50 Favourite Musicals: 1a: FOLLIES (1971) (Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life. So here we are...  a year and 10 months in the making and we have reached the stage musical that is my favourite ever - and I cannot name one out of the four shows that I have left to consider.

I have tried every criteria, every angle and there is simply no way I can say that one of the four is better than the other.  One nearly lost the shared top place when I considered productions of it that I felt had not done it justice but, with that particular show, I simply had to overlook that, bearing in mind the first I saw was definitive.  So let's go... my Top Four Number One's (in alphabetical order)

First performed: 1971, Winter Garden Theatre, NY

First seen by me: 1985, Forum Theatre, Wythenshawe

Productions seen: four

Score: Stephen Sondheim

Book: James Goldman

Plot: In 1971, onstage at the derelict Weismann Theatre on the eve of it's demolition, producer Dimitri Weismann holds a reunion of the stars and chorus girls of his "Follies" which ran between the World Wars.  Old songs and routines are remembered, stirring up the ghosts of their younger selves.  But for former best friends and chorus girls, Sally and Phyllis and their husbands, salesman Buddy and diplomat Ben, it becomes a night of bitter recriminations and the chance for lost love to be found again... what will the cruel light of day reveal?

Five memorable numbers: LOSING MY MIND, IN BUDDY'S EYES, WHO'S THAT WOMAN, I'M STILL HERE, ONE MORE KISS

In 1965, Sondheim and writer James Goldman wanted to collaborate on a project together and agreed on Goldman's idea of a murder mystery set at a showgirls reunion.  The murder plot stalled but the showgirls reunion intrigued them especially how regrets for what one did and more importantly didn't do, can haunt your life.  Five years later, Sondheim was keen to follow up the success of his groundbreaking COMPANY with the show's producer/director Hal Prince and choreographer Michael Bennett and, when Prince heard of the reunion idea, he had an immediate visual reference: a 1960 Life magazine photograph of a glamorous but fragile 61 year-old Gloria Swanson, standing in the rubble of the Roxy Cinema in New York which had opened in 1927 with her film THE LOVES OF SUNYA. Prince felt this captured the essence of the project - the survivor, the glamour and the ruin.

Goldman and Sondheim brought in the bittersweet marital discord found in COMPANY and FOLLIES was born.  Prince's 1971 production ran for 522 performances but lost over $720,000, due of huge production costs and audience ambivalence - despite 'names' like film stars Alexis Smith and Yvonne de Carlo, 1950s singer Dorothy Collins, Broadway star John McMartin  and veteran performers Ethel Shutta and Fifi D'Orsay, audiences found Goldman's book too downbeat.  It won seven of the ten Tony Awards it was nominated for but failed to win Best Musical.  Cult status grew through the original cast album but sadly Capitol Records only released it on a single album meaning a lot of the score was abridged or not recorded.  The show has had two further Broadway revivals in 2001 and 2011, but lost out winning the Best Musical Revival Tony Award both times.

1985 was my FOLLIES year!  To rectify the abridged 1971 recording decision, Herbert Ross staged two concert versions at Lincoln Center to be recorded over both nights by Thomas Z Shepherd for RCA featuring the full score with a jaw-dropping cast of Barbara Cook, Lee Remick, George Hearn, Mandy Patinkin, Elaine Stritch, Carol Burnett, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, etc. which is the nigh-on definitive recording.  But before this, I had seen my first FOLLIES production in Wythenshawe, Manchester, directed and choreographed by the under-valued Paul Kerryson and starring the wonderful Josephine Blake,  The production swept me away, making me yearn for a London transfer.  However, when FOLLIES finally opened in London in 1987, it was with several new songs and a more upbeat ending; producer Cameron Mackintosh had asked the creators to 'revisit' the material to make it more optimistic - Goldman was happy to, Sondheim less so.  After seeing a preview, I was outside the Shaftesbury Theatre stage door and Sondheim came out on his own.  While he signed my programme, I told him I had seen the Manchester production; he shot me a look and asked which I preferred.  Cautiously I said that, while loving Julia McKenzie, David Healy, Dolores Gray and Lynda Baron in the new version, I felt that Manchester had the edge for being more true to the material.  He replied that while shows can always stand a revision, it was always possible to return to the original.  Point taken Steve...

In 2006, FOLLIES reappeared in the unlikely location of the Landor Theatre in Clapham which seated a mere 48 people above a pub!  But any lack of grandeur was compensated with a cast guaranteed to make any 1980s musicals fan giddy: Sarah Payne, Claire Moore, Adele Anderson, Rachel Izen, Carol Ball and Roni Page among others.  This small production scored over the National Theatre's opulent 2017 version in one key element which was also there in 1971: then as at the Landor, the cast were chosen not only for their talents but also because to most of the audience, they would conjure up memories of seeing them in earlier shows back in the day.  For FOLLIES to truly work I believe that an audience must have that nostalgic connection to the actors onstage - particularly for those who appear in the smaller but pivotal roles of the former Follies performers, then the audience can supply their own 'ghosts' for the performers; dimly remembered memories of them in previous shows.

It was with trepidation that I watched the National's FOLLIES for the first time in 2017 - I had longed for a production to be done on that stage for so many years, could it measure up?  Yes it did - despite the lack of 'names' in the smaller roles, despite Tracie Bennett's mugging through "I'm Still Here" - I got the FOLLIES I have yearned for. Because when it hit, it hit hard and with astonishing performances wherever you looked: Imelda Staunton's despairing Sally, Janie Dee's bone-dry Phyllis. Philip Quast's crumbling Ben, but especially Josephine Barstow's tear-enducing "One More Kiss" - that the production managed to cast one of Britain's great operatic divas for the small role was special enough, but within the short space of her song, you could hear a pin drop as her voice soared around the auditorium; in a score of unstoppable great musical moments this was one to treasure. The truly astonishing thing about FOLLIES is that Sondheim floors you with one fantastic song after another.  It was director Dominic Cooke's first musical and he gave his production a thoroughness of vision which allowed the musical numbers to flourish while being equally as thorough at the emotional trauma the four main characters inflict amid the nostalgia.

So... what video to pick?  FOLLIES is well represented on YouTube through productions and one-off performances of songs from the score - and with a score so all-encompassing as this how do you pick a represenative song?  How's about a few.. the stinging sophistication of "Could I Leave You" sung by Lee Remick at the 1985 Lincoln Center concert and then, from the same documentary, a fascinating clip of Barbara Cook rehearsing and then performing the pure emotion of "In Buddy's Eyes" and finally, from the NT Live screening of their 2017 production, Imelda Staunton's broken Sally. lost in her obsession, singing "Losing My Mind".