Everything Was Possible

by Ted Chapin

  Taken as a whole, the collection of reviews Follies received was as rangy as possible. The hope is always for the intelligent reviewers to be linked with the influential publications. Unfortunately for Follies, the more influential the medium, the less adventurous the critic seemed to be. Many critics were more than willing to minimize the weaknesses in favor of celebrating the strengths, but often those brave souls were not situated in papers with wide circulations. And as with Boston, some wrote perceptive and probing analyses of a show they recognized as complex. A few examples:

  “Follies” is a fresh, new musical; it is not a great musical. It may, however, be an epoch-making musical. It succeeds in collapsing and expanding time like an accordion, in juxtaposing the past and present in such a way that each comments on and gently mocks the other. That’s new and may influence musical comedy concepts to come. (Howard Lord, Long Island Catholic)

  “Follies” is most trenchant when the pathos of performance is allowed to come through the elaborate contrivance of plot and spectacle. Prince and Bennett have treated the musical numbers with loving dedication and style. But neither they nor Sondheim are thinkers, and if “Follies” can be faulted it is on the grounds of its limited emotional and intellectual range. It is a bold musical which uncovers ideas it is unwilling (or unable) to pursue. It outlines the process of delusion and also argues for more authentic priorities for the imagination. I’ll bravo for that. (John Lahr, Village Voice)

  For all its rainbow razzle-dazzle, “Follies” is a plaintive anthem to loss: the loss of youth, of love, of the delusions of the past. A disturbing seriousness underlies the glitter of this hard, sad, marvelous musical—a discomforting view of life: we act as best we can, and sometimes the consequences of our past mistakes are hidden for years; self-knowledge comes late and the lack of it can produce frightening results. Strange, sober matter for a musical. By anatomizing the wrong turns we take in life, the dusty answers time brings to our fantasies, “Follies” forces us to preside over the death of dreaming. It is a courageous, not a comforting show. (Arthur Friedman, Phoenix)

  The show continued to generate an amazing amount of publicity. The cover story in Time appeared in the May 3rd issue. In addition to a lengthy feature on the show, it also included a mini-feature, “Sondheim on Songwriting,” in which he responded to several specific subjects—for example, “On Rhyming: Clever rhyming is easy . . . Hammerstein said that the really difficult word to rhyme is a word like day, because the possibilities are so enormous” and “On Lorenz Hart: I find him sloppy all the time,” “On Lyrics and Poetry: Poetry exists in its conciseness . . . lyrics exist in time.” Louis Botto’s article on Hal appeared in the May 18th issue of Look, with several wonderful color photos, including a two-pager of Hal sitting on the steps of the Colonial Theatre surrounded by the showgirls in their most elaborate costumes. Show magazine ran its cover story in July, and a new Avedon photograph of Alexis and some of the showgirls appeared in Life. In February of 1972, Forbes ran a cover story on Hal; the magazine’s cover showed Hal’s face imposed on the Follies poster, with his expression the same as the face on the poster. Theatre Crafts did an article on the costumes in its May/June issue; Stereo Review featured Steve in July; and After Dark sent Craig Zadan to interview Steve for its June issue.

  Also in June, David Frost devoted the entirety of his ninety-minute TV talk show to Follies. This was rare, and in addition to the five principals, Frost invited Steve, Hal, and Jim Goldman. The program provided some amusing moments, including John McMartin’s witty and understated comments about how he got into the show: “I went out to California last year because I wanted to work in films, and when I arrived, the various studios went bankrupt. So I spent most of the year practicing driving to the airport. Then in December I got the call to come back east to audition for three shows. I got on the plane, I auditioned, they wanted me, and here I am.” Yvonne spoke about having auditioned for the role of Phyllis, and of receiving a very sweet note from Hal saying that it wasn’t going to work out, and then getting a call from her agent about “another part in there that would be very suitable.” She then sang “I’m Still Here”—and, no surprise, she went up on the lyrics. Then, to give some sense of how Yvonne’s Carlotta (and the show in general) evolved, Steve played “Can That Boy Fox Trot!” Alexis giggled when clips from her movies were shown, and both she and Gene spoke convincingly of the excitement of coming east for this particular adventure. Dorothy just kept saying how thrilling the experience was for her and how much admiration she had for everyone connected with the show. Hal and Jim were asked to describe the complex genesis of the show. All in all, it was fun, lively television—and the kind of publicity that everyone on Broadway craves.

  The New York Times ultimately acknowledged that the show was controversial. Follies had a champion in culture editor Seymour Peck, who continued to encourage various articles, both pro and con. Three weeks after the opening, a rave review by Martin Gottfried titled “Flipping over ‘Follies’” ran on the first page of the Sunday Arts & Leisure Section. He said: “I am convinced Follies is monumental theater . . . if it is not consistently good, it is always great.” Having received many letters in response to their double-whammy in-house negative reviews, the paper devoted the entire Drama Mailbag on May 2 to the controversy surrounding the show. Labeled “Feudin’, Fussin’ and ‘Follies,’ ” it led with an eloquent letter from historian and author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in which he complained about New York’s newspaper of record having an Englishman wielding so much power over several recent shows that were not to his taste:

  “Follies,” with its complex and sardonic commentary on the American Theater and on American mores in general, is a peculiarly American show. Its wit, its pace, its sense of parody, its self-mocking nostalgia, its ironic exploitation of myth—all constitute a marked case of American exceptionalism. One can understand why Barnes, bred in another tradition of musical comedy, was baffled by “Follies” and felt compelled to put it down.

  Dorothy Collins and John McMartin—Sally and Ben—what might have been.

  Alexis Smith and Gene Nelson—Phyllis and Buddy.

  Immediately following, Barnes responded, “Should only homosexuals review homosexual plays? . . . An immigrant to any country must expect one or two ethnic slurs. It is only surprising when they come from the man who occupies the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities of the City University of New York.”

  Other letter writers included two actors who came to the show’s defense—Jerry Orbach: “Clive Barnes has been wrong a few times in the past, but in the matter of ‘Follies’ he is criminally mistaken”; and Remak Ramsay: “Barnes completely missed the basically idealistic and optimistic point of the show: namely, that despite whatever difficulties there may be in any deep relationship, we all risk losing our membership in the human race if we fail to make an emotional commitment to somebody.” Two other letter writers spoke out against the Times men—Tom Couto: “While Kerr saw some of the trees, he never managed to see the forest”; and Geraldine Stutz: “That your critics—alone—failed to hail ’Follies’ with hosannas is sad and significant for the Times. But that they did not even recognize the monumental breakthrough for the musical theater, I find appalling. Where are their eyes and their ears—and their expertise?” They did find one person who sided with their men: Allen Churchill, who wrote, “Hal Prince chanted, ‘send him back to England.’ ‘Follies’ is one of the dreariest and least rewarding shows I have seen in a lifetime of theatergoing. It is a fraud perpetrated on the public.”

  Follies had arrived. It was being talked about and written about, and it was highly visible. The Tony Awards weren’t going to come around for another year, but it did get recognized by some lesser panels. As soon as it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award later on in the spring, Hal had the words “BEST MUSICAL” painted on the marquee below the title.

  The recording of the Follies cast album was my final official project as gofer. It
took place at Manhattan Center, an odd building on West Thirty-fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, built as an opera house at the turn of the last century by Oscar Hammerstein I. His goal was to produce opera competitively and put the Metropolitan Opera Company out of business. This was in 1903, and his plan failed, although he did scare the Met sufficiently for them to pay him a significant sum of money not to produce opera in New York for a specified period of years. On the seventh floor of his building, Hammerstein built a stately ballroom with a fully equipped stage at one end. The acoustics in the room were quite good, and in the 1960s and seventies it was used by a variety of recording companies to record albums involving large forces—full orchestras, choruses, and so on. It was used for recordings of operas, and Capitol often used it for cast albums. (Capitol’s corporate home was its famous round building in Hollywood; all it kept in New York were some offices on Sixth Avenue and a small studio on West Forty-sixth Street, in the same building that housed Eaves Costume Company.) This was still the era when companies boasted unique recording technologies and sound qualities all their own—“Stereo 360” from Columbia Records, “Dynagroove” from RCA Victor. Capitol, however, professed no such proprietary innovations, and when they used Manhattan Center for recording, they simply hired whatever mobile recording equipment a given session called for. Such was the case with the Follies cast album.

  Every song used in the recording had been subjected to internal cuts, and most musical transitions were cut entirely. Because the entire album had to be recorded in one day, the company’s day off (for which cast members were paid one week’s salary), the schedule was carefully designed so that no one had to spend extraneous time in the studio. (The orchestra, of course, was there for all four three-hour sessions.) A certain amount of time was carefully allocated to each number, and once that time expired, they had to be “on to the next.” Otherwise, the domino effect took place and the day could conceivably end with a song not being recorded. There was, moreover, one song that Dick Jones didn’t want to include on the album but which Steve Sondheim most definitely did. The song was “One More Kiss,” and the compromise was that if there was time, it would be recorded, even if Jones couldn’t promise it would end up on the album. (It did get recorded but didn’t make its way onto the album until the CD reissue years later.)

  The cast handled things well. Dorothy seemed to be the most comfortable, perhaps because the recording studio was where she was most at home. Everyone had special lyric sheets that indicated how the truncated versions of each song would go. This was slightly unnerving for some, but for the most part they were troupers.

  What wasn’t any fun was the technical end. One problem was that a large coatroom just off the elevator lobby served as the control room, and it had no visible connection to the main floor, where the orchestra and singers were located. There was sound communication, but because the engineers couldn’t see the performers, the control room might as well have been blocks away. Although recording engineer Andy Wiswell and the Capitol recording staff had what should have been enough time to set up, the session was plagued with technical glitches. For example, I was standing in the makeshift control room during a take of “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” when suddenly a buzzing sound could be heard on every other beat. It seemed to come from the bass, so the take was stopped, and before it could continue one of the guys had to run out onto the floor, check the connections to the microphone next to the bass, then run back into the control room and try it again to see if that fixed the problem. It hadn’t. Suddenly the wires and the microphones were taking up precious time that should have been spent laying down performances. Problems continuously arose throughout the day—some microphones weren’t turned on when people began to sing, sometimes the actors were standing too far from the microphones. Jones had no choice but to forge ahead as best he could.

  When the album came out, it looked great: the cover was well printed, although they opted for the whole poster on the front; the insert had nice photographs and Larry Cohen’s excellent notes. But the technical problems were clear from the first release. There was a lot of unhappiness over the songs being abridged, and the fans were down on the album from the very beginning. In The Harvard Crimson, John Viertel, a classmate and friend of Frank Rich’s, wrote, “The production of the album has taken the fire out of Follies. No care has been taken to allow the riches to surface. The album is a commercial venture in the worst sense of the phrase.” He then quoted a line from “Lucy and Jessie”: “In Sondheim’s own words, ‘It is a sorrowful precis, It’s very messy.’ ” It does capture the performances of the original cast, but the technical shortcomings have, to this day, made the original-cast album of Follies a disappointment.

  Publicity kept coming. Stars attending performances were chronicled in the gossip columns, as were the whereabouts of the leading actors. There were further articles about the performers. Fifi, resolved to doing her bit for what looked like a hit show, gave an interview in which she was quoted as saying, “Hal Prince is going to heaven, whether he likes it or not. Can you eemagine, geeving me a break on Broadway? I’m 67 and I make my Broadway debut!” Dorothy was followed backstage during a performance for a profile in the Daily News Sunday Magazine: “Racing around backstage as usual, she shouts ‘happy show!’ to every performer in the general vicinity. . . .” Alexis avoided the press when she could, but was frank—about herself—when she was corralled into giving interviews. From one: “In Hollywood I always got the roles I didn’t want, the ones everyone else turned down. They would start at the top of the list—first Bette Davis, then Ida Lupino, then Ann Sheridan. If they didn’t want it, I got it.” Even some members of the chorus got press attention. Ursula Maschmeyer, the tallest of the Las Vegas showgirls, lamented that “there are no stage-door Johnnies on Broadway. It’s very boring every night, like a walking coat hanger putting on glamorous clothes and trying to look glamorous.” Ethel Barrymore Colt gave an interview in which she described being the daughter of Ethel Barrymore, recognized as the first lady of the American Theater: “When I started in theater I was eighteen, straight from the convent, with no dramatic training, and I was a dreadful failure. Then I became a singer—at least no one could say I didn’t sing as well as my mother!”

  The running of the show became routine. Ethel took to drinking more than she had been and occasionally showed up for performances in questionable shape. But Fritz Holt had only to arch an eyebrow and say, “Ethel . . .” and she would clean up her act. Alexis remained somewhat aloof from the company, although maintaining the friendships she had made early on, most noticeably with hairdresser Joe Tubens. Yvonne was out on the town whenever possible; she even managed to get herself into some situation that resulted in a long black limo showing up several Saturday nights in a row with a couple of serious-looking men standing by to escort her out to a certain Long Island night spot where she would sing. Some cast members left during the run—Fred Kelly was the first, invoking a two-weeks’-notice clause in his contract. (He wrote a gracious letter of resignation in which he detailed the several roles he understudied and got to play, and ending by saying, “Thank you again for the ‘pleasure of their company.’ ”) Virginia Sandifur left to play a five-month run as Eve opposite Lauren Bacall in the tour of Applause. Kurt Peterson left for a revival of On the Town, and Sheila Smith went on to Sugar, the musical version of Some Like It Hot, in which she would play Sweet Sue, the leader of the all-girl band. But for the most part, the company remained intact, although by the end of the run in New York many in the cast were missing performances on an almost regular basis.

  I went back to college, but stopped by from time to time to visit. Everyone remained cheerful, and people seemed happy to see me. I would drop in on Yvonne, who would greet me just as cheerfully as she always did. At one performance when I was visiting, she changed a line, “He’s just a thing. But he’s twenty-six,” to “He’s just a thing. But he’s twenty.” I flattered myself to think it might h
ave been for me, but it might also have been her unique memory up to its usual tricks. She sent one letter, in which she told me of her boys’ arrival for the summer. I sent her a reply. Years later I was touring through Universal City in Los Angeles when I saw her name up on the billboard as the “Star of the Day.” I wondered if I ought to seek her out and reintroduce myself; it didn’t seem to make any sense.

  The show started off strong at the box office, with grosses rising each week through the spring to a high of $107,549 for the week of June 5th. Then it began a slow decline, which prompted Variety to observe, when the gross dipped to $79,832 in July, that “Follies sagged to a new low and now appears to be a questionable payoff prospect.” It continued to run, with grosses fluctuating week to week, hitting a low of $31,854 during the notoriously bad Christmas week. The Tonys helped give it a boost in the spring, when it won a total of seven awards of its ten nominations. It swept the design categories—Boris for sets, Flossie for costumes, and Tharon for lighting. Steve won for Best Score (there was no longer a separate award for lyrics and music). The only performer to win was Alexis, who beat out fellow nominee Dorothy for Lead Actress. Gene Nelson was nominated for Featured Actor, but no one else was nominated in either featured category. Hal and Michael won for Best Director, and Michael won his first Tony for choreography. Jim Goldman’s book and the show itself were both nominated, but both lost to a musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Among other ironies of the Tonys: Phil Silvers and Larry Blyden won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for a revival of Steve’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and the writer who took the Tony from Jim Goldman was Follies friend and admirer John Guare, whose adaptation of Two Gentlemen wasn’t even contemplated when Follies first went into rehearsal. Upon receiving his Tony he remarked: “I don’t know what to say. I’m an investor in Follies!”