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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 3, 2011

TT: Getting Follies right

June 3, 2011 by ldemanski

In today’s Wall Street Journal I cheer loudly for the new Kennedy Center revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Of all the major postwar musicals, “Follies” may be the hardest to revive successfully. Not only was it one of the largest-scaled Broadway shows to come along prior to the Era of Falling Chandeliers, but the subject matter of “Follies,” a caustic study of two middle-aged marriages gone sour, is disturbing in a way likely to put off casual dinner-and-a-show theatergoers. Factor in Stephen Sondheim’s magnificent score, which is too musically complex to be done well by most theater companies and too popular in style to be done at all by most opera houses, and you’ve got a recipe for obscurity.
37429b.jpgYet “Follies” somehow keeps on getting done, albeit not often, and each production is a magnet for Mr. Sondheim’s ardent fans, who will travel as far as necessary to see a performance, be it good, bad or indifferent. So it is great and glorious news indeed that the Kennedy Center’s new revival, whose near-ideal cast includes Bernadette Peters and Jan Maxwell, is not just good but superlative….
One of the signal achievements of this “Follies” is that it succeeds in untangling each and every strand of the show’s knotty plot. Most of the credit belongs to Eric Schaeffer, the director, whose Signature Theatre has produced more Sondheim revivals than any other regional theater company in America. Mr. Schaeffer is clearly unafraid of the darkness of “Follies,” so much so that the first act is bitter enough to sting. Yet he and Warren Carlyle, the choreographer, just as clearly revel in the richness of the knowing pastiche songs with which Mr. Sondheim evokes the popular music of the pre-rock era. It helps that they were given a budget big enough to produce “Follies” on a grand scale–and to hire a top-flight set designer, Broadway’s Derek McLane, with enough imagination to make the most of the materials at hand.
The result is a “Follies” that is superior in every way to the lackluster, ill-sung 2001 Broadway revival….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
This rare home movie shot during a performance of the original 1971 Broadway production of Follies (with an overdubbed soundtrack recorded directly from the production soundboard) shows the transition to the second-act “Loveland” sequence. The set was designed by Boris Aronson:

TT: Almanac

June 3, 2011 by ldemanski

“It was a yawn without beginning or end, a yawn as endless as a Wagner melody.”
Milan Kundera, Immortality (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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