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...

"Follies" is in a class of its own. It is safe to say that no Broadway musical has ever attempted its grandeur of vision, the size of its presence. This being so, it cannot be compared in any "good, better, best" sense with any musical in the past. So, if it does not always work, and it doesn't always, one is nonetheless aware that this is happening in a new-found dimension. Like a girl you love but do not always like, "Follies" is very great though it is not...

The frontier of the American musical theater is wherever Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim are. Last season, the producer-director and composer-lyricist collaborated on Company, which focused a diamond-cutting laser beam on marriage, Manhattan-style. With Follies, Prince and Sondheim, together with Choreographer and Co-Director Michael Bennett, have audaciously staked out some unknown territory. They have put together the first Proustian musical…. Compacted of memory, dreams and desire, the illusion...