Sugar Mountain Follies

Follies. We saw it. Tonight.

Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Elaine Paige, etc.

It’s always great to see a play about a bunch of washed up old broads. Singing.

I saw the last incarnation of Follies ten years ago with Blythe D. and Judith I.

This one was better.

Look—the talent was fantastic. Soup to nuts. Enjoyable. Choreography, singing, directing, all of it.

Just one little thing---it didn’t really reach me beyond a very well crafted machine. But as a machine, it worked very well.

Clever show, this is, with the younger versions of characters mirroring the older versions…or actually reverse imaging. And the way it swings into a follies show of the inner lives of the four main characters (when it comes to love). Of course, the double entendre of the word Follies is not to be overlooked.

Exceptionally performed by all.

Bernadette is too old for the role.

The year is 1971 and the hep talk of the time is dated.

The metaphors in the dialog, by James Goldman, sound like merchant class drivel. Diamonds and limos and such.

But the numbers---that’s the deal. It’s always about the music in musicals and the music in this one is fantastic. We all know it. So you do what you must, you sit how you sit, in order to get to the songs.

There could also be another reason why this did not reach me: Nostalgic Sentiment. I am terrified of it. I know my half Irish soul could be sucked into such a thing and never return. I must be cautious. In college, I remember getting very drunk or stoned or both, alone in my single dorm room and I was listening to Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain, “You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain,” and looking into a mirror and watching myself cry like a raving lunatic because I was all grown up and my childhood was over and I would never have the sweetness of youth nor the hope of forever again.

It was quite a scene. (I had just turned twenty). I was inconsolable.

But during that silly excrescence of tears and grabbing-backward, I realized, “Don, this is such bullshit. No more of this.”

Sometimes, it still gets me, time and what could have been. But I believe it is a trap.

It must be handled, the past, like a joke, not to be taken seriously or it all gets maudlin. Because however much that could have been never was, there are infinite universes of even more things that never came your way, besides.