If Company is a case for marriage, Follies is a study of the dissatisfactions that develop (and fester) in a pair of long ones. It’s the reunion party for former Follies girls, as their abandoned theater is about to be torn down—for a parking lot rather than a condo tower, in another out-of-date New Yorkism. Through the evening we see glimpses of the show that once was and also of two relationships that may have run their course.
Written by Sondheim and the book writer James Goldman, Follies followed Company as the second installment in the notoriously fruitful Sondheim-Hal Prince collaboration, opening on Broadway in 1971, a year after its predecessor. Now it’s running at London’s National Theatre, across the Thames from where its counterpart just finished its run. It’s a return of Dominic Cooke’s much-praised staging in the same space from 2017, with the signal difference that the key role of Sally Durant Plummer, one of two key former Follies girls, long trapped in an unhappy marriage, was last time around played by Imelda Staunton and is now played by Joanna Riding.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★★ review of Company here.]
Let’s pause to Six-Degrees-of-Sondheim this for a moment: Follies followed Company in its New York debut. Follies preceded Company recently in London, initially starring Staunton. Staunton played Gypsy in London the year before she did Follies, and Sondheim reportedly called her the best Madame Rose he ever saw. In Merrily We Roll Along (currently off-Broadway in New York), Charley Kringas warns Frank Shepard about giving in to an audience’s demand for an encore: True greatness, he says, is knowing when to get off. The National has brought back its popular Follies, in the shadow of Company and this time without Staunton.
True greatness might have lied in letting this Follies revival, excellent though it is, run its course.
It is, to be clear, gorgeous—in both look and sound. The National’s Olivier Theatre is enormous, a space that feels like the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center, but bigger. (Its seats weren’t all filled on a Saturday night a month into this latest run.) There’s a towering brick well on the stage that represents the derelict Weissman Theatre, rotating as scenes shift from interior to exterior. The orchestra sits further upstage, sounding rich and beautiful—there are 21 players, working from what seem to be Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations. There are more, broken theater seats upstage left, more of the ruined auditorium. The showgirl costumes are sumptuous, and the modern-day ones are striking. (The designer is Vicki Mortimer, and the lighting designer is Paule Constable.)
Many of the performances are wonderful, too, especially that first-act lineup of Follies-redux production numbers. Claire Moore, new for this revived revival, sells a New York accent and tough New York moxie in “Broadway Baby.” Dawn Hope leads a spectacular “Who’s That Woman?”—here a “mirror song” without mirrors. And Tracie Bennett gives a late-Judy Garland growl, and a late-Judy Garland finish to “I’m Still Here.”
Among the four principals, though, only Alexander Hanson, new to the role of Benjamin Stone, deeply registers. He’s a dashing, John Slattery-like eminence gris, and he plays the part to perfection. Janie Dee, returning as his frosty wife, Phyllis, is duly imperious and looks great in Mortimer’s elegantly early-’70s gowns. But she doesn’t match the unforgettable and magnificently restrained fury Jan Maxwell brought to that same role in New York in 2011. Riding and Peter Forbes, as the other couple, Sally and Buddy, are perfectly good but not memorable.
The result is that as the musical shifts from happy recollections of Follies numbers past to the modern-day struggles of these two marriages—there’s no intermission to separate the two acts—the evening loses its energy. The “Loveland” sequence, the fantasy numbers in which each of those four considers and rages about their unhappy romances, feels a bit tedious, not cathartic. As the musical ends, and the two couples choose to stay together, that resolution seems less earned than resigned.
After all, as Company asks, whaddaya wanna get married for?
Follies opened February 22, 2019, at the Olivier Theatre (London) and runs through May 11, 2019. Tickets and information: nationaltheatre.org.uk
