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Follies is almost sans plot. Just before his old Broadway theater is to be torn down, Impresario Dmitri Weismann (read Flo Ziegfeld) orders a first and last reunion of his celebrated personnel. All the familiar types attend: Phyllis, the leggy brunette (Alexis Smith) who married well; Sally, the third-from-the-left blonde (Dorothy Collins) who didn't. The bolero-dancing couple (Victor Griffin and Jayne Turner) who bought a Fred Astaire franchise ("Styles change; you never can tell"), the wisecracking queen bee (Yvonne De Carlo) with her hive of young drones; the feathery Continental (Justine Johnston) who remembers Franz Lehar dedicating a waltz to her (" 'Liebchen, it's for you.' Or was it Oskar Straus? Facts never interest me. What matters is the song").
Unlikely ingredients for forward-looking theater. But around these stereo-and monotypes the past swirls and. flickers, a tincture of antique dreams and topical allusions. Follies is a play full of ghosts. The young hopefuls whom Weismann nurtured scatter their lines across the stage and run unseen by their older living images—a double exposure in three dimensions. The principals are, literally, beside themselves with grief. For, as it happens, the Weismann theater is not the only institution awaiting the wrecking ball. The other is marriage. Sally and her glib, skirt-chasing husband Buddy (Gene Nelson) have become pathetic caricatures of the Andy Hardy couple they once were—naivete swallowed by facts. Phyllis and her acrid WASP's-nest of a husband Ben (John McMartin) are glamour gone dry, a wasteland with wedding rings.
If youth knew, if age could: the theme resounds in the crossfire between past and present until, in a series of an-tinostalgic metaphors, each of the stars takes off the public mask and appears in his own Folly. It is a vaudevilification of their benighted circumstances, in which the truth shines like a spotlight. For the first half of the evening, the stage has been shrouded in melancholy: dim lighting, failed hope, blunted ambition. But in the intensely personal, Ziegfeld-like "Loveland" sequence, lights and color suddenly challenge the eye, an umber paintbox opened in the sun. This visual dazzle is reminiscent of Vincente Minnelli's movie musicals —notably the focal ballet in An American in Paris. Onstage, it has never been mounted with such unfailing skill.
An Old Tradition
Every musical aims for at least one showstopper. Follies can count on two. The first is Who's That Woman? Seven of the aging Follies girls, led by that infallible comedienne Mary Mc-Carty, re-enact an old routine, ostensibly to mirrors. From the indistinct background, their youthful selves emerge —backs to the audience, as if a reflection: new vamps for old. The symmetry of the ballet—choreographed by Follies Co-Director Michael Bennett—is never violated for a quarter-note. When an old girl turns, her "reflection" makes the selfsame move in reverse, a feat whose parallel can only be found in the trickery that cinema allows. The second crescendo is Alexis Smith's Story of Lucy and Jessie, a flame-red, high-kicking number in the old top-hat-and-tails tradition, an echo of a Cole Porter patter song:
Lucy is juicy
But terribly drab.
Jessie is dressy
But cold as a slab.