Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
—Peter De Vries
THE newest hot ticket on Broadway these days—$55 a pair from scalpers —is an admission to a haunted house. Elegiac strains of the '20s, '30s and '40s hover in the wings. Ectoplasmic chorines, all beads and feather boas, wander across the stage like Ziegfeld girls come back to life. Characters are at once 19 and 49. Time bounces off the walls, like sound and light brilliantly altered and distorted.
The show at the Winter Garden Theater* is called Follies, a title self-consciously suggesting irony and double meanings. At its worst moments, Follies is mannered and pretentious, overreaching for Significance. At its best moments—and there are many—it is the most imaginative and original new musical that Broadway has seen in years.
At first look Follies would seem to be part of the nostalgia boom, which has America glancing myopically backward at its own past (see TIME ESSAY, page 77) and has turned the Manhattan stage into a revival revival. The trend toward old goldies began on Broadway in May 1969 with a production of the Hecht-MacArthur war horse about a journalism that never was: The Front Page, starring Robert Ryan. The play whetted the theater audience's appetite for aging stars and graying gags. After it galloped Three Men on a Horse, Our Town with Henry Fonda, Noel Coward's Private Lives, the adventures of the Marx brothers in Minnie's Boys, Helen Hayes and James Stewart in Harvey. Some musical comedies, like 1968's Dames at Sea, were a pastiche of the past, filling off-Broadway with tinkling resonances of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. Some took old movies, tricked them out with old stars and called themselves new—like Applause, which is a face-lifting of All About Eve, plus orchestra and Lauren Bacall.
A Sense of Freshness
No, No, Nanette, of course, outnos-talgiaed them all. The hell with getting someone like Ruby Keeler and Patsy Kelly; they went out and got Keeler and Kelly, plus good old Busby Berkeley to go through his bag of geriatric routines. The show is a collage of ricky-ticky-tacky, but it shines because of the adroit staging of Burt Shevelove and the even more adroit hoofing of Helen Gallagher and Bobby Van.
The genuine surprise in the nostalgia nonsense is not the durability of the vehicles or the performers, but the sense of freshness emerging from all this wallowing in memory. That, precisely, is the delight of Follies. Superficially, its cast may appear to be just another line-up of Late Show dropouts; and its theme could have been one more excuse to laugh or cry at the kind of song and dance that dazzled a less sophisticated generation. But in its staging, and above all in its music and lyrics, Follies is astonishingly futuristic—more modern, really, than that calculated rock-beat ode to the counterculture, Hair.
Full of Ghosts