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[0:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, I was never able to see FOLLIES on Broadway, but I did see the revival when it went to LA. Sometimes shows don't do a full national tour, but they'll do a sit-down LA production. So, I saw the revival cast with Victoria Clark as Sally instead of Bernadette Peters. Victoria Clark, who was also Sally in your on-course production, Mr. Viertel. And it was great. Loved the ghost show, Girls, but there was one image I walked away with that I'll never forget, and it was Jan Maxwell as Phyllis, literally vibrating with fury during Could I Leave You? Unforgettable. Welcome, everybody, to a musical theater podcast where we discuss the cultural and emotional impact of some of our favorite musicals in theater history.

My name is Jeffrey Scott Parsons. You can call me Jeff. Today, we are discussing the musical FOLLIES, which was a listener request from a couple of you, including Dallas, who wrote in and said, quote, Could you please do an episode on FOLLIES? It's one of my favorites, and I would really enjoy listening to it. Unquote. Well, here it is, Dallas, and we've got a crackerjack of a guest for you to enjoy. He's had so many job titles. I'm not even going to go through them. I can't keep count. But here are a few accomplishments. He conceived the longest-running musical review in Broadway history, Smoky Joe's Cafe. The prom was written from his original concept. He was the dramaturg for Hairspray. He was artistic director of City Center on-course for, like, 20 years, right, Jack?

20 years. Insane. During which they presented FOLLIES, starring Donna Murphy and Victoria Clark and an incredible cast. He had a big hit with the book THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN MUSICAL, which I have quoted on this very podcast before. Thank you. And his new book, Broadway Melody, is available now. Everyone, please, please welcome Jack Viertel. Yay! I'm so happy to be here.

[2:12] Jack Viertel: Oh, I'm thrilled. Now, Jack, in your hit book, THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN MUSICAL, you put at the end of it a list of musicals you felt like everybody should know. Now, get ready, everyone. I'm going to read them right now, super fast. By the way, thank you, Colden. THE MUSIC MAN, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, MAC & MABEL, OKLAHOMA, GYPSY, COMPANY, CHORUS LINE, MY FAIR LADY, HAMILTON, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, THE PRODUCERS, LITTLE ME, FLORA, THE RED MENACE, FUNNY GIRL, CAMELOT, WEST SIDE STORY, ANNIE, CAROUSEL, THE NEW MOON, GUYS AND DOLLS, INTO THE WOODS, CITY OF ANGELS, WEDDING SINGER, BOOK OF MORMON, LITTLE ABNER, CABARET, SWEENEY TODD, IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE, A SUPERMAN, LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, RENT, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, CAROLINER CHANGED, THE KING AND I, HAIR SPRAY, ZIGFELD FOLLIES OF 1936, SHE LOVES ME, ANNIE, GET YOUR GUN, BRIGADOON, BYE-BYE BIRDIE, CANDIDE, CHICAGO, DAN YANKEE'S, FINIAN'S, RAINBOW FOLLIES, HELLO DOLLY, HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, KISS ME KATE, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, MAME, THE MOST HAPPY FELLA ON THE TOWN, THE PYJAMA GAME, PAL JOEY, PORGY AND BESS, SHOW BOAT, SOUTH PACIFIC. Now...

[3:15] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, I should say, before you go any further than that...

[3:17] Jack Viertel: Yes, please.

[3:18] Jack Viertel: Some of those musicals that I listed were musicals that I referred to in the book.

[3:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, fair enough.

[3:23] Jack Viertel: Doesn't necessarily mean you have to pay serious attention to them. I just referred to them because there was a particular song in them or moment in them that I'd need to refer to. So, you know, nothing definitive about that list whatsoever. Not a bad list, but...

[3:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: But it's not a bad list. And in fact, we've covered quite a bit. And this was the list that I wanted to look at and kind of see what we hadn't covered on a musical theater podcast and also look at some of the listener requests we've had. And FOLLIES really emerged to me as the natural choice to discuss with you, especially reading about what your new book, Broadway Melody, is, which covers like 70 years and obviously time and is a big part of FOLLIES. Now, can you tell me a little bit about this new book, which is a novel, by the way. We don't get many of those as Broadway fans.

[4:13] Jack Viertel: No, I was about to say, let's not forget it's a novel. So it's made up. It's made up and it's not made up. When I finished the other book, I didn't really have anything else I wanted to say that could be reliably checked. You know, I just didn't want to. But I did want to keep writing because I love writing and I've been a writer. My first job as a theater critic was as a writer, basically. And I had my family is a theater family. My grandfather built theaters and my father had a play produced, ran two weeks on Broadway in the 30s. So I've had a long love affair with the history of Broadway and the history of Times Square and my own romance with it began, I guess, when my parents and grandmother took me to see Peter Pan with Mary Martin when I was almost six years old.

But the real, you know, which ruined my life, basically, because there was then nothing else to do but figure out how to become part of that world. But it really began seriously in 1962 when I started going to Broadway by myself and buying a ticket in the back row of the balcony on a Saturday afternoon and watching whatever the hell I watched.

[5:22] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Okay, wait, tell me, how old were you in like 1962? Do you mind saying?

[5:26] Jack Viertel: Okay, this is now this is where we're like simpaticos, you and I, because I love going and seeing shows by myself. That's so fun. Yeah. Okay, continue. Sorry. So 1962.

[5:39] Jack Viertel: So anyway, this is a very long roundabout way of saying I really wanted to write about all of that and everything that has happened since at least up until just before the pandemic. And I didn't really have a plot. But I had a character, because I had become very close friends with a guy named Red Press, who was a music contractor and saxophone player, reed player, played the flute and the clarinet as well, who had began his Broadway career and had a whole career before Broadway began his Broadway career in the pit of Gypsy, the original Gypsy with Ethel Merman, and was still playing lead reeds in the Encores Orchestra in 2000, when I got there and all the way in like 2008. And I was he finally stopped playing when he was 85, I think.

But he was he was a great friend. And he had lived through all of this history. And we talked about it, talked about and talked about it. And then, while I thought, okay, I have a character, but I don't have a plot. One day, the woman, the young woman soprano, who I always loved having in our shows, she was a great soprano, told me that this was going to be her last Encores. And I said, really, why? And she said, because I'm moving to Germany to get married. And I said, that's a great story. What is that story? And she said, Well, I was playing the lead in Phantom of the Opera in a German tour in English. And the spotlight operator fell in love with me without ever talking to me. He followed me around with his spotlight, you know, every performance, and then suddenly showed up in my dressing room and said, I'm madly in love with you, you have to marry me. And she said, of course, after that, they went out for a bit, but then...

[7:19] Jack Viertel: that is such an intimate relationship, though, a spot up, studying somebody and their like intuitions and their impulses and, and trying to feel when they'll move one way or the other. Like, I mean, that's, I get it.

[7:31] Jack Viertel: Yeah, well, I mean, that struck me as an incredibly romantic tale that could only happen in the theater. And, you know, a spot operator is the only member of a crew who does not take cues from the stage manager, right? He just follows the actors, the actor they're supposed to follow. He has, you know, written directions of like, in this scene, you follow this person. But so he's sort of in the show, in addition to being watching the show. And so now I had two men and a woman, and I thought, well, there's a triangle, and that triangle can go on for 50 years. And so there was the plot. That was the plot of Broadway Melody. And it allowed me to run these characters into and out of a tremendous amount of Broadway history, the destruction of the historic Broadway theaters, the Morosco and the Helen Hayes, the horrible scourge of AIDS, the fall and rise and fall and rise of Times Square itself, from, you know, a glamorous place in the 40s to a slightly seedy place in the 60s, when I started going to a complete hellhole in the 70s. And then it's gradual rescue by, you know, Disney and the Times Square redevelopment.

And now it's a mall, it's a completely different place than it was in the 40s. Every store there is a national brand, and none of them were originally. So it's just, it was a great opportunity to write a yarn.

[9:06] Jack Viertel: So it is this historical fiction, kind of retelling where you learn a little bit, but are also swept up into an all new story at the same time. I love that.

[9:13] Jack Viertel: That was the idea. And of course, there are real characters who appear throughout it. But I made up everything about what they say and what they do. But you know, there's a big encounter with Joseph Papp and another one with Ethel Waters. I don't know whether what they were, I don't know anything like that ever happened. But I, but I say as well, that's not say that it happened. It's a little like ragtime in that way. You know, exactly into these real people. Not that I would compare myself to Yale Doctorow or ragtime, which is one of my favorite books in the world and dramatically superior to almost any book I've ever read. But anyway, the technique is the same.

[9:38] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Sure. That actually will probably come back as we talk about pastiche and how Sondheim uses it in Follies. The technique, my goodness. So it's available now, right?

[9:50] Jack Viertel: It is available now. It's published April 2nd.

[9:52] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Incredible.

[9:53] Jack Viertel: You can get it at a bookstore. You can get it from Jeff Bezos at Amazon or from barnesandnoble.com or wherever you want to get it, you can get it. End of commercial.

[10:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, question about your characters. Are they ever in real shows or do you, did you create shows that were like other shows?

[10:11] Jack Viertel: They're in several real shows and several created shows. The young woman who's an ingenue when we first meet her on Broadway, we actually learn about her whole early life, but is in a catastrophic musical called Nowhere to Go But Up, which I actually saw as a 13-year-old.

[10:31] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: I don't even know this one and I'm wearing my Flahouli shirt today. My gosh.

[10:35] Jack Viertel: That's the thing about Nowhere to Go But Up. It is nobody's cult musical, so it's my cult musical. But the shows that really I go into detail about are mostly shows that I made up.

[10:50] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: How fun.

[10:51] Jack Viertel: With the exception of one other major flop, which is Pousse Café, which is a show written by Duke Ellington.

[10:57] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes. Oh my gosh. This is right up my alley. Okay. So, let's rewind a few years even before the 1960s, before 1962, to talk about this show. We're going to begin by discussing the Follies themselves, right?

[11:13] Jack Viertel: Right. Sure.

[11:14] Jack Viertel: This is definitely one of the branches of our musical theater family tree. I guess its ancestry could probably be traced to France and the Follies Bergère, but they were essentially these big extravagant reviews with huge casts, huge costumes and sets, and they became popular in America on Broadway at the beginning of the 20th century and stayed that way probably up until World War II. Is that fair?

[11:44] Jack Viertel: I would say into the early 50s.

[11:46] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, even into the 50s.

[11:47] Jack Viertel: What happened to review was that it all went to television.

[11:51] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, fair enough.

[11:52] Jack Viertel: It became the Ed Sullivan Show. It became variety shows on TV. Until then, it stayed in the theaters, and there were still some even into the early 60s.

[12:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: How do you see it in our musical theater history, along with burlesque and vaudeville? Like, what is its little corner that it's holding?

[12:06] Jack Viertel: It was the, you know, I think the first Ziegfeld Follies was in 1908, 1907 or 1908. You have to remember at that point, there was no radio and television. They were barely recording actual records, and the movies were a long way from talking and were really just in their infancy. It was, I think, the most glamorous night out that you could possibly have in New York. You could hear songs by many different writers and comedy sketches which were about contemporary things that if you read them today, you might not even know what they were referring to because it was all a passing fancy. Sort of like an endless parade of Saturday Night Live sketches, which if you go back and look at them from 30 years ago, you might not know what they were.

[12:56] Jack Viertel: Ziegfeld Follies were truly glamorous. They were very sexist. They featured lots of scantily clad or unclad women, and probably men as well. But they were a dominant, dominant form of the musical theatre early in the musical theatre's life. And they grew out of vaudeville, I think, which was a less glamorous form of the same thing, which went all around the country. If you were a vaudeville performer like the Marx Brothers earlier in their career, you would get a season, right? You would play 18 weeks in 18 different cities on a circuit. The Ziegfeld Follies happened on Broadway at the Winter Garden, and it sat there for a whole season. So to get that gig, you had to be at the very top of the heap. And so people like Will Rogers and Beatrice Lilly and Burt Lahr, people like that appeared in them as sort of the stars, and then the rest was hugely elaborate window dressing.

[14:00] Jack Viertel: I never thought of it in this way. But do you think the Follies were an essential part of making Broadway Broadway as like a destination, a place to catch the cream of the crop, in terms of musicals?

[14:15] Jack Viertel: Probably, yes. I mean, what there was that was competition, I think, in those early years was mostly operetta, with things like The Desert Song. And, you know, modern musical comedy hadn't really been invented yet. But one of the really nice things about the Follies is it gave young songwriters a chance to have one or two songs placed in a show. They didn't write the whole score. But so, you know, you'll find an occasional song by Gershwin or Berlin, you know, in there. And that's how they got there. That's how they cut their teeth on Broadway.

[14:49] Jack Viertel: City Center Encores! presented one of those shows, the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. What did you learn from that whole experience?

[15:01] Jack Viertel: Well, I was not the artistic director when that happened, but I was on the advisory committee. So I was around when it happened. And the reason they did the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, specifically, was that the orchestrations had been restored. So it was possible to actually put the thing on stage. Most of the Follies and other reviews, I mean, Ziegfeld was not the only one. He was the only one using the word Follies, I think.

[15:26] Jack Viertel: Sure. George White Scandals.

[15:29] Jack Viertel: George White Scandals, and etc., etc. Most of those orchestrations are lost. And in some cases, the sheet music itself is lost. And many of them have none of the sketches have survived. For some reason, Ziegfeld of '36 survived. And because Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics, the Gershwin Trust paid to have the score restored in parts printed and all of that. And so it was chosen, basically, because it was the one that was available. And the music is by Vernon Duke, and it's a great score. And I think one of the things we learned is you can't do them anymore. Because as good as the scores are, well, the score was fantastic and made an incredibly lovely cast album, which probably you can get someplace. But the sketches, as I said, were completely mysterious and not at all funny. And so to actually do a whole Follies was of great historical interest, but not hysterical interest, so to speak.

[16:37] Jack Viertel: This show has a lot of feels attached to it, a lot of ghosts, if you will. And it's no small decision to have ghosts of showgirls constantly walking around the stage during this show, because you feel it. You feel the implications, and the history, and the regret, and the hope, and the tragedy, and everything. You feel it all in the show, and it's quite a theatrical feat to do so. Now, this idea to write Follies occurred when Stephen Sondheim, who had just got done doing, I think, Do I Hear a Waltz with Richard Rodgers, for those who do not know, they didn't get along too well. It wasn't a very happy collaborative experience, which I think was sad because, of course, Sondheim and Hammerstein had been so close. Stephen Sondheim decides from then on out he's only doing music and lyrics. He's not going to go back to just doing one. And he teams up with James Goldman, who had he already written A Line in Winter? I think so, right?

[17:48] Jack Viertel: Yes. Yes, I believe so. He was this big deal. He had a hit play, A Line in Winter, for those who may know the film version with Katherine Hepburn, Piero Tull. Anyway, they team up and are discussing maybe ways that they could collaborate, and Goldman brings up an article that he had read about the Ziegfeld Follies showgirl reunions. The musical could be based at one of these reunions. And where they go initially, as Sondheim tells it, is that instead of creating a whodunit, they were going to make a who's-gonna-do-it. They were going to create this quad of characters, all of whom had enough venom to kill someone. And then the rest of the show, plot-wise, was just going to be about seeing who's going to finally pull the trigger, literally.

[18:42] Jack Viertel: Now, as they kept working through this structure, every time that they would go into the actual details of who's going to shoot who, and how is the plot going to pan out, it was distracting. The plot itself was distracting. And so that is when they pivot and decide to forego the plot. No one's going to get shot, and instead it's going to become more of a concept musical. Now, at this point, as they're having these discussions, this is pre-Company. This is the late 60s. And when Harold Prince comes in, the great director-producer, comes in and convinces Sondheim to do Company, their kind of tit-for-tat is that Harold Prince is also going to come in and help with Follies, which is this other idea.

Because they needed help. They needed help to figure out how to make this show work, and who is more instrumental at making a concept musical than the one who worked with Sondheim on the first, and maybe greatest, Company. So, as you see it, Company ends up coming first, and then the season after Follies comes into play. You were probably there. You were seeing these shows. Can you kind of take us through culturally how these two shows were viewed and received?

[20:09] Jack Viertel: Yes, in some ways I can. I was an undergraduate in Boston when Company was trying out, I think, at the Schubert, not at the Colonial, but I'm not 100% sure. And I had sort of backed away from the musical theater for a little while. This was the height of the Vietnam War, and I thought of musicals as sort of frivolous and silly. But I was a big, big Stephen Sondheim fan. Really, from the opening bars of the overture of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on, I thought, I'm hearing something completely different than I've ever heard before. But he really hadn't been hurt from much. I mean, Do I Hear a Waltz hadn't succeeded, although it wasn't a disastrous flop. And then there was silence for three or four years before Company arrived.

So I went to see Company purely out of an enthusiasm for Stephen Sondheim, and was completely knocked off my feet. Interestingly, Being Alive hadn't been written yet. But the show sort of had no ending, but it sort of came to a stop. But it was clearly a completely new kind of musical, like a real plot, relatively plotless, very sharp edged look at marriage, look at New York City at a time of real tension and hustle.

[21:39] Jack Viertel: And I thought, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. And it went to New York, got mixed reviews, Clive Barnes and New York Times, who came to Sondheim's musicianship very late in the somewhere around a little night music, I think, didn't really like it much. But it ran anyway, and it won the Best Musical Award. And, you know, it was a modest hit, which is to say it recouped its investment plus a little. And then, you know, by then I was I was like back into the musical theater because of this show. And then came Follies, right on the heels of it. And I was still in college. So I got to see Follies trying out this time at the Colonial. And I went once a week, basically, for the four or five weeks it was there.

You know, a balcony ticket in those days, I think, was four dollars and ninety-five cents. So I shelled out and I watched and I watched them change the show. I did not see the final big changes go in, which went in in the last week. Somehow or other, I was too stupid to do that. But so I did not until it came to New York and opened. I did not hear I'm Still Here. I did not see the new opening sequence with the ghosts.

[22:58] Jack Viertel: Both of these shows in different ways, I think we're talking about what it was like to be in America now, now being the early 70s. And what it was like was awakening from a bad dream in a way that it started out as a good dream. You know, you hope that everything will be lovely and it isn't lovely. It's sort of tragic, but it's rich with Americana at the same time. And Americana is not necessarily tragic. It can be very joyful. So trying to make out all of that.

[23:35] Jack Viertel: Yeah, the show Follies in particular, you know, as I'm sure we're going to talk about used pastiche numbers that sounded almost like they're genuinely vintage numbers. I mean, there's always Sondheim in those numbers somewhere. For sure. Letting you know that he just wrote them and that we're not listening to the score from Don't Know Nanette. But, you know, and those numbers stop the show of some of them. I mean, they just stopped it cold in its tracks. But the overall pessimism of it drove some many audiences nuts. And this was not helped by the fact that by the time they got to New York, the show was written not to have an intermission and they had put an intermission in in Boston because it was so running so long.

By the time they carved it down to its final shape, they took the intermission back out. And that meant that audiences in that original production were sitting through two hours and 15 minutes Follies without stopping. And not all of them were there at the end. I saw I saw it a lot in New York and I and I did not never saw a performance in which someone or sometimes more than one person didn't finally give up in exasperation and storm out of the Winter Garden Theater. I thought it was astounding.

[24:50] Jack Viertel: So interesting. Well, you know, we don't hear that. We hear that about the original production of Merrily, right? Like, but I don't ever remember hearing that Follies was receiving that kind of welcome.

[25:02] Jack Viertel: Yeah. And it also got mixed reviews and Clive Barnes missed it again. And then Walter Kerr came. In those days, there were two times critics, right? There was a daily critic and a Sunday critic. And Walter Kerr came in with a Sunday review and bashed it. And then Martin Gottfried, who was the critic for Women's Wear Daily, I think must have called the editors at The Times and said, you have to let me write a piece about this because these two idiots are idiots. And he wrote a long piece about it that was printed in The Times that was essentially a refutation of The Times critics. And as I recall, it was a very good piece. And Martin Gottfried was a very good critic and wrote a very good book called The Theater Divided back way back in the day. And so it also ran a long time and won a bunch of Tony Awards, but not in.

[25:52] Jack Viertel: I can't imagine these fellas who were maybe tied so tightly to their artistic visions and values at the newspapers, then saw *Two Gentlemen of Verona* and thought it was the answer to musical theatre future. Did that show get better reviews than *FOLLIES*? I think *Two Gentlemen of Verona*, which was originally done at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, outdoors, as a LARC, you know, for free. You don't pay to get into the Delacorte Theatre. I don't remember the reviews. They were probably lovely. It was a, you know, there was a moon out and it was a fun show, breezy show. But you have to remember that the Tony Awards are voted on by Tony voters, not by critics. So there you have it. I do remember there was a piece in *New York Magazine* that was a contest.

It was something that Johnny Carson used to do on *The Tonight Show*, which was to give you the answer and you had to come up with the winning question. And the answer that this particular week was, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And the winning question was, what do you think of *FOLLIES*? Fair enough. Well, you know what, sometimes people just want to feel good. And so if Tony voters felt that way, maybe that's why *Two Gentlemen* won. And it might have been a close call. And in my book, one of the things I do is this trumpet player who is based on Red Press ends up in the pit of *FOLLIES*, the original production of *FOLLIES*. Oh, my gosh, I didn't even know that. And he goes and he goes with his mother and his daughter, who's a teenager. And the mother hates it and the daughter loves it. And I just couldn't resist writing that because I thought, yeah, we got it, right? We were in college, we got it. And our parents did not.

[27:51] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Do you think it was too confronting to the parents?

[27:54] Jack Viertel: I think to some degree, it was too confronting. I think to some degree, they were acclimated to a certain kind of musical theater, which was largely musical comedy. And what in those days was called the Tired Businessman's Show. You know, how to succeed in business and *Subway's are for the Wealth*, yeah, if it had been a hit. But yes, that's the aim. The aim is to amuse people with a relatively disposable entertainment that has good songs in it. That's why they went to the theater. That's why they paid their $9.90. And *FOLLIES* was not that. *FOLLIES* was not that. One of the reasons why Sondheim said that he was really looking forward to writing *FOLLIES* is because it allowed him to write in pastiche.

Now, that, of course, means that you're borrowing musical styles from yesteryear. But it's one of the reasons I love pastiche is in musical theater, it's usually a commentary of some kind. And when you look at how much care went into deciding who to pay homage to, what types of songs to include in *FOLLIES*, it really makes you look at something like *Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat*, no offense to Joseph at all, or Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, and just be like, oh, okay, so they're not doing pastiche. This is the standard for bringing this kind of commentary into musicals. So the score of *FOLLIES* is a mixture of, you know, a Sondheim tune like "Could I Leave You," as well as some of these songs that you might find in the FOLLIES. What we're going to do is we're going to talk through the show, go through the songs, go through some of the characters, and I want to hear whatever comes to your brain, okay?

[29:40] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Sure. So the show opens. Here's the other thing. I'm already interrupting myself. Every single production of *FOLLIES* has been different. Every single one. I swear, like, they've never done a major revival of *FOLLIES* where it's been the same show. Why is that? Why have there been so many changes to this thing? It feels kind of singular to Sondheim's career.

[30:06] Jack Viertel: I think the one we did at ENCORES was exactly the same as opening night on Broadway. Okay, fine, Jack, you win. You're the one. As was the one at the National Theater in Great Britain. But what happened was, I think, when the show did not succeed in New York, and Cameron McIntosh wanted to do it in London, he had ideas about how to lighten it, how to change it, how to make it, if not better, more accessible, more digestible, and Sondheim wrote some new songs for that production. So now there are two or three different choices you can make in what to put in any given spot, and different productions, I guess, make different choices. And I assume Sondheim, and then now the Sondheim Estate approves or doesn't approve of those choices.

Several songs were written out of town while the show was trying out, but that's typical, and doesn't count as changing the show, I don't think. And yeah, some of those songs are pretty popular. I think a lot of people know "Boy, Oh Boy, Can That Boy Foxtrot," but it's not because it was from *FOLLIES*, because it was never in *FOLLIES*.

[31:19] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Well, it was in *FOLLIES* in Boston, and it just wasn't, it's a one-joke song. And Yvonne DiCarlo needed more, and so Sondheim doubled the length of it, which just made it less effective, and then he just threw in the towel and wrote "I'm Still Here," which is one of the greatest songs ever written.

[31:39] Jack Viertel: Yeah, he did just fine. My point, I guess, is saying that even the cut songs are interesting, and have lives on their own, and you can't say that for every cut song from a musical. He rarely wrote a bad song, and he himself has said, it's no crime to write a bad song, it's a bad thing to write the wrong song. And I think "Can That Boy Foxtrot" was the wrong song for that spot, but it's not a bad song.

[32:01] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Right.

[32:02] Jack Viertel: And you know, there's a few songs of his that I think are, you know, not top drawer, but he rarely wrote a bad song. But even Goldman himself, I mean, he continued to revise the book.

[32:12] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes.

[32:12] Jack Viertel: Pretty much right up to his death. I mean, because I think of that, like the 1998 Paper Mill Playhouse production, which, speaking of "I'm Still Here," has there ever been an "I'm Still Here" greater than freaking Ann Miller?

[32:26] Jack Viertel: There were some edits in and revisals in there, too.

[32:29] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes. Well, his widow also has taken on the task of revising, cutting, trimming, and that estate, which is controlled by her, is very particular and demanding about what you can and can't say. And I will say to that degree, there are things in the Encores! *FOLLIES* that were changed, trimmed, whatever, at her insistence.

[32:50] Jack Viertel: Interesting.

[32:51] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: So if you're talking about the book, nothing substantive about the book was changed, but there are individual lines that were either changed or cut.

[32:58] Jack Viertel: All right. So anyway, the show begins, right? We're at this reunion, and there's a great story that Sondheim tells about how he and Goldman went to a reunion of *Fiddler on the Roof* as kind of research to see, you know, maybe what kinds of things they could include. What they noticed was that things started out really celebratory, you know, all love, all joy, all tears, right at the top. And then it's an open bar, and things keep going, and the energy kind of settles, and people are performing old songs. And that was when Sondheim and Goldman went, they were like, let's go into the, because it was in a theater, let's go into the orchestra pit and just kind of watch, see how things go. And so they're watching this reunion go.

Basically, there was this one guy who had been drinking too much and took a bite of a sandwich and he didn't like it, and he just like threw it into the orchestra pit. Instead of throwing it away, he just like tossed it in the pit, and they see it land there. And they looked at each other, and they're like, well, that's the show, you know, like this reunion has now turned into something else, which is, you know, symbolized by the sandwich lying at our feet. And so we're in this theater that's about to be destroyed. It was owned by this, you know, Ziegfeld type producer named Weissman. He has this amazing speech at the beginning, which I want to quote. He says, I mean, right from the get-go, this is what the show is about.

You can never guess, I feel like especially in America, how things are going to progress. These things that maybe were once the epitome of art and culture could one day be paved into a parking lot, and certainly that's in your book.

[35:03] Jack Viertel: Yeah. I mean, it is a kind of sloughing off process that goes on all over New York as buildings come down and are replaced by other things. Not so much parking lots anymore, although in those days that was a bit of a laugh because there were so many parking lots being built. But, you know, it's an interesting deterioration. It's very careful and clear what Goldman wrote, right? So ballet and rap are very glamorous, high-end things. Movies, less so. Blue movies, meaning porn movies, even less so. And now they're going to knock the whole thing down. So it's just like we're now in the final circle of hell, you know? And so in this situation, in this opportunity for one last hurrah, he's bringing together all of the participants in his show for a reunion to say goodbye to this space.

And the space, I mean, I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but the first time I went back into a theater after the pandemic, it was an energy that I hadn't felt in a while. And so it was undeniable. When you walk into a place where there has been that much sharing of energy between artist and audience, it leaves footprints. And I don't know how else to say it other than you just feel it.

[36:27] Jack Viertel: You do. No question about it. The first theater I walked into after the pandemic was the Winter Garden, where *Follies* played in New York, to see *The Music Man*, and where I had seen *Peter Pan* with Mary Martin at age almost six. And that trajectory, and, you know, many other shows, *West Side Story* and *Nowhere to Go But Up* played the Winter Garden. Shout out. And when the band started playing the overture, I started to bawl. I mean, and I'm a 70-something-year-old man. You know, I'm not given to weeping in public. And I wasn't weeping. I was actually literally just crying. And it is the energy of all those people, all those ghosts, all that that building has witnessed. And it's not a coincidence that the first and last chapters of my book are both called *The Winter Garden*.

[37:13] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Oh, wow. I love that. In this kind of setting, with all of this energy, here come all of these people who haven't seen each other in forever. And it is a joyful reunion. One of the big opening numbers of the show is called "Beautiful Girls," which is exactly what you would think it would be, the presentation of all of the Ziegfeld girls, but instead of them in spangly, naked-type outfits, there are these older women who are poignantly walking down the stairs just like they did, but now maybe they need a walker. It's a very beautiful symbol, all told, once again, with pastiche. I believe Sondheim said that this song was based on Irving Berlin, who tended to be very elegant in his type of additions to the Follies.

Berlin wrote "A Beautiful Girl is like a melody," which is a beautiful girl, and here's the song called "Beautiful Girls." It was shocking, because the irony of it, that these were beautiful girls who were no longer beautiful girls. They were older women, in some cases quite old.

[38:23] Jack Viertel: Traditionally speaking. Right. They weren't that image of beautiful girls that the Follies exploited. They were in a very different stage of life. The song could be called "Beautiful Girls," and whatever they are, they're not girls anymore. They probably weren't girls even back then, but that's what they were called. It was a very

[38:47] Jack Viertel: The irony of it and the elegance and beauty of it and the sadness of it were just kind of stunning.

[38:54] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Stunning is right. And I guess now would be a great opportunity to say that this was another collaboration between Hal Prince and Michael Bennett, who did the choreography and really was the force behind many of these staging symbols and metaphors that were just so powerful throughout the show. And Bennett was credited as a co-director on this show. That's right. That was his first Tony, right? I guess first directing Tony.

[39:15] Jack Viertel: Each of the women coming down are wearing sashes that have their year, right? The year that they were in the Weissman Follies. Now, let's dive into our four lead characters. We have Sally Durant. She's actually probably the first character we meet in the show. Sally. Oh, man. What do we say about Sally? Well, she's on the surface is very perky, Midwestern woman who's, you know, public persona is that she's raised two sons and she's married to a guy she loves and it's all worked out fine. And beneath the first one to tell you that it all worked out fine. Yes, exactly. And beneath that is this dark well of disappointment and failure and lost love affair from the days of the Follies, which is what the show what the plot of the show to the degree that it has one is actually about.

But she is publicly a very different person from who she is privately. It seems that she's also ill. She has been in and out of rehabs from what we find out a little bit later on in the script. I mean, she's had some real mental crises. And I don't know if it would be considered depression or maybe even bipolar, but that well runs deep.

[40:40] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah. Well, she has a real breakdown in the middle of in the middle of a song called Too Many Mornings that is very carefully written. Like this is when she loses it. She sings, I should have worn green. I wore green the last time. And you think if you're listening to the song carefully, you think, oh, this woman has just gone around the bend right in front of my eyes. And it's a it's a it's a terribly sad moment. We also learn in a roundabout way that her husband, who will come into the picture in a little bit, didn't want her to go. He didn't want to go to this reunion. And she took a plane all by herself. Like they didn't come together. So coming even attending this reunion began with a fight, a full out brawl.

[41:13] Jack Viertel: Yeah. It's interesting because she runs into her past love who's named Ben. Ben Stone became a famous politician, giving lots of speeches. Now he's retired from politics, but he's still very much like in high society. And when Sally sees him, she sings this song called Don't Look at Me, which is just this fascinating Sondheim piece about like, oh, it's so great to see you, but I look like a dead deer on the side of the road, don't I? And he's like, no, why are you going through this monologue in real life in front of me? There's no need. But it's all of this insecurity just bubbling to the surface. Whoever he is definitely brings something up for her.

[42:16] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah. We don't learn this until later in the show. This is the man she has been in love with for 25, 30 years and hasn't seen in 25 or 30 years. And he is the reason why her husband didn't want her to come, because he knows that she's coming to see this guy again. And that something that was settled 25 or 30 years ago stands a chance of getting unsettled, which is exactly what happens in the show. But we don't know that yet. All we know is that they haven't seen each other in a long time. She's very embarrassed about the way she looks and explains in the lyric to the song exactly why she says she thinks she looks fat and she thinks her hair is too dyed. And he's like, it's nice to see you. It's really nice to see you again. But we don't know what any of that really means or is going to lead to. Of course, four lives are going to fall apart because of this moment.

[43:13] Jack Viertel: Because of this moment. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Ben is actually married to another woman named Phyllis. We learn that Phyllis and Sally were roommates. And because of that, we're best friends, very close, also in the show together. Phyllis, I'm not totally sure that Sally has changed from the person that she was originally. Phyllis, however, is a completely different person, at least on the outside.

[43:47] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yes. Phyllis is someone who worked her way up into society from not being a person from society. I actually don't know much about her background, but she seems to have come to New York from someplace. And she was incredibly homesick. She was crying all the time, very naive. But she was ambitious enough to know that she wasn't going home. We don't know exactly why, but we know that she came to New York and decided to conquer New York and suffered in the process and married Ben, who became very successful. And she became the wife of a very successful man. And she told him, she told him, I'm going to learn how to be the hostess with the mostest. I will play this role.

[44:31] Jack Viertel: Right. And she did. And she says at one point, I did. I walked my feet off of the Metropolitan Museum. But it's not a happy marriage, and she's not a happy person. He's distant and chilly, and she's disappointed. And all of the ideas about, if I conquer New York and meet the right man and rise up through society, I'll finally be happy, turn out not to be true. She gets all the things she came for. It seems like everybody in the show in some way gets everything that they ask for and then realize it's not what they needed. Ain't that life? But here's my question for you. And maybe we're skipping ahead here. But why do you think Ben chose Phyllis over Sally?

[45:12] Jack Viertel: I think, I mean, I don't know that any of this is written. Sure. But it's all conjecture. Yes. But I think Ben saw in Phyllis a person who was going to be able to do that. He was very, Ben is also someone who came not from wealth. He says, one of these days, I'm going to have the biggest goddamn limousine. And that's an unwealthy person's dream of wealth. And I think he saw in Phyllis, a woman who was going to be comparably able to rise up and be that sophisticated person, which Sally was not. Sally's from the Midwest. She's going to stay in the Midwest. She's cute as a button, you know, but she's not that other thing.

[46:07] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah. Phyllis is kind of the champagne flute to Sally's, I don't know, drinking well enough to know what Sally is, but surely she's drinking rum and Coke.

[46:15] Jack Viertel: There you go. So now the only one that we haven't talked about is Buddy. And Buddy is kind of like the vaudevillian. He would have been the comic performer in The Follies. And he is the one who married Sally. He's successful. They have a huge home in Arizona. In terms of wealth, there's nothing for Sally to necessarily want, but he is out of the house quite a bit, probably because he knows that Sally's heart on some level is still with Ben.

[46:41] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Buddy is really an average guy. I mean, he wasn't in The Follies when you say that.

[46:46] Jack Viertel: Oh, he wasn't? Oh, I thought he was.

[46:48] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: No. Oh, no, no. Neither Ben nor Buddy were in The Follies. They were staged Georgianis. They would hang out.

[46:55] Jack Viertel: Oh, you're right. You're right. Waiting for the girls upstairs. And they would wait for the girls upstairs, which is my absolutely favorite Stephen Sondheim song. But that might be a conversation for another time. Buddy is, I think, someone who would be reasonably easily satisfied if he had a wife who loved him, if he got on well with his children, and she got on well with his children. I think he had a very simple dream. And weirdly enough, simple as it was, it didn't come true.

[47:23] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Because he has a wife who's in love with someone else and has been from the very beginning. Doesn't feel great. As we're diving in and out of these little conversations that are happening over hors d'oeuvres or in a corner, you know, in a hallway, whatever, we are also getting to know some of the other characters in the show who were Follies performers and are doing their old numbers. We've got the novelty team doing a little rain on the rooftop. We've got Solange, who's like a Liliane Monteverdi type performer, singing, Ah, Pavi Carlotta, who is this old Follies performer who became a true motion picture star. Her great moment is, of course, when she sings I'm Still Here, which I believe the whole setup to that song is that the song got cut because it was too funny. People were laughing in the audience.

[48:21] Jack Viertel: It's such a confusing moment in the show because that's the spot where Can That Boy Foxtrot was. Can That Boy Foxtrot was a pastiche song from the Follies. I'm Still Here is not. I'm Still Here is the story she tells because her song got cut from the Follies. But you're not supposed to think that I'm Still Here was in the Follies. It's a book song. It comes closer to pastiche than any other book song in the show, I think. And Mr. Sondheim said, you know, this is basically a lift from Harold Arlen, but don't tell anybody, you know, it's not intended to be a pastiche song.

[49:03] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Sure. And he's definitely doing an ode to Dorothy Fields. There's definitely pastiche there. Yeah. There's a great song called Who's That Woman, which is, if I remember Sondheim correctly, saying that he was paying homage to EY Harburg, speaking of La Juli. And it's this great song where all of the showgirls are recreating this number that was cardiovascularly challenging when they were 19, let alone now all of these years later. But the irony is just beautiful because it's meant to be this song where a girl catches herself in the mirror and is like, oh, who's that woman? You know, I am gorgeous. And yet, you know, we always hear about people getting older, looking in the mirror and being like, ah, who's that woman? Who's this person staring back at me? So it's this really great play on time making all the difference about what a song actually means.

[50:53] Jack Viertel: Yeah. And, of course, the women are joined halfway through the number by their younger ghosts. Maybe the most develops into the greatest production number ever created on Broadway, I think. One that completely stopped the show cold in its tracks every performance. I mean, for long, long, long periods of applause and cheering. The women sing this song and it is hard for them to dance it. It's an elaborate dance tap number. And in the middle of it, and you can actually hear it in the arrangement if you hear the whole song, I don't know how much of it is on the cast album, but their younger selves appear in spangles and dance behind them perfectly while they're stumbling. And then they go 180 degrees around and you see the young, what the number looked like when it was originally done.

And then they go 180 degrees around again and you see these older women managing to finish completely out of breath. And it's an astounding number created really by Michael Bennett, I think. The music, lyrics obviously are by Sondheim and there's a big dance arrangement. I've forgotten who did the dance arrangements. But yeah, it was a completely astonishing thing. And it is about, I've always thought, and this is completely made up on my part, it is a little bit of a tip of the hat on Sondheim's part to that moment in Gypsy when Louise gets all dressed up to do her first script and looks in the mirror and says, I'm a pretty girl, mama. And so it's the return of the mirror. But of course, Follies is a mirror. It's us looking back and us seeing what's actually there as opposed to what we wish was there. And all the things that aren't still there.

[51:43] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Ben ultimately asks Phyllis for a divorce. She responds with this scathing, seething, "Could I Leave You?", which is one of my favorite dramatic songs. And of course, Sondheim being Sondheim, it's a waltz. It's a Rodgers waltz. That's right, it's just a waltz. Ben sings "The Road You Didn't Take," which I think is a glorious tune. If anybody doesn't know FOLLIES, but loves Into the Woods, and you're like, "Oh, Moments in the Woods is my song." I'm like, also listen to "The Road You Didn't Take." It's pretty fab. So Ben and Phyllis have this thing. Buddy and Sally are basically near disaster as well because Sally is convinced that Ben is going to leave Phyllis for her. Sally and Ben have this beautiful song called "Too Many Mornings," where their passion is reawakened.

And she takes that as the sign of like, he's packing his bags. We're going to move in together. And I think Buddy sees the writing on the wall that that's not the truth. Yeah, I mean, he literally sees them sing this song. He's in the shadows watching it. When there's an intermission, that's where the intermission happens. And yeah, the song is a beautiful, beautiful song, where you can just feel that Ben is stirred by Sally, but he's having an accommodating stirred moment, whereas she believes her whole life is about to change. And some part of him understands that I'm going to have to get out of this mess. And it's a very, very complicated, in a wonderful way, piece of theater writing. And it's also a pattern.

I mean, their relationship at the get-go was he was sleeping with Sally, but also proposing to Phyllis. Like, this is just dysfunction replaying itself all over again, as though nothing had changed. And in a sense, nothing has. Well, I mean, and that's just life, too. One day I'll tell the story about when I helped backstage at the Dreamgirls reunion. And look, things just don't change, even after all of those years. I understand. I did want to make one quick point about "The Road You Didn't Take," which is a song you mentioned just a few minutes ago, which is, I just want to give a shout out to Jonathan Tunick, who was the orchestrator of FOLLIES. There is a repeated discordance between, I think, what sounds like an English horn and a clarinet, maybe, or two reed instruments.

And Jonathan is a reed player. At the end of each line, it's just so, you know, "The Road You Didn't Take" and "In Buddy's Eyes," which is Sally's song. Gosh, I didn't even say "In Buddy's Eyes." My gosh. About her marriage are both just superb examples of subtext, right? Both people are saying, "I'm fine. I'm fine with the choices I made. I'm fine." And the music is saying, they are so not fine. They are the opposite of fine. But they can't tell you that. And that's what subtext is. Something Sondheim said Arthur Lawrence taught him about on West Side Story. When you're saying one thing and meaning the opposite thing, the actor has something to play. They have to confront, like, "Oh, I have to hide something.

I'm saying this, and I'm feeling that." And those two songs are just beautiful, beautiful examples of that exact thing. What a testament to the art form that it can embody that, you know, to be saying one thing and hearing something else.

[55:19] Jack Viertel: Yeah. That's a great point. Before we end, we got to dive into Loveland. Because the whole end of the show is maybe one of the more divisive or controversial parts of the show, which is it's this huge emotional breakdown for these four characters. They've been pushed to the brink of their own sanity. And it's reflected by this empty theater being transformed into a glorious production of the old Follies. And each of them has a standout number, which is directly reflective of what's going on inside. So you've got Buddy, even though I, and I, maybe this is why I thought he was on stage. He's always got a joke. You know, even if he wasn't a comedian, he probably could have done it because he's always trying to make you laugh.

And hey, here I am. And his song in the Follies is the "Buddy Blues." You know, this kind of patter comedy song. Then we have Sally, who has her torch song, which is once again, lovingly lifted from Gershwin. Is it Gershwin? Gershwin, yeah. Yeah, it's "The Man I Love." Phyllis has her song, "The Story of Lucy and Jesse," which is talking about, you know, who she was and who she's become and trying to meld them together into one human. Which is a Cole Porter pastiche. A great Cole Porter pastiche. And then you've got Ben, who sings "Live, Love, Laugh." And at the end of his number, you know, loses control. He can't remember the words. He's asking the conductor and the crack show, right? He's always been this politician that has every answer and now he's in a show and doesn't know what to say. Anyway, I just unloaded a whole lot, but is there anything you want to say about this section?

[57:18] Jack Viertel: Well, the Phyllis song was rewritten, right? The Phyllis song was originally a song called "Uptown Downtown." And in the English production, it was yet a third song, I think. Although I don't remember what that song was called. I love "Lucy and Jesse," though, man. But "Lucy and Jesse" is just a brilliant piece of writing. Listen to this tongue twister Sondheim created. "Lucy is juicy, but terribly drab. Jesse is dressy, but cold as a slab. Lucy wants to be dressy. Jesse wants to be juicy. Lucy wants to be Jesse and Jesse Lucy." I mean, come on! And then the bridge. "Poor sad souls itching to be switching roles. Lucy wants to do what Jesse does. Jesse wants to be what Lucy was." It's so great.

This song is actually kind of personal for me, because I was trying to create, long story short, I was trying to create a tap dance number that was an expression of how it feels to be both gay and LDS. I know. And what I came to was turning this into a tap dance number for a boy, just because it's so perfectly encapsulated. I'm realizing through this episode, I guess I'm Phyllis. Um, interestingly, when we did FOLLIES at Encores, and Victoria Clark played Sally, the song she had the most complicated relationship with was "Losing My Mind." One of the songs. Because it was very hard for her not to sing the song as a book song, as Sally, like Sally singing about losing her mind. And Mr. Sondheim spent a good deal of time with her, not criticizing anything she was doing, but saying, "This is a torch song from a Follies.

You have to let your character go completely, and just do it. It will tell what it's supposed to tell, if you do nothing that has anything to do with your character. It is a torch song. It's a song you sing eight times a week. And every time you sing it, you sing it the same. And you know, that you can't let your character get into it." Right. And she got it right away. And she did it right away. But it was such an interesting observation that these songs, these are the pastiches for the principles, not for the secondary or tertiary characters, but for the principles. And they had to do them as if they were Follies numbers, and ignore their own, all of the personal problems and dramatic things that we had learned about them. They had to let all of that go, and just do it like a Follies number.

[1:00:00] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Interesting. So, it's for the audience to feel that dissonance.

[1:00:02] Jack Viertel: Yeah, that's right. That's right. You just do the Follies number, and the words and music will do the work for you. Wow. So, then how does the show end?

[1:00:08] Jack Viertel: So, the show ends with a much rewritten, many times rewritten scene, where there's like a big nervous breakdown, and everybody in the show is on stage at the same time, singing excerpts from their big number. It's like a cacophony. Sort of never, a big cacophony. Probably never completely written down. I think they just were told, go out there and sing, you know, eight bars. But it's just this complete chaos, at which point they all leave, and the four principals are left alone to get up and go home. And there's a pair of dialogues, brief dialogues, basically saying, we're going to go home and put this all back together again. It's the one thing in FOLLIES that I think doesn't really ring true, because you don't get the sense that either of these marriages are going to get put back together again in a way that really is meaningful. But it is a little ray of hope that I think the writers felt they had to provide for audiences. And they tried it a lot of different ways, but they never convinced me.

[1:01:16] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Yeah. Well, you know what, I gotta say, I had a little bit of a different read on it, because I think that this place and this setting brings out different things in these people. For better or worse, I'm not sure that these conversations would have been had with the same vitriol or the same energy or whatever, if it also hadn't been in this theater with the setting with these people. I think you take them, and it's one of the reasons why FOLLIES is so beautifully called FOLLIES, because it's also showing the characters' follies within this space and this construct. They are coming to this place in their lives because they are where they are, both physically and emotionally. And so I wonder if you go back to Arizona and they just pretend like it didn't happen.

[1:02:06] Jack Viertel: I think that may be true. But it's sort of like, we're going to build it back together again. It's going to be better this time. I mean, maybe. Maybe, or maybe it'll just all get torn down and put a parking lot.

[1:02:21] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: Right. Yeah, exactly. Oh, my gosh. It's such a fascinating show, and we could talk for another hour about it.

[1:02:27] Jack Viertel: Easily, easily.

[1:02:29] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: But I know you have to go. I'm so grateful that you took some time to talk to me today. Thank you, Mr. Jack Viertel. Can you please tell us how to follow you or to buy your book?

[1:02:43] Jack Viertel: Well, I'm on X at Blue Sky, and I will soon have a website, although I don't have one now. And you'll be able to find it on Google, I imagine. The book is called Broadway Melody. It's out in hardback and paperback and e-book availability. And it's a novel about Broadway and about people who fall in and out of love on Broadway and a million things that actually did happen on Broadway and almost that many that actually sort of never did happen. And if you get it, I hope you enjoy it.

[1:03:17] Jeffrey Scott Parsons: As always, if you have recommendations for shows you'd like us to cover on A Musical Theatre Podcast, you can always email me at amusicalpodcast at gmail.com. Don't forget to follow us on social media. We're on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. We also have Patreon! We're for only $1 a month. $1 a month, you guys. You get a bonus episode, plus you get to participate in lots of great conversations. I always love our time over there at Patreon! We also have our TeePublic store where all of the profits we receive from designs go to Broadway Cares, Equity Fights AIDS. Share us with your friends and family. Give us a nice review. I would love having you part of this wonderful podcasting community. Thank you, Jack.

Thank you, Broadway. Thank you, Mr. Sondheim. What a fascinating show. I'd love to continue the discourse about this one because I do think that FOLLIES is confronting, but not necessarily hopeless. So everybody, remember, live, laugh, love. I know that sometimes you'll forget your lyrics, but that's okay. That's the Follies.