New York Times Review of Original Production
Review/Theater; The 2 Personalities of 'Will Rogers Follies'
May 2, 1991, ThursdayBy FRANK RICH
Will Rogers never met a man he didn't like. Tommy Tune never met a costume he didn't like. Just how these two great but antithetical American archetypes -- the humble cowboy philosopher, the top-hatted impresario of glitz -- came to be roped together in a multi-million-dollar Broadway extravaganza is the real drama of "The Will Rogers Follies," the most disjointed musical of this or any other season.
When Will Rogers -- in the utterly beguiling form of Keith Carradine -- is at center stage in the huge mock-Ziegfeld pageant at the Palace, "The Will Rogers Follies" is a drippingly pious testimonial to a somewhat remote American legend, written in a style known to anyone who does not doze during the presentation of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on Oscar night. But when Mr. Tune gets his chance to grab the production's reins, school is out! Suddenly Will is shunted aside so the high-flying director and choreographer, who has a theatrical eye second to none, can bring on the girls, the boys, the dog tricks and a Technicolor parade of Willa Kim costumes and Tony Walton sets that not only exceed these designers' remarkable past achievements but in all likelihood top the living tableaux that Joseph Urban once concocted for Florenz Ziegfeld himself.
Will Rogers never met a man he didn't like. Tommy Tune never met a costume he didn't like. Just how these two great but antithetical American archetypes -- the humble cowboy philosopher, the top-hatted impresario of glitz -- came to be roped together in a multi-million-dollar Broadway extravaganza is the real drama of "The Will Rogers Follies," the most disjointed musical of this or any other season.
When Will Rogers -- in the utterly beguiling form of Keith Carradine -- is at center stage in the huge mock-Ziegfeld pageant at the Palace, "The Will Rogers Follies" is a drippingly pious testimonial to a somewhat remote American legend, written in a style known to anyone who does not doze during the presentation of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award on Oscar night. But when Mr. Tune gets his chance to grab the production's reins, school is out! Suddenly Will is shunted aside so the high-flying director and choreographer, who has a theatrical eye second to none, can bring on the girls, the boys, the dog tricks and a Technicolor parade of Willa Kim costumes and Tony Walton sets that not only exceed these designers' remarkable past achievements but in all likelihood top the living tableaux that Joseph Urban once concocted for Florenz Ziegfeld himself.
What the inspirational Rogers story and the blissfully campy Tune numbers are doing on the same stage is hard to explain and harder to justify, for they fight each other all evening, until finally the book wins and "The Will Rogers Follies" crash-lands with a whopping thud a good half act or so before Rogers has his fatal airplane crash in Alaska. Apparently, the show's authors -- the playwright Peter Stone, the composer Cy Coleman and the lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green -- were overimpressed by the fact that Rogers was a headline performer in the "Ziegfeld Follies" of the 1920's, twirling his rope and taking humorous potshots at Congress while sharing the stage with chorines, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Ed Wynn. This slender happenstance has led them to shoehorn the Rogers biography into their synthetic "Follies" show -- a revue written in the style that dazzled audiences in the days before the modern musical and "The Ed Sullivan Show" were invented.
The concept, which is repeatedly explained in fussy, almost deconstructivist interruptions by an invisible Ziegfeld (a taped Gregory Peck), must have sounded better at a story conference than it plays in the theater. Rogers had many talents -- joke-making, newspaper writing, political punditry, public speaking, rope twirling -- but he was not a musical comedy song-and-dance man. It is impossible to build a show-biz musical around a character who isn't a singer (Mr. Carradine can sing, but not in the "Follies" style) or dancer -- which is presumably why the real Rogers usually shared top billing with equally celebrated singers, dancers and clowns in the Ziegfeld shows. It is also difficult to build a musical around a famous character whose private life was a bore, or seems so in Mr. Stone's retelling. For no discernible reason other than to follow the "Follies" format -- which required an Act I wedding finale and torch songs -- this show endlessly chronicles the courtship, marriage and mild spats between Will and his wife, Betty (Dee Hoty), whose only character trait is a whiny insistence that her husband spend less time at work and more time back at the ranch.
When dealing with the substance of Rogers's career, Mr. Stone's book is longer on exposition than humor. Hardly has Mr. Carradine arrived than he is gratuitously explaining that Will Rogers was more than a name given to the hospital that perennially passes the hat at the nation's movie theaters. Yet the ensuing attempts to rekindle Rogers's topical wisecracks are toothless, and despite a promise that Will will draw gags from today's newspaper, the evening's most persistent comic target is the fateful pilot Wiley Post. More confusingly, "The Will Rogers Follies" never decides for sure what period it wants to make jokes about. Though the Playbill says the musical is set in "the present" and though there is much tedious explanation that Rogers has risen from the dead for our amusement, the evening's only dramatic event occurs when, abruptly in mid-Act II, the legend "1931" is emblazoned on the stage, the scenery lifts away and a platoon of stagehands marches on to repossess the colorful costumes of the showgirls.
Is this the Twilight Zone, or what? Though the stagehands wear contemporary jeans and T-shirts, a grim-faced Mr. Carradine enters to deliver a long radio sermon championing the poor and homeless of the Great Depression. Yet as he does so, the theater's house lights come on, as if to embarrass the present-day audience into examining its own conscience in preparation for confronting the panhandlers lying in wait on Broadway after the final curtain.
Whatever decade we're in, the holier-than-thou tone of this lavishly expensive production's pitch for the downtrodden seems every bit as hypocritical as the similarly shameless Act II plea for Amerasian orphans in "Miss Saigon," and it goes on even longer. One fully expects ushers to pass through the aisles soliciting for the Will Rogers Hospital. And those collection bottles are not all that is conspicuously missing: This show, which so strenuously wraps itself in Will Rogers's democratic values, does not have a single black performer. The W.P.A.-style "We the People" finale that follows -- in which a heavenly choir recites Rogers's famous achievements from behind slide projections of the great unwashed American masses -- seems more than a little hollow in context.
It is a tribute to Mr. Carradine -- his air of unpretentious conviction, humility, warmth and good humor -- that he keeps "The Will Rogers Follies" from riding off the rails into ridiculousness in its pompous waning scenes. He doesn't really resemble Rogers, and he's at best a passable lariat twirler, but he surely captures the man's engaging spirit even when the show is making every effort to embalm it.
The evening's second bananas -- Ms. Hoty, Dick Latessa (as Rogers's dad), Cady Huffman (a leggy Ziegfeld emcee) -- are all able, but their material is routine. Mr. Coleman's music, orchestrated to a brassy fare-thee-well by Billy Byers, recalls but never equals the period show-biz songs the composer wrote for "City of Angels," "Little Me" and "Barnum" (the Coleman show this one most resembles). The Comden-Green lyrics, faithful to the musical's misguided conception, are professional regurgitations of Ziegfeld-era specialties. The exceptions include a Woody Guthrie-style ecological lament sung by a guitar-strumming Mr. Carradine in Act II, and the inevitable "Never Met a Man I Didn't Like," in which Will seems to be going through the Yellow Pages to list every single such man, from politician to mortician, from Napa Valley to Shubert Alley.
There would have been more fun if the songwriters had come up with the hilarious or sardonic numbers of such other Ziegfeld-inspired latter-day musicals as "Funny Girl" and "Follies." Mr. Tune must lean for wit instead on the production's visual riches, immaculately lighted by Jules Fisher. The scenic design is extraordinary because of its cleverness, not its budget: Mr. Walton daringly builds his set around a material as humble if pertinent as rope. The props alone -- rope phones, suitcases, doors -- are more worthy of museum exhibition than the actual Rogers artifacts exhibited in the Palace's lobby, but even more spectacular is the vast proscenium arch that extends the Western motif into the upper reaches of the vast old two-a-day house. The bygone whimsy of a vaudeville past missing elsewhere in these "Follies" can always be found in Mr. Walton's fantasies, among them backdrops that render the totems of Rogers's career (sagebrush, Hollywood greenbacks) in iconography true to both Ziegfeld overkill and the abstract tenets of modern theatrical art.
Ms. Kim's costumes, which are more cognizant of Busby Berkeley and Vargas than the higher sexual consciousness of "the present," are just as breathtaking, with such minor details as the lining of a 10-gallon hat and the intricately stitched pattern of a pair of suspenders capturing the designer's full imaginative attention. In the show's first and best number ("Will-a-Mania"), the musical's chorus just keeps coming and coming at the audience over the horizon of the movable Follies staircase that dominates the set, each time with new chaps, new colors, new headdresses. Even though the heavily amplified lyrics are indecipherable, the text is anything but the point.
Not all of Mr. Tune's numbers are so thrilling, and some of them recycle his own routines from "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and "A Day in Hollywood," not to mention bits of Gower Champion (a ramp procession from "Hello, Dolly!") and Bob Fosse (an ultraviolet gimmick from "Dancin' "). But this director is always a master of his particular art, which makes it all the more frustrating that, after exercising total control over every inch of "Nine" and "Grand Hotel," he seems to be hogtied for so much of this show. If "The Will Rogers Follies" could only be whittled down to the Tommy Tune Follies, grateful audiences would find a musical twice as buoyant and less than half as long.
The Will Rogers Follies - A Life in Revue
Palace Theater (5/01/1991 - 9/05/1993)
First Preview: April 1, 1991 Total Previews: 33
Opening Date: May 1, 1991
Closing Date: Sept. 5, 1993 Total Performances: 981
Category: Musical, Original, Broadway
Setting: Time: The Present. Place: The Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway, New York, NY 10036
Directed by Tommy Tune; Choreographed by Tommy Tune; Associate Director: Phillip Oesterman; Associate Choreographer: Jeff Calhoun
Produced by Pierre Cossette, Martin Richards, Sam Crothers, James M. Nederlander, Stewart F. Lane and Max Weitzenhoffer; Produced in association with Japan Satellite Broadcasting, Inc.
Book by Peter Stone; Music by Cy Coleman; Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; Music arranged by Cy Coleman; Inspired by the words of Will Rogers and Betty Rogers; Music orchestrated by Billy Byers; Musical Director: Eric Stern
Scenic Design by Tony Walton; Scenic Design Assistant: Ann Sheffield and Ann Waugh; Associate Scenic Design: Sharon Sprague and Stephan Olson; Production Draftsman: Ed Check and Charles E. McCarry; Costume Design by Willa Kim; Assistant Costume Design: Frank Krenz and Mitchell Bloom; Lighting Design by Jules Fisher; Associate Lighting Design: Peggy Eisenhauer; Sound Design by Peter Fitzgerald; Projection Design by Wendall K. Harrington; Associate Projection Design: Bo Erickson; Wig Design by Howard Leonard; Assistant to Wendall K. Harrington: Craig McMeekin; Assistant to Sound Designer: Dan Tramon, Ned Moore
Theatre Owned / Operated by The Nederlander Organization (James M. Nederlander: Chairman; Robert E. Nederlander: President; Arthur Rubin: Vice-President) and Stewart F. Lane
General Manager: Marvin A. Krauss Associates, Inc.; Associate Gen. Mgr: Nina Skriloff; Company Manager: Nina Skriloff; Assistant Co. Mgr: Ken Silverman
Production Stage Manager: Peter Von Mayrhauser; Stage Manager: Patrick Ballard; Assistant Stage Mgr: Michael J. Passaro
Music Contractor: John Miller; Conducted by Eric Stern; Associate Conductor: Karl Jurman; Assistant Conductor: Joe Passaro; Concertmistress: Amy Hiraga Wyrick; Trumpet: John Frosk, Joe Mosello and Danny Cahn; Trombone: Jim Pugh, Larry Farrell andPaul Faulise; French Horn: Tony Cecere; Reeds: Chuck Wilson, Dale Kleps, Alva Hunt, Vincent DellaRocca and Frank Santagata; Keyboards: Karl Jurman and Patrick Brady; Violin: Heidi Carney and Robert Shaw; Cello: Joe Kimura; Viola: Crystal Garner; Drums: Ray Marchica; Bass: Richard Sarpala; Guitar: Scott Kuney and Larry Campbell; Percussion: Joe Passaro; Harmonica:Robert Paparozzi; Smoke and fog effects by Zeller International, Ltd.
ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST
Swings: Mary Lee DeWitt (Swing), Jack Doyle (Swing) and Angie L. Schworer (Swing)
Standbys: Erica Dutko (Freddy Rogers, James Rogers, Mary Rogers) and Tom Flagg (Clem Rogers)
Understudies: Dana Moore (Ziegfeld's Favorite), Lance Robinson (Will Rogers, Jr.) and Paul Ukena, Jr. (Will Rogers)
1991 TONY AWARDS
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0153493.html
Best Musical: Winner
Produced by Pierre Cossette, Martin Richards, Sam Crothers, James M. Nederlander, Stewart F. Lane and Max Weitzenhoffer; Produced in association with Japan Satellite Broadcasting, Inc.
Best Book of a Musical: Nominee - Book by Peter Stone
Best Original Score: Winner - Music by Cy Coleman; Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
Best Actor in a Musical: Nominee - Keith Carradine
Best Actress in a Musical: Nominee - Dee Hoty
Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Nominee - Cady Huffman
Best Scenic Design: Nominee - Tony Walton
Best Costume Design: Winner - Willa Kim
Best Lighting Design: Winner - Jules Fisher
Best Choreography: Winner - Tommy Tune
Best Direction of a Musical: Winner - Tommy Tune
Drama Desk Award Outstanding Musical: Winner - Produced by Pierre Cossette, Martin Richards, Sam Crothers, James M. Nederlander, Stewart F. Lane and Max Weitzenhoffer; Produced in association with Japan Satellite Broadcasting, Inc.
Drama Desk Award Outstanding Actor in a Musical: Nominee - Keith Carradine
Drama Desk Award Outstanding Choreography: Winner - Tommy Tune
Drama Desk Award Outstanding Orchestration: Nominee - Music Orchestrated by Billy Byers
Drama Desk Award Outstanding Music: Winner - Music by Cy Coleman
Will Rogers Follies at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Will Rogers Follies in Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade
1991 TONY AWARDS
The Will Rogers Follies, Best Musical 1991 Credit: Tony Awards
Other Productions
Sunday May 1, 2011
"Broadway Birthday!" -
The Will Rogers Follies opened 20 years ago today- May 1, 1991
Twenty years ago today the Broadway musical The Will Rogers Follies opened at the Palace Theatre. It would go on to win six Tony Awards including one for Best Musical.
The subtitle of the musical is "A Life in Revue" - and that is just how the show is presented- as a review of Rogers' life, told through the guise of a big, splashy Ziegfeld Follies production. Now Will Rogers was a lot of things -he was a high paid actor, a social commentator and humorist with at first a syndicated newspaper column and then a weekly radio show, a vaudeville star with his rope act, a great improviser at his live shows and also was about 1/4 Cherokee Indian - all of these characteristics are presented in the musical.
With "Rogers" speaking directly to the audience throughout the show, the musical tries to present the life of Rogers, from his birth to his death with the highs and lows in between- including the effect the Great Depression had on Rogers and how he was asked by President Herbert Hoover to give a speech to inspire the nation. I say "tries to present" because the voice of Ziegfeld constantly interrupts him, telling him to move things along, giving him direction, often times making the events in Rogers' life a little more theatrical -like turning Will's first meeting with Betty Blake that was at a train station into a more glamorous meeting on the moon - and even changing the order of the events somewhat by delaying the wedding of Will and Betty so it can become the act one finale. This theatrical conceit worked perfectly as it allowed the humor of Rogers to come through as well as his humanity and allowed for plenty of splashy musical numbers. The show also incorporated a lot of Will's famous quotes including making his most famous one "I never met a man I didn't like" into the closing anthem of inclusion, respect and togetherness.
Stage Door: Will Rogers Follies @ Candlelight Dinner Theatre
Will Rogers never met a man he didn't like. It's unfortunate that this man didn't like him back. After what has been an exceptional string of productions from Candlelight Dinner Theatre, unfortunately Will Rogers Follies falls a bit short of expectations.
What the inspirational Rogers story and the blissfully campy Tune numbers are doing on the same stage is hard to explain and even harder to justify, for they fight each other all evening, until finally the book wins and The Will Rogers Follies crash-lands with a whopping thud a good half act or so before Rogers has his fatal airplane crash in Alaska.
The 1991 musical pays tribute to the folksy commentator in the style of a Ziegfeld extravaganza. That is, long, leggy numbers are often interrupted by jokes of wisdom, infiltrated by scenes of family and hearth. The approach tells us more about Ziegfeld than it does Rogers. The script never gets to the meat of the man, a beloved icon known for his no-holds barred political advice and jokes. But it at least inspires curiosity.
Though a majority of the show seemed slow and at times dull, there were moments that were quite appealing. The choreography during a few of the numbers is fantastic.
I can't finish the review without mentioning the poor sound. Throughout the production microphones popped, creaked, moaned, and in more than one instance you could hear people talking backstage on microphones, which were not turned down by the soundboard.
After viewing previous productions from Candlelight Dinner Theatre, I chalk this production up to a fluke or a bad night (everyone is allowed one). Candlelight has more than proved itself and I'm sure that along with recent stirrings and changes in house, the next production of Bye, Bye Birdie will be a huge success.
Despite a few kinks and issues, Follies on a good night has the potential to be a wonderful way to spend an evening or afternoon. But don't come alone be sure to bring a friend. The food is terrific, the service impeccable and if they've never seen the Candlelight Dinner Theatre they will surely come back for more in the future.
Click here to see more about Candlelight Dinner Playhouse, auditions, Will Rogers Follies or to check out the rest of the upcoming season.
Candlelight Dinner Playhouse
4747 Marketplace Drive
Johnstown, Colorado 80534
Follies returning to Oklahoma Aviator
"The Will Rogers Follies," award-winning Broadway musical starring Larry Gatlin, returns to Oklahoma in January for a six-day run in Oklahoma City, coming directly to Tulsa for a six-day run. Gatlin, who made his Broadway debut in the 1991 Broadway hit, taking over from Keith Carradine, is appearing in yet another tour with the show,
"Larry Gatlin's wonderful voice; his profound bi-partisan humor, and his strong stage presence was a hit on Broadway and strongly enriches this pro-Oklahoma show," said Michelle Lefebvre-Carter, executive director of Oklahoma's Will Rogers Memorial Commission.
A second tour opened in September in Austin at Bass Concert Hall launching a new national tour of a "family friendly" show based on the life of the Oklahoma cowboy-humorist.
Revival of an equity tour of the musical was described by Lefebvre-Carter as "an absolute boom to Oklahoma's image, tourism and economy."
The show opens Jan. 17 in the Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall for eight performances including Saturday and Sunday matinees. When it closes Jan. 22, Gatlin and the touring cast will move to Tulsa Performing Arts Center for eight performances - Jan. 24-29, including weekend matinees.
Sponsored by Phoenix Productions, this will be the fifth national tour of the show. It opened on Broadway for 982 performances and won six Tony awards. Max Weitzenhoffer of Norman was an original producer.
The "Follies" played in theaters across the United States from Texas to California, crisscrossing the country through mountain states to the east coast down to Florida and Georgia before playing in Maryland the week before Thanksgiving and a holiday recess.
The show reopens Jan. 6 in Pennsylvania for a run through New York including West Point and through Kentucky and Ohio enroute to Oklahoma. The schedule continues through May 2006 when it will open a six-day run in Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Ark.
Impresario Larry Patton of Celebrity Attractions has booked the show for Oklahoma City and Tulsa and other nearby cities early in 2006.
Recommended for patrons age 8 and older, a reviewer wrote the "musical is an upbeat celebration of this folk hero who made the world a lot better place than it was before he entered it" in 1879 on a ranch near Oologah, Oklahoma.
"Tourists absolutely swarm the nine-gallery Will Rogers museum in Claremore and the birthplace ranch after they see the show. We see the car tags," Lefebvre-Carter said.
The Follies is an uplifting image builder for Oklahoma," she said, "just like 'Oklahoma!', Wall Street financiers, Madison Avenue image molders, and major leaders in industry caught and loved the show at the Palace Theatre."
Gatlin, whose half-Cherokee grandmother was born at Broken Bow in 1906, wrote in the preface of a forthcoming biography "that means I've got some good Cherokee blood in me too, just like 'ole Will.'"