FOLLIES
Before A Chorus Line came to epitomize the “high-concept” musical, there was Follies. Combining the songwriting genius of Stephen Sondheim with the staging innovations of codirectors Harold Prince (Sondheim’s collaborator on the earlier Company) and Michael Bennett (who, of course, went on to create Chorus Line), the ground-breaking Follies was recognized as an artistic landmark from the moment of its 1971 premiere. Wedding the flamboyance and frivolousness of the old-fashioned musical comedies of the Rodgers and Hart era with the emphasis on psychological development of the mature musical theater pioneered by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Follies used its own inherent stylistic elements–song and dance, sets and costumes, the physical presence of singer-dancer-actors on a stage–as a metaphor for the drama it depicted.
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Sally and Phyllis, the show’s heroines, are ex-Weismann Girls who gave up show biz to get married. The reunion, after 30 years, of the ex-chorines, now married to their Stage Door Johnnies, is an occasion fraught with anxiety. Phyllis snared Ben Stone, an upwardly mobile attorney; their promising marriage turned into a bitter, loveless arrangement in which both partners substitute lacerating putdowns for communication and material consumption (along with extramarital affairs) for emotional satisfaction. And Sally, who settled for likable but slightly foolish Buddy after being jilted by Ben, still nurtures the fantasy that Ben once loved her and might love her again.
Matching the score is the theatrical concept on which Follies is founded: the reunited middle-aged characters share the decaying Weismann Follies stage with pallid, silent ghosts of their youthful selves. Plump and aging Vincent and Vanessa dance a sensuous bolero in a double duet with their svelte, supernatural alter egos; gray-haired Heidi, her soprano still strong if wobbly with age, reaches out for her young blond doppelganger as she musically yearns for “One More Kiss.” And the confrontation between Ben and Phyllis, and Buddy and Sally turns into a series of set pieces–a Follies for their personal follies–in which past and present collide, the couples’ older and younger selves vying for dominance. The theatrics of musical comedy become a metaphor for psychological disorientation, with each person getting a song to dramatize his or her crisis: the lovelorn Sally sings a torchy blues (the poignant “Losing My Mind”), hypocritical Ben masquerades as a carefree song-and-dance man in the bubbly, Gershwin-esque “Live, Laugh, Love,” and so on.
1000 Airplanes’s theme of reality versus illusion is thus struck at first in a familiar, “normal” key; but David Henry Hwang’s script for this 90-minute “science fiction music drama” soon spins off into extraordinary realms. M., speaking in a tone at once determinedly rational and confused, wonderstruck and terrified, haltingly informs us that he has been repeatedly abducted by extraterrestrial beings, transported to a spaceship hovering above the earth, and subjected to painful and bizarre experiments that include a tiny silver globe being inserted up his nose and into his brain.
Glass’s music has always seemed to me as sleek and shiny as a spaceship, so it’s well suited to Hwang’s narrative. Glass’s musical technique–distinctive, though obviously shaped by influences ranging from Pink Floyd and Alan Parsons to Ennio Morricone to Richard Strauss–is in fine form in this score, full of shimmering instrumental textures, insistent but not overwhelming rhythms, and subtle variations on the melodic and harmonic material.
