Hello Follies

Here's a little background about me (prepare to be riveted!) I grew up watching old black and white films. Thanks to my father who had an appreciation for old timey films (which we coincidentally watched in Nolita eons ago..more about that another time) I fell in love with Fred & Ginger, Katherine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth and all the other old gents and broads from back in the day. I went to university and silkscreened all of their images into posters of my own creations, interned at the Museum of Moving Image so I could hang out with the artifacts and ultimately graduated with a degree in Cinema Studies. Short story Long. I love that stuff. Everything about it. The glamour of the women, the debonair men. Love.

This is why when I got tickets to see Follies on Broadway, starring Bernadette Peters, I was really excited. Follies is short for The Ziegfeld Follies, a variety show that ran from 1907-1931(thank you Wikipedia) with vaudeville actors and comedians performing various acts in the theater. What the shows were perhaps most known for were the Ziegfeld Girls, the women that modeled, danced and pranced about the stage in ornate costumes. The show launched many careers in the tens and twenties and was quite an influential institution in the history of theater.

The Original Ziegfeld Girls

So, Follies is the story of two couples going back to the Ziegfeld theater to say goodbye to the building, 30 years after the show had closed, before it is torn down to become a parking lot. The women in the couples had been Ziegfeld girls and they, and their former costars reunite for one last hoorah. There is then the story of unrequited love, infidelity, and lost feeling between the two couples, intermingled with song and dance. My personal favorite part of the show were the silent models, meant to represent Ziegfeld girls from the past, that would glide through the stage and background, making various poses, their appearances visually striking. For me, someone who had wanted her whole life to be able to see something like this again, after it had not been running for so long, it was magical. I was also quite fond of the musical numbers that would juxtapose the older, more fragile women with ghosts of their Ziegfeld days, the two dancing simultaneously.

Broadway Poster

All in all I have mixed feelings about the show and my companion and I differed in opinion. While my favorite parts were the flashbacks and costumes, she preferred the drama between the four main characters. I found the plot between the couples to be not as interesting as the dance numbers. Bernadette Peters sang well but her character was a bit.....hmm....annoying? The girls sang exceptionally well, the dance numbers were fantastic and the costumes were gorgeous, I guess I just wanted the plot to be a bit more interesting.

I suppose when it really came down to it, I just wanted to watch the Ziegfeld Follies circa 1920.