Follies in Concert, drawn from two performances at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in September 1985, features a handpicked cast of stage, screen, and nightclub stars, and represents songwriter
Stephen Sondheim and record producer
Thomas Z. Shepard's attempt at a do-over of a cast album for
Sondheim's 1971 musical Follies. The show had an original Broadway cast album, but it failed to convey the breadth of the score, which was unusually long, since it contained both contemporary show music and a series of pastiches of the kind of music that might have been heard in one of the interwar musical revues the characters were said to have appeared in,
Sondheim's takes on the styles of predecessors like
Irving Berlin,
Jerome Kern,
George Gershwin, and
Cole Porter. It would have taken a two-LP set to encompass all the material, and while major record labels were still recording cast albums in 1971,
Capitol Records, which handled Follies, restricted it to only one disc. Fourteen years later,
RCA was willing to plump for a more complete rendering, and
Sondheim and
Shepard put together a concert cast who did not have to conform to the demands of a realistic stage performance. The show is set at a 30-year reunion of the fictional Weismann Follies, and the two couples who are the main characters, middle-class Buddy and Sally, and upper-class Ben and Phyllis, are supposed to be about 50 years old. In this version, film star
Lee Remick (a veteran of
Sondheim's 1964 musical Anyone Can Whistle) as Phyllis and
George Hearn (fresh from his Tony Award-winning performance in the musical La Cage aux Folles) as Ben were about the right age in real life, but 37-year-old
Mandy Patinkin (late of
Sondheim's most recent show, Sunday in the Park with George) as Buddy was too young, and veteran Broadway star and cabaret singer
Barbara Cook (surprisingly making her debut in a
Sondheim work) as Sally was too old at 57. No matter. All sing well and characteristically.
Remick holds her own;
Cook plays to Sally's emotional essence, notably in
"In Buddy's Eyes"; Patinkin is his typically bravura self (even providing his own background vocals, in falsetto, on
"Buddy's Blues"); and
Hearn brings out Ben's superficial confidence, eventually giving way to a musical nervous breakdown in
"Live, Laugh, Love." The show is also full of specialty numbers that give terrific showcases to the likes of
Carol Burnett (an understated
"I'm Still Here");
Liliane Montevecchi (perfect casting for the
Porter-like
"Ah, Paree!"); and audience favorite
Elaine Stritch (a typically caustic
"Broadway Baby").
Follies in Concert might not be the definitive version of Follies, but it is a vast improvement on the original Broadway cast album, finally giving a sense of the score's quality. [Cassette and CD versions of this album added the soundtrack recording of director
Alain Resnais' 1974 film
Stavisky, one of
Sondheim's few film scores.] ~ William Ruhlmann
