So, this morning, first thing, I have to run to Kinko's and photocopy these two charts I quickly wrote yesterday. I hope they read down easily today.
DR Jose, I wish everyone of my friends a huge success with FOLLIES. I am elated for every good review they get and bummed at the negative comments because I know more about the rehearsal process on this show than I can say, but nothing's changed my opinion of the director's lack of talent. I don't want to see this production for two major reasons: the original was perfection, and I think that's what alienated so many folk. It was frightening, it was sad, it was haunting in so many ways, it had charm and sophistication, and it was brilliant and brilliantly cast. Every production since then has compromises: Susan Shulman's Pittsburgh CLO production, which was the first time I had thoughts about ever seeing FOLLIES again, had a good Sally and Ben and a lousy Phyllis and Buddy. There were great second-stringers in all the other parts. The Philharmonic concert version was the nail in the coffin for me: a happy ending, concert endings for the Rain on the Roof-Ah Paris-Broadway Baby Montage instead of the counterpoint chaos, an over-indulgent and over-indilged Many Patinkin, all wrong.
The second reason I don't want to see this production is that I still believe Bernadette Peters should be playing Phyllis. These idiot Sondheads wrongly think she's automatically a signed deal for a lead in every Sondheim show and she isn't. She's as right for Sally as I am, and no one will ever replace Dorothy Collins' mix of sweet "girl next door," chip-on-the-shoulder anger, and delusion. That character is the most closely realized stage picture of my sad mother in any show I can think of, and Bernadette Peters, for me, has none of that. I find the comment that Kevin H posted about some actors not auditioning very illuminating because they were offered roles and my first thought was, who gives a woman who can't dance "Lucy and Jessie"? Bernadette plays anger and bitch well, as she proved in the film IMPROMPTU and in a lot of Act One of SUNDAY IN THE PARK.
As to my mother, she was a mess: pathetic, lost in dreams of what never happened, angry at growing up poor in a depression that shortchanged her ambitions, hating people with money who fulfilled a lot of theirs, caught up in tv soap operas and reading pulp romantic novels, jealous, manipulative, unhappily married and feeling trapped, offering conditional love only when she came out of her long trances. I always thought she would kill herself long before she did it with cigarettes and fried food. Dorothy Collins was all of that and more; she is is irreplaceable.
End of soapbox.