Word: ziegfeld
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Follies is almost sans plot. Just before his old Broadway theater is to be torn down, Impresario Dmitri Weismann (read Flo Ziegfeld) orders a first and last reunion of his celebrated personnel. All the familiar types attend: Phyllis, the leggy brunette (Alexis Smith) who married well; Sally, the third-from-the-left blonde (Dorothy Collins) who didn't. The bolero-dancing couple (Victor Griffin and Jayne Turner) who bought a Fred Astaire franchise ("Styles change; you never can tell"), the wisecracking queen bee (Yvonne De Carlo) with her hive of young drones; the feathery Continental (Justine Johnston) who remembers Franz...
...public mask and appears in his own Folly. It is a vaudevilification of their benighted circumstances, in which the truth shines like a spotlight. For the first half of the evening, the stage has been shrouded in melancholy: dim lighting, failed hope, blunted ambition. But in the intensely personal, Ziegfeld-like "Loveland" sequence, lights and color suddenly challenge the eye, an umber paintbox opened in the sun. This visual dazzle is reminiscent of Vincente Minnelli's movie musicals ?notably the focal ballet in An American in Paris. Onstage, it has never been mounted with such unfailing skill...
ETHEL SHUTTA. At 74 she could collect social security. Instead Ethel Shutta (pronounced Shuh-tay) gives her all as the old firecracker who makes Broadway Baby an incendiary number. "I'm the only woman in the cast who remembers Ziegfeld," she says. "In 1925 I was in the Follies as the comedienne." Her song: I'm in Love with Eddie Cantor. When her two sons were attending school at Horace Mann in The Bronx...
Harold Prince was their schoolmate. Retired from Broadway for eight years, she was persuaded to stop playing grandmother and start playing Follies' superannuated swinger. "I don't think Ziegfeld had as many beautiful girls as we have in Prince's show," she says. "Of course, in Ziegfeld's time the girls were rounder. The men then liked a little more hip and a little more breast ?thin at the waist, though...
...60th year, the theater was once the home of the original Ziegfeld Follies...