Arts & Letters

EVERYTHING WAS POSSIBLE: wonderfully detailed book about the The Birth of the Musical Follies. progress of Follies from its prelegendary By Ted Chapin. Knopf. 331 pp. $30 beginnings to opening night. During the A show on the scale of the original 1971 three months of rehearsals and previews, he production of Follies—with a cast of 50, plus was the company’s unpaid gofer (elevated to 27 musicians (and no computers) in the “production assistant” in the Playbill cred- orchestra pit, a monumental set, and 140 its), and he took notes. A Connecticut Col- costumes—would have little chance of mak- lege undergraduate at the time, he got ing it to Broadway today. The financial risk course credit for his Follies experience. would be too great. Of course, Follies was What’s Follies about? Mortality, unhappi- too grand for 1971 as well: It closed after 522 ness, delusion, resentment, the doomed, performances (not a bad run under ordinary irresistible promises we make to one anoth- circumstances) without recouping a penny for er (“Love will see us through till something investors. The show did win seven Tony better comes along”), and, oh yes, the dazzling awards—for its score (Stephen Sondheim), distractions of the American musical theater. direction (Harold Prince and Michael Ben- The time is the present (1971), the setting a nett), choreography (Bennett again), set Broadway theater that’s being torn down to (Boris Aronson), costumes (Florence Klotz), make way for a parking lot. Between the two and lighting (Tharon Musser) and for one of world wars, the theater was home to extrav- its female stars (Alexis Smith)—though not agant follies shows, and a group of individu- the Tony for best musical, which went to als who once appeared in them, and who Two Gentlemen of Verona. Hum anything haven’t seen one another since, gather on from that lately? Once Follies was gone, it the stage of the partially demolished theater became the stuff of legend. for a farewell party. The characters’ younger Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers & selves walk among them, like ghosts, and Hammerstein Organization, has written a sing and dance far more nimbly than the

Al Hirschfeld captures Follies’ opening night on Broadway, in April 1971.

Winter 2004 129 Current Books older folk. Two unhappily married couples began in 1172. Six years later, when the tower who are the focus of the show suffer a kind of was three stories high, work on it halted— collective nervous breakdown in a conclud- nobody knows exactly why—and didn’t ing production number of Ziegfeld-like restart for a century. Between 1272 and 1278, splendor. At the end, the whole cast faces the uppermost four stories were added, after the dawn through the shattered back wall of which construction was once again suspend- the theater. ed. In 1370, the tower was finally completed What a lot of mopey, rainy-day stuff, and with the addition of the belfry. thanks largely to Sondheim’s virtuoso score, Once the tower reached its intended how exhilarating. height of 180 feet, the political fortunes of In telling the story of this one show so pre- Pisa began to head in the opposite direction. cisely, Chapin writes a shadow history of After a century of sieges, the city surrendered every Broadway show that ever had a diffi- to Florentine forces in 1509. It would have cult birth and pulled itself together. What been symbolically logical for the tower to seems now all of a piece was once just a lot collapse then, but this was not to be. Instead, of pieces, and he lets you watch as they’re it went on to become the ideal setting for put together, first one way and then another— young professor Galileo Galilei’s experi- songs added and dropped, lyrics altered, ments with falling objects, a story as appeal- dances adjusted, dialogue introduced one ing as it is unfounded. day and excised the next, costumes sewn, fit- In the 19th century, clever but desperate ted, and shredded. He records the actors’ marketers concocted a different fiction about daily bouts of generosity, jealousy, insecuri- the tower in order to invert potential embar- ty, and fear. He notices when they blow a rassment. They maintained that the lean was line, flub a lyric, or miss a dance step, all of intentional. The tower-de-force, so to speak, which happen surprisingly often. As the mat- standing firmly on the brink of disaster, was ter-of-fact details accumulate, you’re meant to reflect Pisan survival and past glory. reminded just how live live theater is, and In his enjoyable account of the creation how subject to human frailty: a crapshoot and survival of the tower, Nicholas Shrady, the behind a velvet curtain. author of Sacred Roads: Adventures from the Follies may be the smartest Broadway Pilgrimage Trail (1999), rescues one of the musical ever—not the fleetest or wittiest or world’s most familiar architectural oddities funniest, surely, or the most moving, if only from the bin of one-liners. He reconnects because there’s Carousel, but the one in the tower with the curious collection of peo- which the layers of emotional resonance are ple and events caught in the pull of its off- built with so much intelligence. If the show kilter orbit. His pleasant, clear, and often had an epigraph, it would be from A. E. amusing tale is weakened, however, by Housman: “With rue my heart is laden.” But somewhat stingy illustrations and by all-too- Follies is shrewd enough to wear its rue with gimmicky packaging. Instead of the usual a difference: sequins. rectangle, the book has a slanted parallelo- —James M. Morris gram shape intended to evoke the tower—as if the publisher lost faith in the content and felt the need to jazz it up. TILT: —David Macaulay A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa. By Nicholas Shrady. Simon & Schuster. PUSHKIN: 161 pp. $21.95 A Biography. Pisa’s problematic bell tower, the final By T. J. Binyon. Knopf. 727 pp. $35 component of a complex of religious build- In the view of his friend Nikolai Gogol, ings undertaken to celebrate the triumph of the poet Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin Christianity over Islam in general and the vic- (1799–1837) was “an extraordinary and per- tory of Pisan forces over the Saracens in par- haps unique manifestation of the Russian ticular, began leaning soon after construction spirit.” And not only that: Gogol believed

130 Wilson Quarterly