Review Roundup: FOLLIES at the Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' production of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's FOLLIES officially opened last night, May 21, 2011 after previews which began May 7. The cast features two-time Tony winner Bernadette Peters as Sally Durant Plummer, four-time Tony nominee Jan Maxwell as Phyllis Rogers Stone, two-time Tony nominee Danny Burstein as Buddy Plummer, Ron Raines as Benjamin Stone and Olivier Award winner Elaine Paige as Carlotta Campion. 

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: "It wasn't until the second act that I fell in love all over again with "Follies," a show that had broken my heart many times in the past. Up to that point of the Kennedy Center revival of James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim's brave and beautiful musical from 1971, I'd been feeling as if I had hooked up with an old flame I'd been longing to see, only to find a snuffed candle.

"Oh, lord," I thought disconsolately a few minutes into the slow-creeping opening scene of Eric Schaeffer's starry production, which was looking as if it might depress itself into a coma. "Is this what I'm spending the night with?"

Yet almost as soon as the curtain rose on the second act at the Eisenhower Theater here, I was showing all the familiar symptoms of deep infatuation: increased pulse rate, welling eyes and an overwhelming urge to beat my hands together until they stung."

Peter Marks, The Washington Post: "The Kennedy Center's grim and glittery new revival of "Follies" takes an audience halfway to paradise. As itineraries go in the musical theater, that's no insignificant distance.

Blessed with some crackling performances - especially by a broodingly luminous Jan Maxwell as a leggy ex-showgirl licking her wounds, and by Danny Burstein playing a hapless onetime stage-door Johnny - the luxe treatment of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's landmark '70s musical of shattered midlife illusions has its share of startling delights. Chief among them: the show's final 20 minutes, when we ascend with the main characters into an ironic vaudeville dreamscape of assorted neuroses - the most intoxicating articulation of the musical's "Loveland" sequence that I've ever seen."

Variety: "Nine years after impressing the theater world with its six-production festival of musicals by Stephen Sondheim, the Kennedy Center is back with the exclamation point -- the colossal 1971 Sondheim-James Goldman tuner "Follies." The lavish and entirely satisfying production includes a full orchestra, eye-popping designs and a 40-person cast headed by Bernadette Peters.

Eric Schaeffer, the a.d. of Arlington, Va.'s Signature Theater who helmed the 2002 festival, returns to direct this melancholy turn about two loveless couples attending a reunion of entertainers at a theater where they once performed. Schaeffer does so in methodical fashion, building progressively to a crescendo exactly as Sondheim does with so many of his stirring melodies. Several show-stopping routines are provided by choreographer Warren Carlyle.

This $7.3 million revival, five years in the making, is endowed with a virtual embarrassment of riches, beginning with the cast. Along with Peters as the terminally remorseful Sally Durant Plummer, other principals are Jan Maxwell as the cynical and experienced Phyllis, Ron Raines as Phyllis' self-satisfied husband Benjamin and Danny Burstein as Sally's suffering hubby, Buddy. The show's second tier of returning hoofers offers a real-life reunion of showbiz titans that includes Linda Lavin, Elaine Page, Rosaline Elias, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Florence Lacey, Regine and Terri White."

To post a comment, you must register and login.