steve's notebook

(Aug. 20, 2010)

Last week’s big casting news was the confirmation that Bernadette Peters would be headlining the Kennedy Center’s spring 2011 Follies. The production, to be directed by Eric Shaeffer, was announced several months ago, but this casting guarantees its place as a Major Theatrical Event. Kim Cattrall is all but confirmed for Phyllis, and Danny Burstein, late of South Pacific, is said to be set for Buddy (though at least one website amusingly published an initial report of the much younger Danny Gurwin – Sally as cougar), while word is that John Dossett, Peters’s Gypsy co-star, is in talks for Ben. The last major role this leaves, then, is former movie star Carlotta, whose big moment is the well-loved “I’m Still Here.”

Unsurprisingly, this has prompted endless chatter from various corners of the internet over who might, or ought to, play the part. Everyone from Patti LuPone, to Leslie Uggums, to Ann-Margaret, to Bette Midler, to Elaine Stritch has been bandied about. There’s at least one rumor that an offer has been made to Stockard Channing.

All this discussion gives me a chance to dwell at length on a particular pet peeve of mine: the gradual aging of Carlotta Campion. Over the last forty years, the general trend in casting the part has been older and older actresses, moving increasingly futher away from the role as written.

A non-comprehensive survey:

• Yvonne de Carlo – 1971 - created the part on Broadway - age 49
• Carol Burnett – 1985 – Lincoln Center Concert – 52
• Dolores Gray – 1987 – London – 63
• Eartha Kitt – 1989 – London – 62
• Karen Morrow – 1995 – Seattle and Houston – 59
• Ann Miller – 1998 – Papermill Playhouse – 75
• Polly Bergen – 2001 – Broadway – 71 [look who introducers the song!]
• Donna McKechnie – 2002 – L.A. Reprise! – 60
• Christine Baranksi – 2007 – Encores! concert – 55

So we’ve seen an addition of as many as ten to twenty-five years to the character’s age. Interestingly, the highest-profile examples of casting by-the-script occur in concert settings, where this kind of thing tends to matter least. Elaine Stritch, performing “I’m Still Here” at the White House, prefaced the song, “I thought you should be at least eighty, eighty-one, eighty-two before you sing this song. Otherwise I don’t believe it, I just don’t believe it,” a statement she’s frequently echoed elsewhere. And it would seem, based on our examples, that she’s not alone in this impression.

But there is more to the character than The Song, so let’s take a moment to look at Carlotta as originally presented. In Michael Bennett’s staging of the prologue and overture, she enters and is immediately surrounded by a fleet of men (about 1:45) offering to take her wrap and escort her. There’s a sexual heat to the way they descend upon her. She’s famous, but also desirable.

Librettist James Goldman clearly identifies her as fifty in the script prior to her first scene:

Our attention shifts again, this time to BEN as he turns and sees CARLOTTA CAMPION. CARLOTTA is a one-time movie star and in terrific shape for fifty. She is the kind of woman who not only has seen everything but has liked the look of it.

A fairly definitive statement. Florence Kotz’s original costume designs included a “1941” sash during the “Beautiful Girls” procession, just like Phyllis and forty-nine year-old Sally (that’s all she is).

Later in the show, Ben, trying to get some sympathy action, seeks comfort in Carlotta, but she rebuffs him, claiming never to cheat on the guys she’s living with and downplaying their past involvement:

We had some fun once; it was just a thing. That’s all you meant to me, Ben: just a thing. (She cradles his head in her lap and gently touches his hair) The guy I’m living with, he’s just a thing, too, but he’s twenty-six.

Less definitive, but age makes a difference in this line. A fifty year-old talking about her twenty-six year-old lover is a woman with a lover half her age. Phyllis suggests the same arrangement in “Could I Leave You?” Feisty, a little bold, but not that strange. Maybe it even adds a little glamour. A seventy-five year-old romancing a man a third her age is a different story. I’m sure it happens, but the tone of the line shifts a lot. Less Ashton-Demi and more Sunset Boulevard-esque desperation. Ben earlier mentions a girl he slept with that afternoon. He doesn’t specify her age, but calling her “a girl” it doesn’t sound like he goes for septuagenarians. So, the higher Carlotta’s age is pushed, the weirder this scene becomes.

But, you say, what about “I’m Still Here”? Isn’t fifty a little young to have been through everything in that song? And you have a point. A fifty year-old Carlotta would have been thirteen when the Dionne Babies were born, fifteen at the time of Windsor and Wally’s affair, a child during the Hoover administration. But by the same token, during the depression, a “now”-seventy-five year-old Carlotta would have been a fortysomething dancing in her scanties. Which, again, is a somewhat different image than the song is trying to present. And further, I’m not even sure “I’m Still Here” ought to be taken literally. During the Boston tryout the spot was for “Can That Boy Foxtrot?,” a Follies number in line with the earlier re-lived performances of “Broadway Baby” and “Ah, Paris.” When “I’m Still Here” was inserted instead, the lead-in dialogue remained reminiscence of a Follies number, so it’s unclear where the song falls in the diagetic/non-diagetic field. In either case, while a fifty year-old Carlotta is one the young side of plausibility, she’s still there.

The bigger difficulty is how an agèd Carlotta throws off the dramatic balance of the show. In the original production, Ethel Shutta was a seventy-five year-old Hattie. If Carlotta is equally old, she falls squarely in among the supporting performers, the background to the main drama. If, instead, she’s a contemporary of the central four, she becomes more than tone setting; she takes on an active relationship to their conflict.

Follies, at its core, is about the disappointment that comes from holding onto illusions and fantasies — the idealized, romanticized version of love and happy endings promised in the Follies. Sally has remained in love with Ben for thirty years, allowing her image of him to grow more heroic and dashing as Buddy (and her life) provedsadder and blander. Ben briefly allows himself to fall back in love with his memory of Sally. In a brilliant bit of staging, Hal Price had Ben sing a love duet with Sally while embracing the actress playing the memory of Young Sally. Literal, but the point made beautifully. Phyllis has perfectly perfected this perfect image, but there’s nothing left inside all that perfection. These are people desperately unhappy because they want life to be the dream that the Follies sold them on. Loveland.

Carlotta, meanwhile, is happy. She has her ups, she has her downs, but she’s a broad who knows that that’s life. She’ll get by and make the most of it until the next twist in the road. It’s completely possible for a sixty or seventy year-old to play this trait, but unless she’s of the same age group as the two central couples, she hasn’t been living this concurrently; she’s not the alternate possibility for what their lives might have been. People love to see some old star still miraculously standing to belt out the song, but the old she gets, the further from the central focus she becomes and the less impact the contrast provides. The dramatic situation is diluted.

So what’s needed for the Carlotta that James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim wrote is an actress who can play fifty-ish, who can be a former-movie-star-glamorous but tough broad, and who you want to imagine with a young lover. The actress the Kennedy Center eventually announces will be a signal whether we can expect this Follies to be merely a big event, or its fusion with good theatre, too.