Never judge a musical by its score alone. Even more than with opera, the music is only ever half the story and if you judge a classic show from the cast recording, you might get a shock when you see it staged. Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is generally reckoned to be one of the fizziest, funniest Broadway scores ever composed. But in the theatre, the storyline is so intractable that the combined efforts of Richard Wilbur, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim and even (it’s said) Dorothy Parker haven’t succeeded in establishing a definitive, stageable version.
No such problem with Sondheim’s own Follies: you’d be hard put to find a smarter piece of stagecraft. But even there, what you hear is not at all what you get. We’re in 1971, the fag-end of Broadway’s golden age, where the long-disbanded company of the Weismann’s Theater gather for a last reunion before the old place becomes a parking lot. Their younger selves appear on stage alongside them, reliving forgotten hopes and dreams. Listen to the score alone and you hear a knowing (this is Sondheim, after all) but basically nostalgic elegy for a vanished Broadway.
See it on stage – in this case, in Cameron Menzies’s new production for Northern Ireland Opera – and your mouth fills with ashes. It’s often said that in great songwriting partnerships, the writer supplies the cool, sceptical head while the composer provides the tender heart. Think Lennon and McCartney, or Gilbert and Sullivan. But Sondheim wrote his own lyrics, and in Follies he tears himself apart – wrapping Broadway history in a loving embrace while sliding a knife between its ribs. All-American uplift sours into a savage deconstruction first of theatre, then of marriage, finally of love itself. Follies is a martini served so cold that it cracks your teeth; by the end, one of the main characters is yelling for the pain to stop. If you’re over 40, and married, it might be the cruellest show you’ll ever see.
Anyway: all that, plus Busby Berkeley production numbers, neon billboards and a doe-eyed line of the leggiest, lissomest chorus girls this side of the Lagan. Is it any wonder the Belfast audience went wild? Menzies didn’t tinker with Sondheim’s basic concept. True, a derelict theatre makes a cost-effective set for a cash-strapped opera company but NIO splashed out where it mattered, keeping Jonathan Tunick’s original orchestrations in all their smoky, haunted beauty, and going all-out for spectacle in the climactic ‘Loveland’ showstopper. The sizeable cast absolutely nailed the faded nylon-and-flares glamour: you expect great things when Jacqueline Dankworth (Carlotta) delivers ‘I’m Still Here’, and sure enough, she was brassy enough for ten.
But the central quartet – the two fifty-something couples who yearn, cheat and spit venom in the manner of one of those 1970s New York relationship movies – really carry the thing. In particular, Alasdair Harvey (Ben) and Anna-Jane Casey (Sally) were both capable of selling a soaring tune while their features revealed souls that were quietly dying. Their youthful doubles (clean-cut hopefuls from the 1940s) were very well-chosen, too, and Menzies handled the transitions between them so deftly that you stopped noticing the artifice. In Sondheim’s imperial phase it was sometimes suggested that he was too clever by half. I wonder if he wasn’t, in fact, precisely as clever as he needed to be.
All-American uplift sours into a savage deconstruction of theatre, then of marriage, finally of love itself
But, but, mutter the purists – should opera companies be spending scarce funds on commercial musicals? That depends on whether Follies counts as commercial (it hasn’t had an un-subsidised London run since 1987) and how you define opera. Let’s just say that in any European opera house the question would simply not arise (the Komische Oper Berlin is doing Jesus Christ Superstar later this month). Admittedly, since NIO can only afford one full-scale production a year (hurrah for devolution!) it’s frustrating that they couldn’t muster something more classical. But they did Onegin last year and Tosca before that, and it’s clear that Sondheim is much more in Menzies’s line. Result: a hit, and they should run with it.
The same goes for Welsh National Opera’s production of Candide, a Broadway show which gets a free pass from opera bores because Bernstein conducted Mahler and wrote bad symphonies. The piece is a mess but James Bonas’s production is an absolute joy, bowled along by brilliantly integrated and irrepressibly charming cartoon animation from Grégoire Pont. I adored it on its first outing in 2023 and I liked this new revival even more. As Candide, Ed Lyon is still engagingly gormless, Rakie Ayola is an unsinkable Pangloss (in this latest rewrite she doubles as a narrator) and best of all – a regular diamond, in fact – Soraya Mafi is Cunégonde: funny, feisty and spraying out her high notes in ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ like she’d just uncorked a bottle of Bolly. The best of all possible worlds? Voltaire’s words, not mine.
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