More on Follies
(May 6, 2011) “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” Donna McKechnie. 1996 BBC radio concert broadcast. Donna McKechnie is the only actress I can think of to play all three major female roles in Follies. She played Phyllis here, 1996. 1998, she played Sally at New Jersey’s Papermill Playhouse. 2002, she first played Carlotta at LA Reprise. I’m not sure what qualifies Carlotta as the third “major role” — is she really all that much more important than Stella or Hattie or Emily or Vanessa? But it’s a great recording. I. II. i. ii. iii. So Carlotta stands somewhere between the leading four and the others, less central than the quartet but with more individual significance than anyone else.
The original casting impacts this statement. DeCarlo was one of the names. She did all the same interviews. She bowed with the four. And subsequently, the role has always been cast with a bigger “name” than Hattie or Solange or the rest.
More to the point: Carlotta has a unique role in the dynamics of the show, more closely related to the four than the other follies performers.
The story of the main four is of broken dreams and unfulfilled expectations. Carlotta is the foil: successful, evidently happy enough. (This is also why she needs to read as their contemporary and not their mother.) The four’s problem arises because they bought into the dreams the follies, standing in for the post-war American Dream, promised: Loveland and happy endings. “I’m Still Here” disavows that approach. You don’t love tomorrow? Love hasn’t seen you through? Roll with the punches - don’t expect it to and you’ll survive. She illuminates by contrast.
The other follies performers provide the context. The performance numbers, recreations of their acts from decades past, set up then lead us through the fall of the follies’ promises. The Montage: simple love that will get through anything, adventure, determined belief in success. The Bolero: romance, passion, sex. We’ve grown up a little, but here we start to see how fleeting it’s all going to be. The fluid movement of the younger couple highlight the inability of the older couple to reach the same heights. “Who’s That Woman,” the contortions and justifications one makes in order to keep pursing love – a coldness and cynicism begins creeping in. “One More Kiss.” The only one with specifically European influences; the only one that explicitly acknowledges what the others cannot: the blissful picture-perfect happiness we’ve been promised must fade. By the time we tumble into “Loveland,” we see this dream for what it is: a blithe rejection of reality. Sally and Ben and Buddy and Phyllis are incapable of reconciling to this. The other follies performers create, together, the background.
“I’m Still Here” fittingly walks a strange line between performative number and character monologue. Carlotta talks about having a follies number, begins singing and for a while we could be hearing the number. But halfway through it starts becoming increasingly personal and bringing in history that could apply to the character and her life after the follies. It’s ambiguous, but crosses between diagetic and non-diagetic performance in a way the other follies characters, aside from the four, do not.
