Synopsis(From the OBC booklet) The original scenario ran as follows:To fragments of old, tinny, unsettling music (Prologue), a dark and cavernous theater is slowly populated by ghostly figures dressed in styles of the long-ago past, larger -than- life creatures in black and white who move among the living without being noticed. Now some flesh-and -blood characters appear as well: Ben and Phyllis Stone, rich and glamorous, and Buddy and Sally Plummer, middle class and a little dowdy. The couples now fiftyish, have not seen each other for 30 years, but they were friends once, two chorus girls of the "Weismann" Follies and their suitors, and that have all come back for a reunion.
Dimitri Weismann himself arrives, old but fit and just as lecherous as ever. The theater is being torn down, he says; a parking lot will take it's place: "You won't be coming down these stairs again." He introduces his old emcee, Roscoe, who in turn brings on, one last time, the (Beautiful Girls) dressed as they were then, but with there own ghosts shadowing them.
Scraps of information -- a plot without incident, really--drift through to us, from past and present, amid the musical numbers. Ben, we learn, has done exceptionally well, a millionaire and diplomat living with Phyllis ins a lavish Manhattan apartment. Buddy and Sally live in Phoenix; Buddy makes his living on the road, selling oil rigs, while Sally stays home reading romance novels. Buddy didn't in fact want Sally to attend this event but she left without him, and he has come along to find her. in flashback we see Phyllis and Sally as roommates; then mysteriously we see Young Buddy punching Young Ben.
Sally and Ben we slowly realize, were lovers, however briefly, back then, and Sally, at least, is still thinking about it. She can hardly bear to have Ben see her as she is now (Don't Look At Me).
As the reminiscences unfold, each character is joined by his or her younger self, until past starts to merge with present, and Ben and Buddy are once more standing at the Follies stage door, (Waiting For The Girls Upstairs).
These flashbacks are interrupted by the first of a series of musical moments starring other Follies girls, including Solange, a still-sultry Frenchwoman who's now in perfume (Ah, Paris!), and Hattie, whose (Broadway Baby) deglamorizes the chorus life once and for all.
More bits of the past float by, out of which Ben emerges as the mystery man -- supremely successful, yet cold, detached, "out of touch" with his feelings, as we might say today. Still, he can't help wondering what might have been (The Road You Didn't Take).
Sally for her part, can't claim that her life with Buddy has been terrible she's "still the princess, still the prize," she tells Ben (In Buddies Eyes).
Now we meet Stella, another Follies veteran, who like her sisters from the chorus line can't believe what age has done to her (Who's That Woman), she asks her mirror, in what has become known as "the mirror number." As the women sing and dance a little bit, their ghosts are pantomiming behind them.
And then there's Carlotta, a former sex symbol now struggling just to get through the day (I'm Still Here), which contains the priceless Sondheim lyric, "First you're another sloe eyed vamp, then someone's mother, then you're camp."
The marriages now seem to unravel as the confidences multiply: Ben finds his work meaningless. Phyllis's opulent life drags, Sally lives in a dream. Buddy has had a girl in every town. Buddy sick of remembering, asks Sally to leave with him, but she refuses. For a moment, in fact, it seems that she and Ben are going to run off together (Too Many Mornings).
We sympathize with Buddy, and not just because his philandering has brought him little comfort. Through all these years, he has known and tried to forget that Sally's true love was someone else. He knows, even as he play-acts domestic bliss with her, that his latest mistress is not (The Right Girl).
The last of the pastiche numbers is in some ways the most wrenching (One More Kiss), a light operatic ballad in the style of Rudolf Friml or Sigmund Romberg, is sung by Heidi Shiller, and elderly woman confined to a wheel chair, and as she sings she is joined by her younger self -- and younger voice.
The pain, the fatigue, the torture of remembering are by now beating down the four principal characters: Buddy and Sally have parted in anger, and Ben (who freely admits that he's too tired to cheat further on his wife) and Phyllis reach their crisis, as she considers divorce (Could I Leave You?).
As real life becomes just too much to bear, some sort of collective unconscious impulse propels Ben, Phyllis, Buddy and Sally into the past, where the Weismann Follies of old are still in progress. This is the remarkable "Loveland" segment that consumed that last half-hour of the original Follies. The foursome are whisked into a dream show in which each acts out his or her own principal "folly":
First they briefly recapture the days when love was real and present in their live, with (You're Gonna Love Tomorrow), Ben's promise to Phyills, and (Love Will See Us Through), Buddy's promise to Sally.
Then each is revealed in turn. Buddy, we see, doesn't want to belong to any club that will have him for a member, and in (The God-Why-Don't-You- Love-Me Blues, he acknowledges that he has never been able to love anyone who loved him.
Sally's Folly, of course, is carrying a torch for a long-dead love that probably only existed for her to begin with: she can never really have Ben, who doesn't and can't love anyone, she's on the brink of (Losing My Mind).
Phyllis can't manage to reconcile the two conflicting sides of her own personality, the ice-queen beauty and the woman of passion, which she describes as (The Story Of Lucy And Jessie).
And finally, Ben tries to celebrate the hedonistic life he's always lead, consuming things and people and throwing them away, but as he sings and dances in top hat and tails, the house of cards comes down around him: the orchestra starts playing 10 things at once, the dancers move randomly, in a stunning staged expression of his internal breakdown. "I don't love me, " he gasps, as the Loveland sequence fantasy collapses.
The night has passed, the reunion is over, and daylight streams in through the back of the theater. Bulldozers await. Phyllis leads away the broken Ben, and Buddy and Sally head back to Phoenix together. Their illusions stripped away as couples and as individuals, what's left is what comfort they can give to one another till the end of the road. And that Follies suggests is still something.
We've all had the experience of leaving a matinee performance of a play or film so powerful that we can't quite adjust to the light of (actual) day, and so we stand outside the theater blinking, not wanting to let go. Decades after this show sent us on our way, some people are blinking still.
Sondheim, true to his own advice, has moved on; these Follies survive as just another fractured monument , at which we gaze, remembering.
