Michael Bennett's Attempt to Fix "Follies" — Page 4

Updated On: 11/21/15 at 04:12 PM

So I read "I'm Still Here" as Carlotta's autobiography, not her pastiche song.

If she sings about "I've gotten through Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover" and "In the Depression...I met a big financier..." then she has to be at least 10-15 years older than Sally and Phyllis.

Am I understanding "I'm Still Here" correctly?

Gothampc said: "So I read "I'm Still Here" as Carlotta's autobiography, not her pastiche song.

If she sings about "I've gotten through Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover" and "In the Depression...I met a big financier..." then she has to be at least 10-15 years older than Sally and Phyllis.

Am I understanding "I'm Still Here" correctly?

"

I think you are, and the chronology is a bit dodgy if not actually impossible. And even if it's a pastiche number that Carolotta performed, she still had to be old enough to sing it, right?

Yvonne de Carlo was 49 when FOLLIES opened, so you are correct that she is just a few years older than Sally and Phyllis. (As you also point out, Alexis Smith was a year older, but de Carlo had been playing a mother on TV, so I think most of us thought of her as older than she was.)

Using de Carlo's actual age as a reference, she was 6 when Herbert Hoover was elected and 10 when he left office. Although the Depression is now dated more specifically by economists, I remember when it was a general term for the years between the crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941; by 1941, 19-year-old de Carlo was already dancing in a chorus line (other girls started even earlier), so it's not impossible that a financier helped a girl her age through the "Depression", statutory rape or not.

*****

On a different note, I agree with PalJoey that it was very odd to have Carlotta singing to the wait staff. Isn't the point of her one, big speech that men gush about how happy they are to meet her, but then only talk about themselves? It always amazes me when such a glaring paradox is built into staging. Doesn't anybody (AD, actor, the writer him or herself) say, "Uh, yeah, but she has this other speech..."?

Updated On: 11/21/15 at 09:30 PM

I hesitate, to respond, Master, because I feel certain I've invented by own ending over the intervening 45 years, but here goes:

I think I remember the set pieces moving during the pandemonium sequence and ending up looking even more like debris than they had before and making a sort of surreal skyline. And I think there was a glimpse of sky over the leaning walls, almost as if the roof had caved in during the pandemonium. And I think the lighting of the sky suggested dawn.

And I think I remember the characters climbing up and over the wreckage like the survivors of an earthquake in order to escape the rubble.

But I so could have invented the above: I saw the show twice in my teens and then listened to the album thousands of times. I'm sure there's a lot I "restaged" in my mind over the years. (I've also seen several other productions, but they were nothing like the original in their sets or staging.)

Gaveston, I remember everything you do, except for them climbing over the debris. Great idea, though.

By the way, I just remembered one more production of FOLLIES that I have carefully blocked out, an earlier Eric Schaeffer take on the show at Signature, where, I think, all the characters were already dead and/or playing their own ghosts. Ghastly.

The vid of Elaine Paige singing I'm Still Here to her boys made me glad I didn't waste money on a plane ticket to see that production. It seemed inappropriate enough when Dolores Gray sang it to her fellow party guests.

Stephen Daldry needs to the next director as he demonstrated he can handle multiple time levels, ghosts, surrealism and stunning visual metaphors in An Inspector Calls.

I should have chosen a better phrase than "climbing over the debris", which sounds like they were wading through broken cement and fallen plaster.

WHAT I ACTUALLY REMEMBER is that the on-stage platforms, by the end of the pandemonium, were set in a way that the characters had to walk up them like steps to get off of the stage. (As opposed to the 2012 production in LA, where the characters simply exited through the rear theater door.) In my mind, I interpreted those platforms as "debris", but it wasn't the mess my wording seemed to imply. If my memory is correct, it was Ben and Phyllis helping each other up and out that gave one the sense that they had reached a rapprochement.

I honestly can't recall what happened to Ben and Sally at the very end. Anybody? I'm sure they left somehow, because the young ghosts of the central quartet were left alone on stage as the curtain fell.

Updated On: 11/23/15 at 12:25 AM