Follies in Concert (BBC-TV, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I opened the boxed set of the late Stephen Sondheim’s musicals and watched the 1985 video of Follies in Concert, based on his 1971 musical Follies which in its original production was a major box-office flop even though it ran for over 500 performances and would therefore have been considered a success. Follies in Concert was billed as a definitive production of the work, though according to the Wikipedia page on the show Sondheim continued to fiddle with the text as late as 2017 and so there is no this-is-it authoritative version. This one had the New York Philharmonic in the pit – actually on the stage of the auditorium since this was a concert version, albeit semi-staged – and it was a disappointment because it was basically a video of The Making of “Follies” in Concert as much as it was of the actual show, It consisted of half its 90-minute running time with rehearsal footage of the four days before the concert (September 6 and 7, 1985) and half a very “potted” version of the concert itself.

The abbreviated version of Follies given here won’t provide newbies much of an idea of the intricacies of the complete version, which is hard to cast over the years at least partially because William Goldman’s original script called for the four leads to be double-cast with young actors playing their younger selves in flashback sequences and older veteran performers playing them in the show’s 1971 present. It also features a downbeat ending in which one of the characters has a nervous breakdown on stage while reproducing one of his old “Follies” numbers and reveals the depths of his self-loathing and hate. One of the things various rewriters have tried to do is giving it a happier ending in the tradition of more normal musicals. I can see why Follies has become the great white whale of flop musicals (one of them, anyway) because there’s a sense that somewhere in the long accumulation of various materials lurks a masterpiece. Right now Follies in Concert sounded like one potential piece of the jigsaw puzzle, remarkable mainly for featuring glimpses of legendary performers like Elaine Stritch, Barbara Cook, Betty Comden and Adolph Green in their later years.