Wednesday, April 04, 2018

Happy 47th birthday to Follies

... the glorious, epic, mold-breaking 1971 musical by Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince and Michael Bennett that ended up being too lavish and probably too jarringly mold-breaking for its own good. The most expensive Broadway production to date when it opened, it drew effusive critical praise but didn't get the musical-theater-pantheon foothold it deserved and closed after 500 performances without recouping any of its investments.
I was unfortunately three when it opened and I couldn't get tickets, but my heart and endless fascination and I were eventually--inevitably--pulled into its magical, inspiring, gorgeous, heartbreaking world when I saw the 1987 London revival, which gave Eartha Kitt a much-needed comeback when she replaced the broken-ankled Delores Gray (just like what happened to her in 42nd Street!) to belt the iconic "I'm Still Here"--which, as coincidences never cease, was the song in the 1971 production that brought Yvonne De Carlo back from the brink of terminal embarrassment after playing Lily Munster on TV.

Thankfully--inevitably--Follies has since then finally achieved the musical-theater-pantheon stature it deserves, and I've been fortunate enough to have seen more productions of it than I can count in New York, D.C., Chicago and beyond. I'm obviously overflowing with fanboy knowledge and trivia and opinions and lyrics (oh boy, am I overflowing with lyrics) about the show, but if I even want to come close to sharing everything about its brilliance that's waiting to burst out of me, I'll have to schedule a six-week subscription-series symposium at a local college to get it all Jakesplained to you.

Fun fact: It opened at the Winter Garden Theater in NYC, where--again with the coincidences--I just so happened to see my first-ever Broadway show (Cats, the fact of which I am hard-stop-sun-comes-up-coffee-cup unwilling to discuss).

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