Follies
by Stephen Sondheim
Directed by Dominic Cooke
Designed by Vicki Mortimer
Conductor Nigel Lilley
National Theatre, London
Tuesday 26th March 2019, evening
CAST:
Janie Dee – Phyllis
Johanna Riding – Sally Durrant Plummer
Alexander Hanson – Benjamin Stone
Peter Forbes – Buddy Plummer
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Julie Armstrong – Christine Donovan
Lindsay Atherton – Young Carlotta
Rosanna Bates – Young Emily
Jeremy Batt- Young Theodore
Tracie Bennett – Carlotta Campion
Theodore Whitman – Billy Boyle
Kate Brown – Meredith Lane
Anouska Eaton – Young Deedee
Liz Ewing – Weismann’s PA
Vanessa Fisher – Young Stella
Geraldine Fitzgerald – Solange LaFitte
Caroline Fitzgerald – Sandra Crane
Bruce Graham – Roscoe
Adrian Grove – Sam Deems
Alyn Hawke- Cameraman
Harry Hepple- Young Buddy
Aimee Hodnett – Young Sandra
Dawn Hope- Stella Deems
Liz Izen- Deedee West
Jasmine Kerr- Young Meredith
Alison Langer- Young Heidi
Felicity Lott – Heidi Schiller
Sarah-Marie Maxwell – Young Solange
Ian McIntosh- Young Ben
Ian McLarnon – TV Interviewer
Claire Moore – Hattie Walker
Tom Partridge – Ensemble
Gary Raymond – Dimitri Weismann
Michael Remick – ensemble
Rohan Richards – Kevin
Lisa Ritchie – Young Hattie
Myra Sands- Emily Whitman
Gemma Sutton – Young Sally
Monica Swayne- Young Christine
Christine Tucker- Young Phyllis
Liam Wrate – Young Roscoe
The tableaux look great
This is a revival of the 2017 production which won the Olivier award for Best Musical Revival. It has a cast of forty and an orchestra of twenty-one. It’s the sort of huge production the Olivier Theatre excels at staging.
It’s 1971. The theatre that housed the Weismann Follies between the wars is facing demolition tomorrow, in Joni Mitchell’s words, to put up a parking lot. It’s had a rough few years harbouring travelling rep, then movies then blue movies before the developers moved in, Weismann has invited the old dancers to a reunion meet and drink before the building finally goes under the wrecking ball. Sashes are issued with their years of service on – 1918, 1939, 1941, 1927 etc. Some have come with their husbands. We focus on two couples. Phyllis is with Ben, a politician. Sally is with Buddy, a businessman. They were contemporaries and Phyllis (Janie Dee) and Sally (Johanna Riding) shared an apartment thirty years earlier.
Centre: Johanna Riding as Sally with shadow Ben (Ian McIntosh) and shadow Sally (Gemma Sutton)
Both marriages are in trouble, and back in 1942, at the start of the war for the USA (we’re still inclined to be pissed off about the US late entry here), Sally was about to marry Ben (Alexander Hanson) and married Buddy (Peter Forbes) on the rebound. All this will surface. Sally still has a torch for Ben.
Aexander Hanson as Ben, Janie Dee as Phyllis, Christine Tucker as Shadow Phyllis
The 1971 reunion has the characters shadowed by their younger selves, allowing time shifts back, and big production numbers, both of the ageing cast now, and their younger selves, and the two time zones mix. Well, I’ve been to university reunions and hardly met anyone I ever knew, let alone old flames.
Each of the main ex-hoofers gets a song, and there are distinct characters.
At the end, the four main characters each gets a major production number, labelled Buddy’s Folly (Buddy’s Blues). Sally’s Folly (Losing My Mind), Phyllis’s Folly (The Story of Lucy and Jessie) and Ben’s Folly (Live Laugh and Love). A set of pale curtains descends to cover the old theatre for these. Buddy’s bit is pure vaudeville. There is no connection whatsoever to “blues”.
Follies is two hours fifteen minutes long, played with no interval. While the National seats are well-raked and comfortable, as ever with well raked seats, you can’t put your feet under the row in front. I had knee surgery eight weeks ago and found that long without an interval beyond endurance. A director’s folly. And arrogance. Sorry!
I invariably complain about the American drama template, with its four characters, at least two of whom are major stars, emoting at each other on an incredibly elaborate fixed set. Preferably they’re seen as writers, actors or other performers rather than ordinary people. I usually exclude the American musical from that Broadway template as the Musical is America’s greatest theatrical contribution to world drama.
However with Follies, You can reduce the plot here to the classic four characters emoting about relationships and infidelities with thirty-six other actors just watching, posing, forming tableaux, and drifting about. Reviews mention the psychodrama. On the way out people were saying how terribly sad it was. To be frank, the characters’ tales of infidelity and lost love went straight past my head, and I had no emotional response to it.
I am fond of the Follies era dance, and spent my summers at university working on limelights on variety shows, which had a dance troupe of a dozen or more doing just these sort of high stepping, tap dancing, ensemble routines. So I have nostalgia for that Television Toppers sort of dancing which I watched twice nightly, even though it was in many ways before my time. (see the novel Music to Watch Girls By, by Dart Travis, set in that era).
The old and the new: the dancers as they were in 1971 with their earlier selves
There are some good cameos from the other ex-dancers. The old couple who ended up running a ballroom dancing school and still fall into routines are funny. The one in the red dress who once had an affair with Ben, Tracy Bennett as Carlotta, was excellent when the old dancers reunite to do a routine, keeping up perfectly, but giving facial expressions of exhaustion and straining.
Tracy Bennett as Carlotta
The one who looked plump and unlikely to have been a dancer, Hattie, was superb, the older one who was a star in 1918. I didn’t catch many of the names, and the programme doesn’t give head shots.
Hattie sings Broadway Baby
We had read the five star reviews. I sat there admiring the set, the acting, the dancing, the technical singing, the costumes, they were all well cast, but I wasn’t enjoying it at all. It was all technical assessment and admiration, but for me and for Karen too as it transpired, no fun. The dance was the best part, though Karen adds that only the tap was exceptional.
Musicals were never really my thing, reminding me of the early 60s when half the Top Twenty seemed to be musical soundtracks, and my mum loved them. I am a recent convert to them, and that’s down to Chichester Festival Theatre, with a reliable run of excellent productions.
I was thinking the curmudgeonly reaction here was my fault- the 5 star reviews are universal. Basically, I actively disliked the music in Follies. Copyright in music is based on the top melody line and lyric. Nothing else, like arrangement, counts. I found myself listening to the exquisite arrangement because I really didn’t like the top line melody. Ok it’s Sondheim. SONDHEIM. A great lyricist for West Side Story and Gypsy. Then he moved to music and lyrics. I have just discovered that I can’t stand Sondheim’s music, at least in this example. My musical tastes are eclectic but there are a few things I dislike- Sex Pisols, grand opera, Liam Gallagher, light opera, gangsta rap, drums ‘n’ bass. Add Stephen Sondheim as a composer, then. To me it’s clever lyrics (his strength) meandering about looking for a melody or hook, and coming up short.
One song, Losing My Mind, sung with terrific power and emotion by Johanna Riding as Sally cut through that and I liked it. But just the one, and I reckon that was her performance rather than the song.
i don’t think I’ve been this far out of the critical consensus more than once or twice. It’s supposed to be 1971. My first year of working. The year I met Karen. A key year in my life. Follies has not the slightest whiff of 1971 for me. OK, it’s America, not the UK, but Sondheim’s “1971” is what I’d call “1956.”
Production – *****
Plot – **
Music **
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID (2019)
5 star
Claire Allfree, Telegraph *****
Follies is not so much a nostalgic love letter to Broadway as a poignant and entirely painful skewering of the simplistic fantasies of femininity paraded by those intoxicating Forties chorus lines. Like the inferior Company currently in the West End, it’s a series of sketches rather than a fully developed narrative, yet Cooke’s emotionally devastating production mines such deep wells of longing, disenchantment and finally despair that it takes on the force of a full-on marital psychodrama.
Caroline McGinn, Time Out *****
The genius thing about Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical is that it starts at the end of love: the opposite of the golden-age musicals it looks back on, which tend to end at the start, with a quartet of youngsters high-stepping into the sunset.
Stefan Kyriazis, Express *****
Natasha Tripney, The Stage *****
Lucy Brooks, Culture Whisper *****
Marianka Swaine, The Arts Desk *****
Sarah Crompton What’s On Stage *****
When Dominic Cooke’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies first landed on the Olivier stage it scooped up virtually every award going. Now it’s back, substantially recast, slightly reworked, and – amazingly – it glistens more brightly than ever. Cooke’s stroke of brilliance was to treat Sondheim’s 1971 show, with its dramatic and melancholy book by James Goldman, as if it were less a musical and more a densely textured meditation on life’s regrets and mistakes.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG:
ALEXANDER HANSON
The Truth 2016 (Michel)
The Lie, 2017 (Paul)
Wars of The Roses: Richard III, Rose Kingston (Buckingham)
Wars of The Roses: Edward IV Rose Kingston (Richard, D. of York)
Wars of The Roses: Henry VI Rose Kingston (Richard, D. of York)
[…] added of the National Theatre production of FOLLIES (linked) by Stephen Sondheim. This revival of the 2017 production had universal 5 star reviews. Ah! […]
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