Theatre in Review: Follies (Marquis Theatre)

	Don Correia, Susan Watson, Jayne Houdyshell, and Mary Beth Peil. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The ghosts are back, and Broadway is better for it. As soon as the curtain rises on the single, impassive spirit of a showgirl past, you know you're going to be in good hands - and so it proves with Eric Schaeffer's revival of Follies. A Strindbergian portrait of troubled marriages, a Proustian account of the search for lost time, a musical that suggests that musicals are a cruel joke on those who love them, this famously difficult show challenges the skills of even the finest theatre artists. I've seen three previous stagings -- alas, not Harold Prince's original in 1971 -- and all of them have had their good points, but this is the production I've been waiting for all my life. Over the course of two and a half hours, I lost track of the times the hair was raised on the back of my head.

This production works like no other I've seen because Schaeffer has focused on both Follies' grand vision and on the all-important details that give it emotional power. Thanks to the largesse of the Kennedy Center, the original producer, James Goldman's tale of aging entertainers and their spouses, on a date with the past in a crumbling Broadway theatre, is given -- there is no other word for it -- a monumental staging. It's an intimate drama about the havoc wreaked by unfulfilled dreams, but Follies also pays tribute to the lost world of Broadway between the wars -- a time when popular entertainment deeply reflected the social consensus -- before kissing it goodbye forever. It comes with a built-in grandeur, and any production needs to reflect that. This one has it all -- a cast of nearly 40, an orchestra of two dozen playing Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece score in Jonathan Tunick's ravishing orchestrations, and a design that reaches into the depths of the house.

But the real thrill of Schaeffer's production is in the dozens of thoughtful details that amplify the story, taking a musical that is sometimes (wrongly) dismissed as a sour, shallow soap opera and giving it heartbreaking impact. Of course, Bernadette Peters, one of the world's greatest interpreters of Sondheim's catalog, turns the ballad "Losing My Mind" into a commanding psychological portrait of a woman warped by a fantasy of desire. But note what happens when the song is over -- how her body slumps, ever so slightly, and she trudges offstage, a portrait of defeat. You see it when Jan Maxwell puts a tentative, exploratory hand on a ruined proscenium in wonderment at the passing of time, or, later, when being carried across the stage by a complement of chorus boys, her face becomes a mask of comic ennui. It's there in the way Danny Burstein, having unleashed his fury at an unloving wife and a too-loving mistress, sinks to the stage in despair, and in the haunted look in Ron Raines' eyes as he insists that, really, no really, he's perfectly contented with his life. (This song, "The Road You Didn't Take," contains one of Sondheim's personal-best lyrics: "The Ben I'll never be/Who remembers him?" In eight words, he takes direct aim at his character's soul.)

In an age of four-character musicals, jukebox tuners, and featherbrained retreads of Hollywood comedies, Follies is a brilliant reminder of what artists, equipped with ambition and the talent to realize it, can create. Forty years on, there's nothing else like it. It begins with a straightforward set-up -- a reunion of the former casts of the Weissman (read Ziegfeld) Follies -- and, by degrees, becomes darker and more surreal as the membrane between past and present collapses and the characters find themselves side by side with the shades of their youthful selves. As long-suppressed yearnings are unleashed and increasingly bitter recriminations are aired, the action becomes more and more disconnected until it dissolves into a kind of nightmare follies, in which the leads act out their emotional conflicts.

It's strong stuff, but, fortunately, Schaeffer has a cast that moves from strength to strength. Peters submerges her natural glamour into Sally, the ex-showgirl turned depressed Arizona housewife. Outfitted in a dowdy gown and overly pert hairdo, Sally is a middle-aged girl, terrified of aging and living in thrall to the dreams of her 19-year-old self. There's something chilling about the way she says, "I was a Weissman girl," investing the line with various layers of longing and regret. Each of her numbers, especially "In Buddy's Eyes" and "Losing My Mind," charts her spectacular emotional disintegration. Burstein gives one of his finest performances as Sally's husband, the glad-handing salesman Buddy, drunk with love for his wife and enraged at her inability love him back. It's especially gripping to see his anguish, so well expressed in "The Right Girl," transformed into a sinister burlesque routine in "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me Blues," accompanied by a pair of blowsy chorines.

Maxwell, impossibly sleek and chic in her golden gown, offers plenty of brittle hilarity as Phyllis, who married a go-getter and finds herself trapped in a golden cage. "We haven't really talked since 1941," she tells husband. "Do you think the Japs will win the war?" (One of her more priceless moments finds her leaning against a wall, bored out of her mind, while a sexy young waiter nibbles on her neck.) Ron Raines' Ben -- a politician and power broker, married to Phyllis -- is a practiced charmer on the outside and a hollow man on the inside, his suave manner devolving into a stare of bewilderment in his private moments.

Follies also depends on a series of brilliant musical comedy turns - each of them an echo of Broadway's glittering past -- and again this production is richly endowed. "I'm Still Here" is one of the finest show tunes ever written -- each line adding a telling detail to the portrait of a certain kind of show business survivor -- and Elaine Paige presents it with a bleak humor and mounting fury. Susan Watson and Don Correia step delightfully through the novelty number "Rain on the Roof," and Mary Beth Peil slinks so amusingly through "Ah, Paris" that you'd never guess she plays the dour mother-in-law in television's The Good Wife. The biggest showstoppers are "Broadway Baby," delivered with hammer-and-tongs hilarity by Jayne Houdyshell, and "One More Kiss," ravishingly, and chillingly, sung by Rosalind Elias, as an aging diva, in a duet with her younger incarnation. ("Never look back," sings Elias - words that reverberate powerfully in this context.) In a class by itself is "Who's What Woman?", Follies' fabled mirror number, in which a chorus line of faded beauties, tentatively and awkwardly fumbling their way through half-remembered steps, are joined by a gleaming, ghostly chorus line in a stunning collision of past and present. Here, as elsewhere, Warren Carlyle's choreography is exemplary.

All of these sad, seedy, and surreal goings-on are aided immeasurably by the work of a gifted design team. The relatively new Marquis Theatre isn't the ideal location for a show about lost Broadway, but Derek McLane dresses the house in distressed, ripped muslin sheets, effectively turning it into a candidate for the wrecker's ball. He also has come up with a most effective transition into the show's "Loveland" sequence -- the nightmare follies --with a disorienting coup de theater that sets the tone for everything that follows. Natasha Katz's lighting demarcates the line between past and present with Cartesian precision, moving between them with the fluidity of a dream; she also endows Loveland with a beautiful -- and slightly sinister -- color palette and some dazzling chase sequences. Gregg Barnes' costumes range from period-accurate formal wear -- each outfit calculated to tell you something important about its wearer -- to a gorgeously detailed procession of Joseph Urban-inspired showgirl designs. Kai Harada's sound design has a blessedly light touch; a bonus is the eerie sound of wind whipping through the theatre before Act I and during the intermission.

There are little moments here and there that I wish were different. Maxwell goes a bit over the top during the last verse of "Could I Leave You?", arguably the greatest kiss-off number ever written, and in one or two other cases one feels that the cast reaches for big emotional effects when it would be better to simply trust the words. But in its glorious visuals, incisive performances, and searing emotional impact, this is likely to be the finest Follies we are likely to get. Only a fool would miss it.--David Barbour