Word: broadway
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...This season, to celebrate the centenary of the first Ziegfeld Follies (which opened at the Jardin de Paris, Broadway and 44th Street, on July 8, 1907), the Encores! management led by Jack Viertel staged three musicals inspired or produced by Ziegfeld's grand old revues. These were extravagant revues featuring vaudeville stars, lavish production numbers and statuesque chorines in eccentric headgear, and they ran annually until 1925, then sporadically for another decade, even after the great impresario's death in 1932. The revue format hung on through the 40s and 50s, with Leonard Sillman's New Faces series...
...production, in 1971, is well remembered, indeed cherished, by the folks of a certain age who haunt City Center. The fabulous CD is readily available. In the 80s a famous concert version (also on CD) was performed at Carnegie Hall, and just six years ago a not-so-hot Broadway revival - I should say embalming - was on display...
...clear from the first note of the Encores! Follies that the best revivals bring a new clarity to old shows. Director-choreographer Casey Nickolaw, whose recent Broadway work (Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone) has been spot-on silly, somehow summoned a perfect reading of the antique text, and piqued in people who'd seen the show before one of those "Eureka!" moments. Now, we got it. We saw the maturity, the emotional wisdom in Goldman's libretto. His story - about two married couples who meet 30 years after the girls, chorines in a Ziegfeld-type revue, met their husbands...
...Phyllis; to Victor Garber, as her successful, empty spouse Ben; and to Michael McGrath, as Buddy, the philandering schlemiel who loves his wife Sally even as she is slipping away from him into Ben's arms. But the revelation was Victoria Clark as Sally. Clark, who had toiled in Broadway obscurity for decades before earning a Tony for her role as the mother in The Light in the Piazza two years ago, was the one true singer in the lead quartet, mining every note for meaning...
...against the sentimental Disney hegemony of fairy-tale movies. But today the outlaw is king: parodying fairy tales has become the default mode of telling them. 2005's Hoodwinked! reimagined Little Red Riding Hood as a crime Rashomon, while this year's Happily N'Ever After sent up Cinderella. Broadway smash Wicked posits that the Wicked Witch of the West was misunderstood. This fall Disney (et tu, Mickey?) releases Enchanted, in which a princess (Amy Adams) is magically banished by an evil queen to modern New York City, where she must fend for herself, parodying her princess foremothers...