Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies (Applause Books) (48 page)

The running of the show became routine. Ethel took to drinking more than she had been and occasionally showed up for performances in questionable shape. But Fritz Holt had only to arch an eyebrow and say,
“Ethel . . .”
and she would clean up her act. Alexis remained somewhat aloof from the company, although maintaining the friendships she had made early on, most noticeably with hairdresser Joe Tubens. Yvonne was out on the town whenever possible; she even managed to get herself into some situation that resulted in a long black limo showing up several Saturday nights in a row with a couple of serious-looking men standing by to escort her out to a certain Long Island night spot where she would sing. Some cast members left during the run—Fred Kelly was the first, invoking a two-weeks’-notice clause in his contract. (He wrote a gracious letter of resignation in which he detailed the several roles he understudied and got to play, and ending by saying, “Thank you again for the ‘pleasure of their company.’ ”) Virginia Sandifur left to play a five-month run as Eve opposite Lauren Bacall in the tour of
Applause.
Kurt Peterson left for a revival of
On the Town,
and Sheila Smith went on to
Sugar,
the musical version of
Some Like It Hot,
in which she would play Sweet Sue, the leader of the all-girl band. But for the most part, the company remained intact, although by the end of the run in New York many in the cast were missing performances on an almost regular basis.

 

 

I
went back to college, but stopped by from time to time to visit. Everyone remained cheerful, and people seemed happy to see me. I would drop in on Yvonne, who would greet me just as cheerfully as she always did. At one performance when I was visiting, she changed a line, “He’s just a thing. But he’s twenty-six,” to “He’s just a thing. But he’s twenty.” I flattered myself to think it might have been for me, but it might also have been her unique memory up to its usual tricks. She sent one letter, in which she told me of her boys’ arrival for the summer. I sent her a reply. Years later I was touring through Universal City in Los Angeles when I saw her name up on the billboard as the “Star of the Day.” I wondered if I ought to seek her out and reintroduce myself; it didn’t seem to make any sense.

 

 

T
he show started off strong at the box office, with grosses rising each week through the spring to a high of $107,549 for the week of June 5th. Then it began a slow decline, which prompted Variety to observe, when the gross dipped to $79,832 in July, that “Follies sagged to a new low and now appears to be a questionable payoff prospect.” It continued to run, with grosses fluctuating week to week, hitting a low of $31,854 during the notoriously bad Christmas week. The Tonys helped give it a boost in the spring, when it won a total of seven awards of its ten nominations. It swept the design categories—Boris for sets, Flossie for costumes, and Tharon for lighting. Steve won for Best Score (there was no longer a separate award for lyrics and music). The only performer to win was Alexis, who beat out fellow nominee Dorothy for Lead Actress. Gene Nelson was nominated for Featured Actor, but no one else was nominated in either featured category. Hal and Michael won for Best Director, and Michael won his first Tony for choreography. Jim Goldman’s book and the show itself were both nominated, but both lost to a musical version of
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Among other ironies of the Tonys: Phil Silvers and Larry Blyden won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for a revival of Steve’s
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
and the writer who took the Tony from Jim Goldman was
Follies
friend and admirer John Guare, whose adaptation of
Two Gentlemen
wasn’t even contemplated when
Follies
first went into rehearsal. Upon receiving his Tony he remarked: “I don’t know what to say. I’m an investor in
Follies
!
”

The Tony wins gave the show a boost, but within a couple of weeks the grosses began to drop again. Finally, the show could no longer sustain itself. Hal, however, came up with the innovative and positive-sounding plan of closing in New York and moving the entire production west, first for one week at the outdoor St. Louis Municipal Opera, and then to open the brand-new Shubert Theater in Los Angeles. The hope was for it to remain at the western Shubert on an open-ended basis, before taking off on a major tour.

The final New York performance, on July 1, 1972, was number 522. It could only be described as riotous. Throughout the run, the show had amassed enough fans to make the final performance sell out far in advance. They cheered, they screamed, they stopped the show at every possible moment. Kurt Peterson’s plan changed, and because he had agreed to go west with the show, he asked if he could do the final New York performance. His replacement agreed, and when the stage manager announced, “At this performance the role of Young Ben will be played by Kurt Peterson,” the place went wild because an original cast member had returned. When Stella said, “Wasn’t that a blast?” the place went wild. Yes, everyone in that theater agreed: it had been a blast. And now it was over. One fan claimed to have seen it sixty-five times.

Most of the original cast made the trek west and opened in Los Angeles—Ed Steffe was back playing Dimitri Weismann, Terry Saunders had replaced Sheila Smith, Jan Clayton replaced Ethel Barrymore Colt, and Alexandra Borrie took over from Virginia Sandifur as Young Phyllis. A few of the partygoers and choristers had left as well—Dick Latessa, Graciela Daniele, Charles Welch, and Marcie Stringer. Otherwise, it was the original cast intact.

The show failed to catch on in Los Angeles. It closed on October 1, 1972, and with it the proposed national tour was scrapped. There were conversations about a movie version, mostly with Daniel Melnick at MGM, so the costumes were sent to the studio. The plans were dropped—one problem was that Jim Goldman hadn’t been included in the conversations—although a couple of years later MGM released a nostalgic film titled
That’s Entertainment!
which used old movie stars to introduce clips from musicals made while they were young, often filmed on what was left of old sets and soundstages in Hollywood. Both Hal and Steve suspected it was inspired by the notion of making a film of
Follies.
Hal’s original idea was to gather a group of bona fide older film stars—Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had agreed to participate—and create a real party in an old soundstage and film it in cinéma-vérité style. Twentieth Century-Fox also flirted briefly with a movie version. Two screenplays were commissioned.

According to
Variety,
the show closed as a total financial failure, with a cumulative loss of $792,000.

S
tefan Kanfer was right.
Follies
was indeed revived in the mid-1980s, three months past the exact midpoint, in September 1985, not as a production, but as a gala all-star concert with the New York Philharmonic. This time it was received with great enthusiasm, its two performances completely sold out, and to a certain extent it was greeted as “an item of genuine nostalgia.” But more important, the show had finally come of age; it was acknowledged by the press as a work of major consequence. “Where were you on the night of September 6?” asked James Kirkwood in the liner notes for the album made of the concert. “There are openings and closings and benefits and testimonials . . . then there are ‘major events’ which come along every decade or so . . . well, add to the cherished small quota of ‘events’ . . .
Follies
at Avery Fisher Hall. The thing about these evenings is: they simply erupt into mythic events through a mysterious combination for which no one has the recipe.” The concert soon began to be referred to as legendary. Newfound interest in the show was one of the results. A full-scale London West End production was mounted in 1987, and other incarnations followed, both in concert and in full production, around the world: Ireland, Germany, Australia, and various places in the United Kingdom. The United States had been keeping the show alive with interesting attempts through the years—one production in Birmingham, Alabama, even boasted seven ex-Miss Americas in the cast—and the rave reviews received by a 1998 production at the Paper Mill Playhouse prompted Broadway transfer rumors. A Broadway revival was produced by the Roundabout Theater in spring 2001. In January 2003, a concert performance in Ann Arbor, Michigan, cast Harvey Evans, Kurt Peterson, Virginia Sandifur, and Marti Rolph as Buddy, Ben, Phyllis, and Sally, thirty-two years after they had shown up on West Nineteenth Street to create the youthful ghost counterparts. And the Shubert Theater in Los Angeles, whose gala opening had been the West Coast importation of the entire Broadway production and cast, was itself closed for good in 2001. A local group established to perform concert stagings of musicals thought it would be appropriate to present
Follies
as the final production in the theater. The landlord wasn’t interested.

Today,
Follies
is rarely performed twice in exactly the same version. James Goldman’s widow made the observation that the show has morphed throughout its entire life. By the time rehearsals for the original production began, it had already gone through many more versions than most musicals. There had been well over five drafts, two titles, plot changes, characters written in and written out and renamed, over twenty songs, and endless small revisions. As the preceding pages attest, changes continued to be made right up until the Broadway opening, including the shifting of the order of scenes, the changing of tone of dialogue, and the creating and dropping of songs and musical arrangements. Shortly after the Broadway opening both the libretto and vocal score were published, documenting, at least, the text and score of the show that played on Broadway. The London production had new songs and dialogue. The Paper Mill Playhouse production used some elements from London but stayed close to the original. The 2001 Roundabout Broadway revival, the first major production following Goldman’s death in 1998, was again a combination of previous versions.

It’s tempting to wonder whether there ever was a version that both Sondheim and Goldman felt was definitive.
Follies
had come a long way from
The Girls Upstairs.
Was there a place along its history that both authors could point to and say: “That’s the show we wanted to create”? Why did they agree to the constant requests to change the show? Did they feel the show wasn’t finished? Did they keep trying to “get it right”? Were they just cooperative collaborators trying to encourage any production the show would get?

A great deal of scholarly discourse has been focused on the show over the years. Every book published on the musical theater since the mid-1970s includes a mention of the show, and every book published on Stephen Sondheim—there are many—includes at least a chapter on
Follies.
Bold theories about the show’s true meaning have ranged from “a searing commentary on the American experience in the middle of the twentieth century . . . [with] parallels between Nixon, as the symbol of the deterioration of faith in pervasive American myths, and the lives of the
Follies
characters . . .” (James Fisher) to “a lament for the lost age of female star glamour, an examination of failed heterosexual romance set in juxtaposition to a youthful romantic fantasy, all laden with the sort of irony that was central to gay culture of the time . . . show queens read their own show and their own lives into
Follies”
(John Clum). The British musicologist Stephen Banfield wrote that
“Follies,
like the world of the theater and our participation in it as spectators, operates between the tragedy and cruelty of self-delusion, Erasmus’s ‘sagging, withered breasts’ and ‘little love-letters,’ and the exhilaration of self-preservation and celebration, for, as Erasmus’s Folly acknowledges, ‘Self-love . . . is so prompt to take my place on all occasions that she is rightly called my sister.’ ”

Theatrical historians take a more practical approach. In a piece written for the
New York Times
prior to the 2001 Broadway revival, Ethan Mordden, who was one of the first to describe the show as being “one of American music drama’s few epics” in 1976, wrote:
“Follies
recalls a time when musicals were the smartest invention of a smart culture. . . . It is a flashpoint for who owns the musical. Florenz Ziegfeld or the Disney company? . . . Yet it is a timeless piece, for in a democracy there are always new roads to not take and always ghosts of our former selves looking on.” In program notes for the 1985 concert, Bert Fink wrote, “simply and unsentimentally,
Follies
suggests that the past belongs in the past. . . . [it] does not condemn the past. . . . it condemns our tendency to hide behind a false depiction of the past rather than let ourselves be confronted by the reality of the present.” Joanne Gordon wrote:
“Follies
is
of
the musical theater and
about
the musical theater; yet it transcends the musical theater. Larger than life, it synthesizes the dreams of its audience, the illusions of its actors, the distorted memory of a youthful America of the past, and a harsh perception of the contemporary disillusion.” Mordden concluded his piece by saying, “It’s a fine show for kids, because they all think they’re Moss Hart, with every choice in the world and no penalty to pay. It’s a rough show for their elders, who have learned how marvelously perilous free will can be.”

“It’s my favorite show, really, and the reason is it is the most flying blind I’ve ever done. It was all about instincts and feelings.” That was Hal Prince, speaking in his Rockefeller Center office in 2002. In another interview he had offered this: “The point of the show was that you should
use
the past to look into the future.” To a reporter, Sondheim said,
“Follies
was a retrospective of all the different streams that had made up the American musical, so in that sense it was the end of a certain era. But
Follies
also was enormously experimental and therefore was not really the end of something but in fact a beginning.” In a mid-1970s interview he elaborated,
“Follies
represented a state of mind of America between the two World Wars. Up until 1945 America was the good guy . . . now the dream has collapsed, everything has turned to rubble underfoot and that’s what the show is about. It’s also about the collapse of a dream. It’s how all your hopes tarnish and how if you live on regret and despair you might as well pick up, for to live in the past is foolish.” On the night of the 1985 concert, Michael Bennett told Graciela Daniele that of all the shows he had been affiliated with,
Follies
was the show of which he was the most proud. By then, his
A Chorus Line
had become its own time-consuming industry. “So much of that show [
Follies
] was better than anything I’ve ever seen or anything I’ve ever done” is what he told Craig Zadan for
Sondheim & Co.,
one of the first books on Sondheim. James Goldman told Zadan, “You want something to succeed for being as close to what you wanted it to be, not something else.”

Confessing that she was “scared shitless when Hal insisted that I do the show,” costume designer Flossie Klotz said that there was no way her original costumes could be re-created today. “Not only would they cost upwards of $2 million, but we used fabrics from England that aren’t even made anymore.” Lisa Aronson reported that Boris was as proud of his work on
Follies
as he was on any show he ever designed.

For the stars,
Follies
proved to be a career highlight. Unfortunately, none achieved or maintained a new higher status for long, if at all, in the years following. Only John McMartin, a Broadway regular in 1971, remains a Broadway regular. Never really a star, he is nonetheless one of the few respected and reliable leading men today. In 2002 he opened in a revival of Sondheim’s
Into the Woods
, a show whose original production postdated
Follies
by sixteen years. Gene Nelson returned to Hollywood and went back to his career as a television director and occasional actor. He directed for the stage as well, and in 1984 took on a production of
Follies
. He admitted to being a hard taskmaster: “I would not let them bend one word,” he told Terri Roberts for an interview in
The Sondheim Review
. “I told them: This is the way we did it; this is the way you’re going to do it. Don’t talk to me about motivation or I’ll hit you right between the eyes.” He concluded that interview by proclaiming,
“Follies
was a helluva great show.” Cancer took his life three months later, in September 1996.

Alexis Smith remained a Broadway star, but unfortunately none of her subsequent roles provided anywhere near the success of Phyllis. In 1978, hers was the only name above the title of a musical directed by Joe Layton called
Platinum
about a faded movie star who attempts a comeback through the recording industry. It bombed. She went back to Los Angeles and made guest appearances on television shows and in small roles in movies. Dorothy Collins continued to perform for several years after
Follies,
but gradually withdrew into early retirement due primarily to the asthma that had hindered her career for years. (Few actually knew that she had needed to use an inhaler during the original run.) Both were invited to Houston in 1985 when a producer mounted a production of
Follies
to open a new theater. He seated them together. At the end of the first act—yes, by then the show most often played with an intermission—Alexis grabbed Dorothy by the arm and pulled her out of her seat, out of the auditorium, into some out-of-the-way place where they could be alone. A stall in a ladies room was the most expedient choice, and once they were out of sight and out of earshot, Alexis turned and looked straight at her co-star, the early favorite who ended up being overshadowed by the tall, willowy beauty from Hollywood. “Dorothy,” she said, “I have to apologize. Seeing this show tonight, I realize—I had no idea how good you were.”

Alexis died of cancer in 1993, in Los Angeles. Dorothy died at home in Florida in 1994. Many of the older actors didn’t survive long after the original run ended. First to go was Ethel Shutta in 1976, followed by Ethel Barrymore Colt in 1977. Mary McCarty died in 1980, and Fifi D’Orsay in 1983, having once again made it into a new edition of the book
Whatever Became of . . . ?

As for the rest of the performers, every one has about the same feeling, best summed up by an interview Harvey Evans gave in 1996. “I’ve done nineteen shows, and this is the show I’m recognized for. I like that. I wouldn’t mind having on my tombstone: Here lies Harvey Evans. He was in
Follies.”

In 1982, Hal Prince was in Los Angeles working on a new musical entitled
A Doll’s Life.
For a backstage scene, he wanted a few racks of miscellaneous costumes. His production manager called Western Costume, Hollywood’s oldest and most established independent costume house, which housed many of the discards from the major studios. As two racks of costumes were pulled out onstage, Hal noticed the purple cape in which Alexis had made her first entrance in
Follies.
It had been ten years since
Follies
closed.

I made a tape recording of Steve playing the score for the cast on the first day of rehearsal. For one of my meetings with him about this book, I made a copy. I saw him a week later, and he said, “I can’t believe how fast I played that score. Judy Prince has been telling me for years that I play my stuff too fast. Now I see what she means. But when I got to the end of the tape, I thought, ‘My God.
That
is all of the score I had on the first day of rehearsal?’ ”

And I thought—yes, Steve, that is all there was. And I have a story to tell.