Follies
Cygnet’s choice for its first show in the brand-new Clayes theater in Liberty Station is a canny one. Change is scary, in part because it means waltzing with the unfamiliar. So when you’re leaving behind your comfy old digs in touristy Old Town for a bigger, sleeker setup in an honest-to-goodness arts district, it’s probably best to stage something with an impeccable pedigree. Even if your audience hasn’t seen much Sondheim, they surely know his name, and that he’s Broadway royalty.
Better still, this particular Sondheim is set in the old Weismann theater, which is set to be leveled to make way for a parking lot. It’s a relic from the days when, as one character puts it, “there was a thing called vaudeville.” (By comparison, musical theater like what you’re seeing here is alive and well!) A bunch of aging showgirls — the dates on their sashes range from 1918 to 1940 — have gathered with their old boss and a couple of significant others to bid farewell to the past — and face the future. Just like Cygnet is doing!
The show is set in the ‘70s, some 30 years after the two showgirls at its center, Mrs. Sally Durant Plummer and Mrs. Phyllis Rogers Stone, left the stage for the less glamorous — but rather more dramatic — drama of marriage. (It premiered in the ‘70s as well, an era when Broadway occupied more real estate in the cultural imagination than it does today, Wicked or no Wicked. When an acknowledged master like Sondheim could fool around with structure — say, by inserting an extended adventure into the dreamspace of Loveland for a musical catalog of various follies: of love, of youth, and of the four central characters — and expect folks to play along.) Things haven’t worked out the way our heroines hoped, and here they are back where it all began, haunted by memories of the way they were. Them and everyone else, really: the play’s genius move is to have our present-day people shadowed by their young, lovely, and bespangled past selves. (Those showgirl outfits must be a costume designer’s dream; Eliza Benzoni does not disappoint.)
The Follies staged between the wars by the Weismann Girls were gorgeous fantasies, designed to help folks escape reality. The follies on display at the reunion are much the same. The best thing is to enjoy the charade for a moment, the way showgirl Stella does when she gamely leads the gang in the old showstopper “Who’s that Woman?” and then accept and endure, the way showgirl Carlotta does in the new showstopper “I’m Still Here.” (It’s rendered “I’m Still Her” in the program, which is a wickedly smart typo.) Otherwise, you’re courting disaster; just take a look at these song titles: “The Road You Didn’t Take,” “Could I Leave You?” “The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues,” “Losing My Mind.” One number — I won’t say which — had me convinced it had to end in suicide. But these here Follies aren’t big on escape of any kind. It’s not so a much a good time at the theater, more of a grand time — what people might call sophisticated.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, October 12, 2025
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm |
| Wednesdays, 7:30pm |
| Thursdays, 7:30pm |
| Fridays, 7:30pm |
| Saturdays, 7:30pm |