This Day in Theater History (Sondheim’s “Follies” Triumphs in Concert)

September 6, 1985—Its purpose was to create a fuller record of one of the pivotal musicals of the postwar period, but the concert version of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies gave the audience at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall the thrill of a lifetime: an all-star cast singing songs that challenged, amused, tore hearts out, and summoned ghosts from a theatrical and national past that felt ever more elusive.

All 5,500 tickets for this performance, along with the following night’s, sold out in less than three hours. Sondheim, never one to miss an irony, must have wished that the original run of Follies, back in 1971, had received a similarly ecstatic reception from the public. Instead, like most of his other productions over the years, it was a critical darling but a popular underperformer, running for less than a year and losing $800,000. Despite the overwhelming brilliance of the songs, it was undoubtedly difficult for audiences in the middle of the Vietnam War, struggling for escape amid massive disillusionment, to confront a show about the reunion of a troupe of former showgirls (reminiscent of the Ziegfeld Follies) and the anger and disillusionment let loose as a result.

Seventeen years ago, historian John Steele Gordon, explaining in American Heritage why Follies made his list of the 10 all-time greatest musicals, noted its consistently piercing take on relations between the sexes: “if you have ever realized, much too late, that you were in love with someone (‘Too Many Mornings’); if you have ever been really, really angry with your spouse (‘Could I Leave You?’); if you have ever been dumped by someone you can’t help loving still (‘Losing My Mind’), this score can have the impact of an emotional ICBM.”

By the mid-1980s, Sondheim had become to the American musical in its post-Rodgers and Hammerstein period what Beethoven was to classical music in the wake of Haydn and Mozart: the apotheosis of everything they stood for, yet a successor who pushed daringly into entirely new territory. None of his work demonstrated this paradox more than Follies.

To those who questioned whether he could write a hummable tune in the manner of the great masters of the musical, Follies included songs heavily reminiscent of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Gershwins, Porter, Arlen, Berlin, and Romberg. But the show’s sensibility—urban (and urbane), somber but not cynical, but with enough psychological baggage to justify a decade in psychoanalysis—could only have come from Sondheim.

Unfortunately, all those who, like Gordon, believed that Follies was Sondheim’s greatest score were overwhelmingly disappointed by the original-cast soundtrack for the 1971 production. In the era of the LP, several songs had to be left off the single disk, reducing the breathtaking variety of styles and moods. Just as scandalous in its way, in keeping with the circumstances of the production (quick, record the show before it closes!), the sound was rushed.

The two-LP “Follies” in Concert set recorded for RCA Victor solved these problems while providing a bonus for Sondheim devotees: 45 minutes of background music that the composer created for the 1974 French film Stavisky.

Sondheim fans being who they are, they wondered why they couldn’t get even more. After all, a complete audio recording of one of the greatest American musicals wasn’t simply welcome, but the minimum necessary. While the show’s producers were at it, why couldn’t they have gone for a complete video record, too?

They’re talking, of course, about the documentary concerning the making of the concert. The intent of this latter special, evidently, was shooting similar to D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 documentary on the recording of the original-cast album for Follies' great predecessor, Company.

However, in the case of Follies, less than 50 minutes of the video recording were devoted to the songs themselves. With all due respect to director Herbert Ross’s yeoman work in bringing the show together in only four days, most fans still beefed that they could dispense with the behind-the-scenes comments and been perfectly content with the show and nothing but the show.

Well, what they found on audio was treasure enough. “Follies” in Concert not only drew together a quartet with major experience in musicals—Lee Remick, George Hearn, Barbara Cook, and Mandy Patinkin—but equally talented supporting players: Carol Burnett, Elaine Stritch, Phyllis Newman, Adolph Green, and Liz Callaway.

The 1985 concert version, no matter how quickly it came together, could never equal the high-wire offstage drama of the original 1971 show, as chronicled in Ted Chapin’s present-at-the-creation Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical “Follies.” Still, the new recording offered something for nearly everybody.

Vocally, the one performer in the concert version who did not match the others was Lee Remick. I suspect that many fans like myself would still have found the show somewhat diminished without the fire-and-ice elegance she brought to sassy showgirl-turned-sophisticated-diplomat’s-wife Phyllis Rogers Stone. (See the YouTube clip of her big production number, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.”)

In any case, if there was one performer in the show whose position was secure, it was Remick. The actress and the lyricist-composer had gone out for awhile around the time of the flop Anyone Can Whistle (1964). If the homosexual Sondheim had not been struggling with his sexual orientation at the time, they might well have married. The two remained close for the rest of Remick’s life.

Somehow, it seems appropriate that the last role in which she was cast—one from which she had to withdraw before the recurrence of the cancer that took her life—was as aging beauty Desiree in the 1991 Los Angeles production of A Little Night Music.

Song Lyric of the Day (Stephen Sondheim, Showing He’s “Still Here”)

“I’ve run the gamut, A to Z,
Three cheers and damnit, C’est la vie,
I got through all of last year, and I’m here
Lord knows, at least I was there, and I’m here
Look who’s here, I’m still here.”—Stephen Sondheim, “I’m Still Here,” from Follies (1971)

Yes, I know I just wrote a post the other day about Sondheim. Well, what of it?

Sure, there’s a voice inside—the kind that many bloggers probably hear—saying, “Wouldn’t it be good to offer a little variety? Vary the ol’ subject matter a little bit?”

I hear you, faithful reader. But I also obey the insistent impulse of most bloggers: I write as I please. And right now, what pleases me is to pay tribute to the greatest craftsman of American musical theater for the last half-century today, on his 80th birthday.

Stephen Sondheim’s musicals have been, as often as not, orphaned at their original premieres, only to be taken up by later generations. One of these was the one that first got me listening to his music in a sustained way: Merrily We Roll Along, which told its story of middle-aged disillusionment backwards through time.

I wish the Roundabout Theatre had chosen to stage Merrily rather than the revue on the boards now, Sondheim on Sondheim. The latter might have its crowd-pleasing stars—Barbara Cook, Tom Wopat and Vanessa Williams—and a kind of best-of format. But it sounds to me a little safe—everything Sondheim, most emphatically, has rejected in his art.

Follies is not only central to the Sondheim canon, but with time, I think, it’s entered the larger sphere of the very select American musical canon. Think of its relationship to the musical the same way you might compare Lonesome Dove to the western: an examination of an endpoint of an American era, and, in a sense, a particular American art form.

For the plot of Follies—a reunion of “Weissman” (read: Ziegfeld) girls—Sondheim summed up nearly half a century of seminal figures of the American musical, including mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Sigmund Romberg. But that whole tradition is then deconstructed—there are no happy, romantic endings, simply a weary acceptance of one’s experience—and the whole projected forwarded into a nightmarish phantasmagoria of dreams unrealized.

“I’m Still Here” might be my favorite among this dazzling collection of musical pastiches. There are all sorts of reasons to love it:

* as a kind of through-the-years history lesson, with fun but more obscure allusions than, for instance, Don McLean’s “American Pie” or Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (for a complete rundown of the meaning of these references, see this helpful guide from June Abernathy). How many Americans today can tell you what Brenda Frazier, Major Bowes, or Abie’s Irish Rose means?

* as an example of Sondheim’s dazzling wordplay. My favorite: “First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp,/Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp,/Then you career from career to career.”

* as an anthem of show-biz veterans’ indomitability. As WNYC-FM deejay Jonathan Schwartz remarked on his show yesterday, “I’m Still Here”—based, according to an interview of Sondheim by Chicago’s Gary Griffin, upon the life of Joan Crawford--has become the preferred tune of actress-singers of a certain age, including Yvonne DeCarlo (who originated the role of Carlotta Campion), Carol Burnett, Polly Bergen, and Elaine Stritch.

But I think its relevance is even more extensive. No profession beats show business for the variety of its cruelties, the way your career can be upended through personal demons, changing fashions, economic downturns, shifting politics, or simply capricious tyrants inexplicably given charge of your destiny at crucial moments.

“I’m Still Here” is not a kind of defiantly theatrical “My Way,” but an alternately rueful, witty reflection on human imperfection, a tale of endurance in the face of such repeated and various indignities in the entertainment world that it builds to the level of majestic, thrilling heroism.

Sondheim’s first up-close and personal experience with show business—as a gofer for Hammerstein for the experimental musical Allegro—was just such a failure, and he’s endured a full share of his own career and personal setbacks (e.g., the ‘60s disappointment of Anyone Can Whistle and his collaboration with Richard Rodgers, Do I Hear a Waltz?, plus a mid-Seventies heart attack that forced a change in his lifestyle). He wrote “I’m Still Here” for a character, but today, it can serve as his own cry of the heart.

Happy 80th birthday, Mr. Sondheim.