Word: yesteryears
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Stephen Sondheim's score uses old conventions of songwriting as well as new ones, and it is in his music and lyrics that Follies puts across its extraordinarily upsetting point of view. Almost cruelly, we watch old performers of yesteryear relive their greatest moments on the stage, singing melodies that sound as ancient and scratched as our parents' old 78 records, dancing steps proclaiming a kind of spirit that has long since passed from their lives as well as our own. The world of the dead Follies and the reality of the present intermingle constantly in Sondheim's work...
...more sustained triumph. As the four central characters (or eight, since each character is seen as two people) reach a bottleneck in trying to resolve their pasts and their futures, the lights come up, the set changes, and the grim shattered playhouse is transformed into the gaudy palace of yesteryear. Follies becomes an old Follies show itself. The follies of the characters are now expressed in terms of the old prewar musical until finally the follies and the Follies merge into one surrealistic nightmare. The play within the play (titled "Loveland") is as depressing as anything I've seen...
...there'll always be an adman. In a full-page newspaper announcement of the size change last week. Esquire Publisher Arnold Gingrich discovered that his magazine had a "big and bulky old-fashioned page size," and dismissed it as the "full three-masted rigging of yesteryear." Despite record advertising revenues and circulation (1,175,000), he decreed the switch to a "more modern size," promising readers more pages (presumably ones of lighter weight) and more color, and advertisers a better page rate per thousand. Gingrich hinted at a further fringe benefit in the smaller size: Esquire will be less...
...needs when it is struggling to regain price stability and social peace, but it was by wielding that blunt weapon that labor won its largest gains in the past. It is ironic that blue collar workers are suspicious of today's social disruptions; labor often created the disturbances of yesteryear, and they helped the workingman to come a long way from the bad old days. As late as 1900, seven-year-old boys worked in the mines of Pennsylvania, and girls of six helped run the mills of the South. The regular work week ran as high as 84 hours...
Some are already panicking. Freaks, radicals and striving novelists of yesteryear now talk about "Law School." Other speak vaguely of such things as "living off the land" or "starving in a garrett someplace in Europe" or "getting this really neat house in Chile" (wherever that is). And there are the one-liners about marriage, the ministry, revolution, and that old Harvard standard, suicide...