"...never misses a beat"

June 26, 2005 performance, reviewed by Pat Nichols

When Julianne Boyd appeared before the curtain opened for Follies, she welcomed the audience and admitted she had thought of doing the musical for a long time and that it was the most demanding play Barrington Stage Company ever mounted.

Eric Ulloa (Young Ben), Nili Bassman (Young Phyllis),
John Patrick (Young Buddy) and Elise Molinelli (Young Sally)
sing "You're Gonna Love Tomorrow"/"Love Will See Us Through"
Photo credit: Kevin Sprague

With Julianne Boyd as director and Lara Teeter as chorographer and with a huge cast including a small ensemble, the play never misses a beat.

The glamorous opening is spectacular: chorus girls arrayed in elegant costumes and balancing huge headdresses as they descend the stairs of a stage full of memories in a worn theater that will be razed the following day.

It is 1971 and people start entering through a center rear door to attend a reunion of the chorus girls of long ago. The event, generated by Dimitri Weismann, owner of the Weismann Theater and the man who developed the original Weismann Follies, brings together the women who made up the chorus lines in 1941. They recognize each other and begin to catch up after 30 years.

Two couples whose lives coincided in the past meet again. Old memories, old hopes come to the surface. Time and lives have changed since the more innocent days of 1941. Not all hopes were realized.

Sally (Kim Crosby) and Buddy (Lara Teeter) meet Ben Stone (Jeff McCarthy)and his wife Phyllis (Leslie Denniston).

Sally, the mom of two boys wears a short homey dress while the childless but elegant Phyllis wears a long gray gown, sexy and very attractive. Both women know their men have strayed but live with it.

One of the former chorus girls after another sing songs about themselves and their lives. Solange (Joy Franz) takes the audience to her Paris; "I’m a Broadway Baby" by Hattie (Diane Houghton) posits her leanings; "I’m Still Here" by Carlotta (Donna McKechnie) her own reminisce of what she’s done and where she is.

Sally’s solo "I’m Losing My Mind" hits the perfect note of pain for a woman unsure of where she is going or what she should do.

Phyllis’s feather dance in red makes clear that it takes a while to discover the follies we make throughout our lives but answers often lie beneath what we see at first.

Buddy’s energetic, frenzied dance takes him speeding in a beautifully choreographed dance from one side of the stage to the other in anguish as he tries to understand why Sally doesn’t love him.

And Ben dances it up with the ensemble in "Live, Laugh, Love" before he crumbles over in despair.

This is a big musical, but underneath the gaiety, the song and dance, lies the need to sort out lives that began in optimistic moments but have slowly gone astray.

The musical slips effortlessly between the era of World War II when love affairs were beginning for these chorus girls and the young men who waited impatiently for them at the foot of the stairs to the Vietnam years that altered America forever.

The enduring work Sondheim and Goldman shows how universal so much of life remains and how many of the ghosts of other times come back to haunt us all.

FOLLIES: June 23-July 16 -  Tickets: 413-528-8888
Book by James Goldman; Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Choreographed by Lara Teeter; Directed by Julianne Boyd
Barrington Stage Company: barringtonstageco.org