Year 6, Day 94

Good Morning! Today's song is Broadway Baby from Follies.

Follies is a musical that was first developed in 1967 as The Girl Upstairs, but plans kept falling through and it passed through a couple different hands before landing with Harold Prince, who made a deal with Stephen Sondheim to do it and Company. Prince changed the name to Follies; and Sondheim brought in James Goldman to do the book while he did music and lyrics. It started on Broadway in 1971 and has many runs since, most recently playing in London in 2017. It's about two ex-showgirls and their relationships as they descend on their old theatre which is scheduled to be torn down. I can't really explain it better than a quote from Martin Gattfried published in the New York Times stating: "The concept behind Follies is theater nostalgia, representing the rose-colored glasses through which we face the fact of age ... the show is conceived in ghostliness. At its very start, ghosts of Follies showgirls stalk the stage, mythic giants in winged, feathered, black and white opulence. Similarly, ghosts of the Twenties shows slip through the evening as the characters try desperately to regain their youth through re-creations of their performances and inane theater sentiments of their past." So Follies is loosely inspired by Ziegfield Follies, which I hadn't heard of before writing this, so I asked my grandma about them. It was a revue where dancers would act out songs played, it's kind of hard to visualize without seeing it, but in my head it's kind of like a cross between (as my grandma put it) can-can girls, improv, synchonised swimming, and Fantasia but with people... which is a lot. The Ziegfield Follies started on Broadway in 1907, and eventually ended up as a radio show in 1932 and 1936. It was named after the man who conceptualized and brought the show together, and after he died his widow authorized his name to Jake Shubert for the Broadway show. The Ziegfield Follies seem really interesting to me and I'm still learning about them so I don't want to write too much, but seriously look them up if you're curious.

Peace.