Follies / Original Broadway Cast

I admit it. I love Follies, and have three recordings of it - this original Broadway recording, the single CD version of the 1987 London recording, and the double CD New Jersey 1998 recording. This latter recording is possibly the finest, being the most complete, and also including some extra tracks. However, it seems to be no longer available from amazon.com.

So to the recording at hand. The original cast, and to an extent then, the definitive recording. Well, it would be if there were more of the music on here, but what there is just happens to be pure class.

Alexis Smith and Dorothy Collins give up great performances as the two leading Follies girls. They are ably supported by their husbands, Gene Nelson and John McMartin.

Standing above the rest of the supporting cast is Yvonne de Carlo (best remembered as Lily Munster) with the song written especially for her, I'm Still Here. She sings it surprisingly pacily compared to the other available recordings that I know of. As the intended artist, we must assume that this is the definitive reading.

The other Follies ladies all give good performances, but as has been said by other reviewers, this cast recording is sadly incomplete.

Well, OK, so what if it is? As an introduction to this great work, full of rich pastiche numbers, clever lyrics, and towards the end the heartbreaking Losing My Mind, this is a good place to start....

If you cannot find the 1998 New Jersey recording, then this is the next best thing.

I was privileged to see Follies in its initial Broadway run three times, including the most memorable and emotional closing night I have ever spent in a Broadway theatre. Follies remains my favorite Sondheim musical (and Sondheim remains my favorite Broadway composer) even though I admit that those who consider Sweeney Todd his masterpiece certainly have good reasons for doing so. The Follies "highlight" original cast album - funny it wasn't released that way - it was released simply as "the cast album" - is a bittersweet experience; to this day, I regret as do other reviewers here that the producers could not see their way to releasing a two-disc complete recording. It's not so much the numbers that were completely left out as the songs that were butchered and cut to their bare essentials that one regrets most. I can live without "Loveland", but the loss of almost half of the lyrics to "I'm Still Here" and "Broadway Baby" are omissions that have puzzled me since the day this abortion of a cast album (as my ex-boyfriend called it at the time) was released. Although most of this has already been said, the main reason I wanted to add my two-cents was to trumpet the song that for some reason is one of the least mentioned but, for me, the most impressive. "Too Many Mornings' is, to me, both lyrically and musically the most touching, heartbreaking and emotionally potent song that Mr. Sondheim ever wrote. The sentiment behind the lyric is one that makes me literally choke up with tears and is still capable - 34 years after I first heard it - of making me break out in goose bumps. "Two many mornings, waking and pretending I reach for you, thousands of mornings, dreaming of my girl. All that time, wasted, merely passing through, time I could have spent, so content, wasting time with you..." To me, this song captured the essence of what the show was really about - the heartache of waking up one day, irreversibly older, and finding that you didn't do with your life anything that you dreamed of or idealized in your younger days. As I recall John McMartin remarking on a TV talk show just a few days after Follies ended it's Broadway run, "It's a very painful, tragic show to watch unfold, and the more I am privileged to work with this material, the more I get out of it". The deceptively simple book of this show masked the powerful emotional punch of all that it really had to say. I understood when I was 17 (which I was in 1971) that this was a melancholy and achingly poignant show; time has only deepened and expanded the emotional experience that this recording grants with every listen.

Okay, I know that it is truncated. I know that it is not digital. But it is the version with Sondheim's original cast, and the cohesiveness and unity of the original cannot be matched. Although I also love "Follies in Concert", it is disjointed and some of the performers do not compare favorably with the originals (with the exception of Stritch's "Broadway Baby"-that is brilliant!)Ultimately the concert version fails, but the original cast album satisfies in every way. I know to some that this statement is heresy, but I must express my true feelings.