared no expense.

The production is confusing at the beginning with way too many people populating the stage – it seems too early for the ghosts. But it settles down as the story kicks into gear and rarely misses a step thereafter. There were terrific performances by all four leads, led by a spectacular Imelda Staunton in a beautifully calibrated portrayal of the demented Sally. Philip Quast (Ben), Peter Forbes (Buddy) and a great Janie Dee (Phyllis) were also as good as it gets. Their entire “Loveland” sequence was tremendous on all fronts – acting, staging, singing, dancing. That portion of the show as performed by these actors was on its own worth the ticket price.

The supporting cast was variable. Tracie Bennett (who mined the past before as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow) aced “I’m Still Here”, and the young versions of the leads were excellent throughout, most notably in “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow/Love Will See Us Through”. Others were less impressive, giving the impression that the producers were drawing from a very shallow well. “One Last Kiss” in particular was poorly staged and performed, a real pity, and the lead in “Who’s That Woman?” should not have been there. The expert staging of the “Broadway Baby” medley made me wonder what better performers would have done with it.

There’s always a lot to enjoy in this show despite the depressing sight of wasted lives, and this production is up to the task. For all that I enjoyed the superb stripped-down Encores concert version some years back, the musical really demands this Ziegfeld-scale treatment given its subject matter. We’re lucky to have this filmed version.