Classic musical Follies set the bar with its ambition

It was supposed to be a murder mystery - two couples, four motives, one gun.

What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely - a musical that got prominent pans, alienated much of its audience and lost most of its investment - yet survived.

Not only is Follies, which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still here 50 years later, trailing a string of revivals, revisions and gala concerts, but it is also recognised as the high-water mark of the serious "concept" musical, that genre in which form and function are brought into the tightest possible alignment.

It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won seven, including for Best Original Score for Stephen Sondheim, whose work is a marvel and a minefield of layered meanings.

The sets make comments. And in the original staging, by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, even frivolity had to serve a purpose - not that there was much frivolity in James Goldman's script. The gun disappeared, but the two couples were still floridly dysfunctional.

Both wives had been showgirls in the Weismann - think Ziegfeld - Follies at the end of its run of annual extravaganzas in the years between the world wars. Both had been in love with Ben, a Stage Door Johnny with big ambitions. But Phyllis was smart enough to nab him. They are now wealthy, unhappy sophisticates.

Sally - romantic, conventional - got Ben's feckless pal Buddy. Never for one moment in the 30 ensuing years has she been happy with the trade-off.

During a Follies reunion at the decrepit Weismann Theatre, the night before it was to be razed to make room for a carpark, the two couples meet and promptly disintegrate. As they do, their past selves appear alongside them as living characters.

At the same time, former stars of the Follies relive memories and stumble through old numbers, magically ventriloquised from Broadway's past in the Sondheim songs.

As the ghosts crowd in, the couples' tangled history is unearthed, bringing them to the point of a nervous breakdown as a group.

To see them collapse, dissolving into a fantasy world accompanied by a Golden Age score, is to see American optimism collapse with them.

The ghosts of Follies past that live in the theatre had to be both ethereal and imposing. Casting was done among Las Vegas showgirls who were already 1.83m tall before their enormous head-dresses turned them into giants.

Even so, a who-was-who of middle-aged and older women stole the show - Dorothy Collins, 44; Mary McCarty, 47; Yvonne De Carlo, 48; Alexis Smith, 49; Fifi D'Orsay, 66; and Ethel Shutta, 74, among them. Though cast for the kick of nostalgia their names elicited, they made survival seem vital and sexy.

All of the performative songs in Follies - the ones sung as if they were real numbers from the past - are pastiches, sampling Harold Arlen (I'm Still Here), George Gershwin (Losing My Mind), Irving Berlin (Beautiful Girls), Sigmund Romberg (One More Kiss) and many others.

There was one catch - in almost every case, they are better crafted and richer than their templates, which make their salute to the past a wonderfully complicated and sometimes cruel gesture.

At US$800,000, Follies was an expensive show for its time. Boris Aronson's set, which exploded into lace and froufrou for the final sequence, was technically complex. Florence Klotz's costumes were among the most sumptuous seen on a Broadway stage since Ziegfeld.

And with all the major roles doubled by "ghosts", the cast was huge - 47 performers, not including understudies and standbys.

"Nearly everything that could cause a Broadway musical to go over budget did," says Ted Chapin, author of Everything Was Possible, a memoir of the experience. "If it were produced today, I would imagine it would log in at close to US$30 million (S$40.4 million)."

Alas, that is a sum no one would spend on such a chancy show, which means audiences will never see its like again.

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But its big canvas is not the only reason Follies remains important. In its seriousness and cleverness, in its matching of style to substance, in its use of a medium to comment on itself, it has hardly ever been bettered.

In any case, ambitious musical theatre would never be the same. There would not have been Fun Home, Hamilton or Dear Evan Hansen without Follies hovering behind them, the most beautiful ghost of all.