If you care about American musical theatre and you can get to Washington DC in the next month, you have to see Follies at the Kennedy Center. It’s a masterwork, but it’s tough and uneven, the bastard child of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Usually, the focus has been on the dark and depressing aspects of James Goldman’s book, rather than that the characters have endured and will somehow find a new beginning for themselves. The score is a marvel, covering Tin Pan Alley, Viennese operetta, the Great American Songbook, and the conceptual, recitative style that Stephen Sondheim pioneered with Anyone Can Whistle. It’s light, charming, ruminative, emotionally complex, ambivalent, and enraged and that’s not counting the lyrics.
The set up is a reunion of performers, primarily showgirls, from the Weismann (Ã la Ziegfeld) Follies of the 1910s – 1940s, just before the old theatre is about to be torn down for a parking lot in 1971. Most of the supporting characters (this is a cast of 43) are either the performers at the reunion or the chimeras from their past at their prime. The four major characters are two couples, best friends thirty years earlier, who are uncertain whether they married the right people or pursued the careers that suited them. This is rarely performed because the cast is everything – it has to be seasoned and there needs to be former stars in it. This production has current stars (musical theatre superstars) and a deep bench of mature talent, part of the reason that it cost $6 million.
