When the National Theatre opened on the South Bank in 1976 I was a regular visitor. A dear friend from my years in Wexford, Denys Lasdun, was the architect, and Peter Hall, a friend and colleague with whom I worked closely for 20 years at Glyndebourne, was the Director of the NT. So I saw pretty well all they did in those days - they were part of our family as it were.
Now, after my years in Canada and then in Chicago, and with the inexorable passage of time, the ties have all but disappeared. But nevertheless it is always a joy to be in this building and seeing the work of the remarkable company. I know that Denys was often unhappy about some changes that were proposed in his lifetime to his iconic if controversial building. But I feel sure that he would be proud of where it is now - a splendid functioning theatre for the 21st century for the audiences of today. And it has a strong sense of permanence about it, unlike some of the other edifices on the South Bank which have not ripened and matured with time.
I now get there not as often as I should with all the other professional imperatives of an operatic and musical nature which take my time when I am in London. I have to do better......
Anyway yesterday evening I was at Follies - a stunning many layered show, funny, moving, disturbing, tear inducing, but ultimately heart warming as a panorama for someone who has spent 55 years working in this business - and with no desire to stop just yet! The human condition indeed......
For us opera people of course the event was the appearance of Josephine Barstow (left - click the pic to enlarge) singing splendidly as Heidi Schiller, one of the Follies girls from 1918. Her remarkable professional life continues. She was a stalwart of the Arts Council's Opera for All tours of the 1960s - and was our understudy Mimi at Glyndebourne in 1967, and then went on to her fabulous career of course. And we will be seeing her again on the London operatic stage I feel sure - just wait!
This production of Follies has been ecstatically received so there is no need for me to add anything other than to say "do anything necessary to get a ticket". Imelda Staunton and Janie Dee (seen below) are worth the price alone, and the huge cast includes Philip Quast and Peter Forbes as their perfectly matched partners.
Follies photos © Johan Persson
I am so jealous that I am unable to get to London for the production of Follies. I have been a Stephen Sondheim fan for about 45 years ever since seeing his Company in London, a show whose music I at first did not appreciate but that soon changed. I managed to catch Follies in the 2001 Broadway revival and was totally enchanted.
There is a lovely anecdote about the song "Who's That Woman?" in the splendid book of Sondheim's annotated lyrics of his early musicals - Finishing The Hat. I am sure you and the publisher will not mind my quoting it here. Sondheim writes -
"I had conceived the number as a routine for Stella and five older chorines as her backup, the sixth one having died. I thought it would be poignant fun to see geometric dancing patterns with an empty space in the middle, and Michael Bennett [the show's choreographer who was later to create a sensation with A Chorus Line] seemed to agree, Therefore I was surprised, not to say irritated, when I showed up at rehearsal one day to find him coaching Stella and all six in a perfectly conventional, geometric tap routine. When I grumbled to him that I would never have written such a banal song without the bizarre twist that accompanied and justified it, he told me that it wouldn't work and that he had come up with a better idea . . .
"I tucked my brilliant idea under my arm and quietly slunk home, while Michael went on to devise one of the most brilliantly staged numbers in Broadway history (and very Broadway it was). His idea: have the six older ladies start their routine and then be joined by the mirror-costumed ghosts of their younger, beautiful selves, true reflections of their pasts. What Michael did was take a lightweight, semi-camp pastiche lyric and mime it for all its emotional resonances as well as its imagery. . . Michael ignored my scenario, but it did give him the springboard for the glory he came up with."
Posted by: Nick | November 06, 2017 at 08:29 AM