Armando Fox – Music

Premise & Structure

Before a glorious old theater is turned into a parking lot, it hosts the “first and last reunion” of the Weissman’s Follies cast (a clear reference to the Ziegfeld Follies) who performed there “between the wars”. Among the guests are former Follies girls Sally and Phyllis and their husbands Buddy and Ben, former stage-door-Johnnies.  Sally had a brief and passionate affair with Ben but ultimately married Buddy, who had always worshiped her; his low self-esteem leads him to cheat on Sally because he feels certain she would have preferred Ben. Meanwhile Ben is now a successful UN diplomat with Phyllis as his trophy wife, but Phyllis knows about Sally and Ben’s early affair and is likewise suspicious that Sally and Ben may still carry a torch for each other, with the result that she is by turns cold and sophisticated or vulnerable and needing affection, depending on which side of Ben she sees.

At the time of the reunion, these conflicts have had twenty years to brew; what will happen when these four characters come together for the first time as grownups? Will they be able to confront their past and reconcile it with their imperfect present, or will it prove too much for them? What we learn is that, if anything, Sally and Ben carry a torch for what they think may have used to be; we’re left to decide how real it really was, and whether they long for their past relationship or for their glamorized ideal of it when compared to their imperfect present. This is what Follies is really about: dragging the glamorized fantasies out into the daylight, mercilessly revealing the unrealistic and unsustainable illusions they are.

For the most part, Follies is a traditional “book musical” with a linear plot, but somewhere in the second act, the four protagonists get into such a conflict with each other about their confused views of the past that they lose touch with reality (in a theatrical sense) and enter an extended “Follies sequence”. We are suddenly transported to the actual Follies set of decades past, on which each of the four protagonists sings about his or her personal “folly”–in each case, the folly of romanticizing the past, or living in it at the expense of denying the present and future. (In this sense, the show’s title works on two levels.) The climax of this sequence occurs when Ben, the most conflicted of all the protagonists, realizes mid-song that even he can no longer keep up appearances–he’s been fooling himself about how he sees his past, he’s seen right through himself and, panicked, becomes convinced everyone else will too. At that point, the Follies “dream world” collapses around him, with all the evening’s songs simultaneously playing, “vomiting up” the entire evening’s material–and we are abruptly back in the “real world” of the Follies reunion for the final moments of the show.

Music

Follies works on so many levels that its score is considered “an embarrassment of riches” by many Sondheim fans. Its most obvious aspect is pastiche, the conscious imitation of another style (and not in a derogatory way). Through both the Follies sequence and some of the songs sung by non-protagonist characters in Act I, Sondheim’s pastiche numbers constitute a tour de force of American popular musical styles from the turn-of-the-century operetta to Gershwin and Porter. Each pastiche number, while true to the style being imitated, invariably includes a signature element of harmony, rhythm or melody that serves as Sondheim’s unmistakable imprimatur. All of the songs display Sondheim’s absolute mastery of lyrics without calling attention to themselves (except in the Cole Porter pastiche “Ah, But Underneath”–which is faithful since Porter’s lyrics do in fact call attention to their own cleverness) and support the contention that Sondheim remains by far the most brilliant lyricist writing for theater today, and perhaps ever.

Subtext

More than probably anyone else writing musical theater, Sondheim’s work is rarely without significant subtext. The characters who sing his songs are, like us, complex, multidimensional, and often subject to a little self-denial, and we get subtle musical cues that what these characters are singing isn’t always what they really feel:

• In The Road You Didn’t Take, Ben tries to convince us–and himself–that the alternative path his life might have taken probably would have been unremarkable, so he has no real regrets about it.  But the music doesn’t say the same thing. For one thing, after a big buildup of persuasion – “One has regrets—which one forgets—and as the years go on….”— What happens as the years go on? The answer is accompanied by a sudden and unexpected change of key that completely saps the power of the harmonic resolution your ear was expecting to hear at the end of the phrase. In the new key, Ben continues his self-denial “The road you didn’t take hardly comes to mind – does it?  The door you didn’t try – Where could it have led?”  Furthermore, immediately after each empty affirmation we hear persistent and clearly dissonant muted trumpet notes, as if Ben’s conscience is tapping him on the shoulder after every phrase to protest, “Really? You’re sure you believe that?” (In a high-school concert performance of this show, the dissonant trumpet notes were not played at all. I almost jumped out of my chair. Either the trumpet player was absent, or someone with no understanding of the material removed the dissonant-sounding notes thinking they were typos.) The persistent dissonant edge recurs right up to the end of the song and lingers through the final chord.
• In In Buddy’s Eyes, Sally tries to persuade Ben–and herself–that even though her role as Buddy’s housewife may not match her passionate fantasy of a life with celebrity Ben, it’s still a good life because he practically worships her. But again the music tells a different story. When she talks about her own life, it’s all dry woodwinds, but when she talks about how Buddy sees her — “In Buddy’s eyes, I’m young, I’m beautiful” — we hear almost grotesquely romantic lush string crescendos. And tellingly, even while she waxes rhapsodic about Buddy — “…in Buddy’s arms, on Buddy’s shoulder, nothing dies” — right on dies there is a subtle, but very clear, dissonance thrown into the harmony, making it not only different from what it had been in previous verses, but almost uncomfortable, as if to say “something does die”. And just as suddenly, the moment of dropping the veil of self-denial has passed; we’re back into string crescendos and the song is over.
• Too Many Mornings is one of the most beautiful unabashed love ballads Sondheim has written for any score–though, as we soon find out, it’s a ballad about a love that won’t work out. Usually, this number is staged so as to give an obvious answer to the question whether Ben and Sally are really in love with each other, or with the romantic ideal of their past relationship. But even absent this staging, the vaguely dissonant chromatic violin notes at the very end add (which actually echo a melody sung earlier by Sally) reveal some bitterness in the sweet of the ballad, letting us know that maybe what the ballad is singing about is not everything it claims to be.

Discography

The two definitive recordings of the score are the Lincoln Center concert cast Follies In Concert (1985) and the Paper Mill Playhouse/NJ State Theater cast album (1999). (The original 1971 cast album is a mutilation of the score that should be expunged.) Follies In Concert has an impeccable cast and the amazing sound of the New York Philharmonic performing the score, but as it’s a concert version, it elides some extended musical sequences. The Paper Mill Playhouse cast album, while technically not quite as polished a recording, is more complete, and also includes a number of songs that were cut or replaced over the years. Most interesting among the cut songs are the three songs written for Phyllis. All of the songs are slightly different takes on the same idea—a woman who is such a chameleon, such a contradiction in terms, that even she herself may no longer be sure who the “real Phyllis” is: Uptown/Downtown, The Story of Lucy and Jessie, and Ah, But Underneath. All share dizzying Cole Porter-esque rhymes, and it’s interesting to listen to how the structure and harmonies in the music were cannibalized and reassembled into different songs.

Also quite beautiful is the song All Things Bright and Beautiful, originally a duet between Young Ben and Young Sally, which was cut as a vocal number but is used as the opening in the current version.