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Follies | An Orgy of Pastiche

Follies | An Orgy of Pastiche

If imitation, as the English cleric Caleb Charles Bolton suggested, is the sincerest form of flattery, then writing pastiches – what Merriam Webster defines as “work that imitates the style of previous work” – must be a labor of love.

The late Stephen Sondheim, in the context of discussing Follies, called them “fond imitations, unlike parodies or satires, which make comment on the work or the style being imitated.” He added, “Follies is an orgy of pastiche.”

Written by Sondheim and James Goldman as a contemporary work in the late 1960s, the plot of Follies, such as it is, uses nostalgia for both the literal past and an imagined one to propel its characters and its score. A group of show folk and their spouses reunite at the scene of their greatest shared success, the Weismann Theatre, where in the years between WWI and WWII their careers began.

In Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954– 1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, Sondheim recalled, “the seductive aspect of the show was the opportunity to write two kinds of songs: character songs for the four principals and pastiches for the other performers, in styles ranging from 1918 to the 1940s.” Turning forty during the development of Follies, he called it “a chance for me to pay homage without attitude to the genre I loved, the past I had known only through recordings and sheet music.”

Some of the pastiches Sondheim deployed in Follies are general, alluding to a quality evident in a genre or the styles of multiple writers of a period and some are more specific. Here are a few examples:

“Beautiful Girls” – Irving Berlin contributed to the 1919 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies and wrote “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” which became a recurring Ziegfeld theme. It was originally sung by a tenor on stage to present a succession of women in elaborately costumed tableaux. [Watch the 1936 film The Great Ziegfeld for an Oscarwinning recreation.] Sondheim wrote that Berlin’s “lyrics appear to be simple, but simplicity is a complicated matter, as well as being hard to achieve without a quick slide from simple to simplistic. He might seem easy to mimic, but his lyrics are so naturally colloquial that they never constitute a distinctively recognizable style.”

“Rain on the Roof” – According to Sondheim, this pastiche honors the genre of novelty songs which were “bouncy and catchy, often with a title which featured a repetitive gimmick or heavy alliteration or nonsense syllables. I decided to use punctuated kisses.”

“Broadway Baby” – Originally titled “Tough Luck Tessie,” this is another genre pastiche with, perhaps, tones of DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson (“Birth of the Blues”) reflecting “the songs of the 1920s just before the crash, with their optimistic dreams of upward mobility.”

“Who’s That Woman?” – Sondheim describes this as “a combo platter: the lyric is an imitation of Cole Porter in his professionally weary mood (“Down in the Depths”) which, because of its inherent camp, I tried to balance with music reminiscent of Richard Rodgers in his Rodgersand Hart days, spikier and less sorrowfully mellifluous than Porter’s.”

“One More Kiss” – The first song Sondheim wrotefor Follies mines the “lush music and overripe lyrics” of the operetta genre. “I chose Sigmund Romberg andRudolf Friml, the leading operetta composers of the post-World War I period, as my target figures and Otto Harbach as my lyricist.”

Sondheim’s other examples note the work of Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Burton Lane, George and Ira Gershwin, Arthur Schwartz, E. Y. Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Noel Coward, Arthur Freed, Howard Dietz, and more, including Sondheim’s mentor Oscar Hammerstein II. If you asked him, he could write a book… or two. He did, on Follies and all his work, and they are fascinating reads.

– Robert Sokol

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