(3 of 8)
Lucy wants to be dressy,
Jessie wants to be juicy.
Lucy wants to be Jessie,
And Jessie Lucy. You see
Jessie is racy
But hard as a rock.
Lucy is lacy
But dull as a smock.
Jessie wants to be lacy,
Lucy wants to be Jessie.
That's the sorrowful precis,
It's very messy.
Critics and audiences alike have responded with enthusiasm to Follies' stylistic inventiveness. There is less unanimity of feeling about the theme. Some —including TIME'S T.E. Kalem—found in it Proustian resonances. Some contend that James Goldman, whose screenplay for The Lion in Winter won a 1968 Oscar, has supplied less of a book than a book jacket. For Phyllis, he wrote some pseudo-sophisticated, Manhattanite monologues that are better read than said.
Such speeches are mercifully few —remnants, perhaps, of the play that never was. Follies took shape more than five years ago when nostalgia was a euphemism for camp. In those days it was called The Girls Upstairs, a backstage murder mystery set in melody. Producer David Merrick (Hello, Dolly!) held the first option; he loved the score, loathed the book. The project was jettisoned. One producer later, it ended in the court of Hal Prince, who agreed to produce and direct.
At 43, bearded like the pard, Prince is one of the theater's most formidable figures. At 26 he co-produced his first show, Pajama Game. Four years later he was enough of a Broadway inside joke to be lampooned as the hyperthyroid boy-wonder impresario of Say, Darling. The producer of such hits as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof, and producer-director of Cabaret, Company and Follies, he is not treated like a figure of fun any more.
With unnecessary modesty, Prince describes his role in the shaping of Follies as "a moderator, a mediator, someone to take the blame." Not quite so. If writers had the final play on words, it was Prince who enjoyed the ultimate word on plays. He discovered what came to be the show's essential conception in Eliot Elisofon's picture of Gloria Swanson amid the ruins of Manhattan's Roxy Theater, a barococo movie palace that was demolished in 1960. "That sparked the whole notion of rubble—how it relates to the past and present." Prince set Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with him on Forum and Company, to work emulating typical mid-'20s and '30s show tunes for the "Loveland" sequence, and devised the flowing, cinematic style of the play. He also gave Costume Designer Florence Klotz one great illumination: Follies was to be a "Fellini musical."