One More Kiss, and Then We Break The Spell

Review: Follies
The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
May 29, 2011


"Look at these people, aren't they eerie? Look at this party, isn't it dreary?" That's how Sally Durant Plummer, a 49-year-old Phoenix housewife, sees her return to the theater where she performed in the Weismann Follies as a young girl.  The year is 1971, and the showgirls are reuniting thirty years later in a lavish party before the theater is demolished. Over the course of the evening, watched by the ghostly spirits of decadent showgirls still haunting the wings, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies allows the chorines one last burst of nostalgia before their memories fade into the impending rubble. Pastiche songs liven the proceedings, as old veterans of the stage relive their moments in the spotlight.

With these memories come unfulfilled lives, unstable marriages, and the loss of their careers in show business. Sally (distracted, lost in her past) and her old friend Phyllis (cool, stately) come back with their husbands, but neither has found happiness at home. Phyllis cannot connect with her bruised diplomat husband Ben, while Sally cannot shake the vivid fantasy that he will fall back in love with her. Bernadette Peters (who could've been a showgirl once) is fragile and girlish as Sally, affecting as she veers closer toward unreality. Sondheim's score, though, doesn't always sit well in her voice. 

The strongest performances come from Danny Burstein as Sally's stage-door husband Buddy and Jan Maxwell as Phyllis, who finds the warmth and genuine care for her husband Ben beneath her icy exterior. She delivers the bracing "Could I Leave You?" like a runaway locomotive, as she finally explodes from the suffocation of living as an absent politician's plus-one. Buddy is playing around behind Sally's back, and she knows it, but Burstein makes us understand his need for attention (just like the follies girls).

Director Eric Schaeffer has assembled some fine performers for the follies veterans, notably Linda Lavin crooning "Broadway Baby" and Terri White hoofing it to "Who's That Woman?" with the rest of the ladies. Alas, despite the ghosts parading through the party, the nostaglic numbers mostly showcase fifty-sixty-something women in their prime, without the melancholy beneath. Not until the second act, with Rosalind Elias' aria from her fargone operetta days ("One More Kiss"), do we see any sadness in these Follies solos. Frank Rich once reflected that Follies represents a death of the American musical, and Sondheim's score (more than Goldman's fragmented book) both celebrates the artform and mourns its passing.

But the production blossoms as Sally, Phyllis, Ben, and Buddy are swept into Loveland, a dreamlike theatrical limbo in which they are forced to confront the follies (note the lowercase) of their youth. Burstein's "Buddy's Blues" is excellent, a vaudeville toe-tapper full of humor and anxiety. Standing eerily still, Peters shines in the femme fatale torch song "Losing My Mind," a performance that summons the desperation and disillusionment intended for the show. There may never be another perfect Follies, but isn't the point that we always regret the road we didn't take?