Follies is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Goldman. The show is nostalgic in tone and has a generally melancholy atmosphere. Several of its songs have become standards, including "Broadway Baby," "I'm Still Here,"...
Paul Auster. The Brooklyn Follies. Holt, 2006. 306 pp. $24.00. Like Paul Auster's other recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies is a postmodern page-turner, drawing us immediately into its narrator's broken world. Nathan Glass, retired, recently divorced,...
Gilbert Sorrentino. Lunar Follies. Coffee House Press, 2005. 143 pp. Paper: $14.00. Sorrentino is a master, but a particular specialty of his has always been illustrating the "eight million ways to step off the cliff"-or lose one's soul-in the pursuit of art. No...
The story just won't die. Joe Mercurio just emailed out copies of correspondence between him and the Fields campaign. The mid-March emails include .pdfs of the infamous flier, and the correspondence -- from Mercurio to top Fields aides and to Fields' own AOL account --...
THE ICEBERG Running time 84 minutes Written and Directed by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy Starring Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, Philippe Martz The Iceberg (L’Iceberg) is a Belgian film (in French with English subtitles), co-directed and co-written by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and...
Sondheim's verbal felicity has remained with him throughout his career. He has that gift for clever rhymes that has distinguished lyricists since W. S. Gilbert ("beauty celestial the best you'll / agree" from Follies, for instance). Better still, he has the ability to link musical construction with verbal cadence, to let the rhythm of the words shape the structure of a phrase. To take yet another of many possible examples, the song "Broadway Baby," again from Follie...
Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for the show Follies reach their acme of wit in the very first song, in which he rhymes "celestial" with "the best ya'll (agree)." The song, Beautiful Girls, is sung by an aging, flabby tenor … as a line of women, former Follies girls attending a reunion in the crumbling shell of their old and soon-to-be-demolished theater, goes tottering down a staircase in a creaky reprise of the famous Follies showgirl parade. The women are all ei...
The most important musical of the Broadway season is Follies, concocted by some of the collaborators who made Company the best musical of the last two seasons. The new work uses song and dance to suggest our evolution from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, when we counteracted our comparatively simple problems with childishly glamorized entertainments. But it resolutely resists the audience's wish to find these eras nostalgic and charming. Instead, it presents the ghosts of the past as painful exh...
