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    ‘Back to the Future’ to Close on Broadway, Rerouting DeLorean to Germany

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    The musical, which opened in London three years ago, is still going strong there and touring North America, while productions are planned in Japan and on a cruise ship.“Back to the Future,” a nostalgia-rich and spectacle-laden musical adaptation of the much-loved 1985 film, will end its Broadway run on Jan. 5, succumbing to the difficult economics of the commercial theater business.The show had a decent run — the first performance was on June 30, 2023, and for more than a year it grossed over $1 million most weeks — but it was costly to mount and expensive to sustain; its grosses took a dive in late summer and early fall, and although it had rebounded somewhat more recently, sales were still insufficient to justify continuing. Thus far it has been seen by 720,000 people at the Winter Garden Theater.The long-gestating show began its production life in England, and won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical in London’s West End, where it has been running for more than three years. It has not been so fortunate on Broadway, where it won no Tony Awards. It cost $23.5 million to capitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ultimately it did not run long enough, or make enough money each week, to defray its New York costs.But this is not the end of the line for the show. The Broadway set will move to Germany, where “Back to the Future” plans an open-ended run starting next season. The London run is ongoing, there is a North American tour now underway and productions are planned in Japan and on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship.“Back to the Future” is about a teenager who travels back in time, aided by a mad scientist with a souped-up DeLorean, and must figure out how to deal with the unintended consequences of his trip. One of the highlights of the stage production is the soaring car.The musical, directed by John Rando, features a book by Bob Gale, who wrote the movie with Robert Zemeckis; the songs are by Alan Silvestri, who wrote the film’s score, and Glen Ballard. The lead producer is Colin Ingram, a British theater producer.American critics were mostly unimpressed; in The New York Times, the chief theater critic Jesse Green wrote, “Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.”The show is the seventh musical to announce a closing date since early May, following “Lempicka,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “The Who’s Tommy,” “The Notebook,” “Water for Elephants” and “Suffs.” More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

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      The addition of 17 songs turns the 1985 sci-fi classic into a big “why?” musical with a big wow factor.The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live.Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.Roger Bart, left, as Doc Brown and Casey Likes as Marty McFly with a life-size replica of the souped-up DeLorean DMC from the film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.Jelani Remy, center, as Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955, performing “Gotta Start Somewhere.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.Back to the Future: The MusicalAt the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ on Broadway: Buckle Your (DeLorean) Seatbelt

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      If he could go back in time and do it again, Bob Gale probably wouldn’t change much about “Back to the Future.” This 1985 science-fiction comedy, about a teenager taking a whirlwind trip to the year 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean built by an eccentric inventor, became an endearing and endlessly quotable box-office smash.The film, which Gale wrote with its director, Robert Zemeckis, also turned into a cultural phenomenon. It bonded its stars, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, to their quirky characters and spawned two hit sequels that its creators envisioned as a self-contained saga.When the words “The End” appeared onscreen in “Back to the Future Part III,” Gale explained in a recent interview over lunch, it was a message to audiences. “We told the story we wanted to tell,” he said. “And we’re not going to milk you guys for a substandard sequel.”But like its emblematic DeLorean, the “Back to the Future” franchise has continued to reappear in the ensuing decades, in authorized books, games and theme park rides, in cast reunions and countless pop-cultural homages.The gang’s all here: Doc Brown, Marty McFly and, at the center of some of the show’s much-anticipated stunts, a replica of the DeLorean time machine.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesAnd now on Broadway: “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film. Using a time machine devised by Doc Brown, Marty McFly travels to 1955, meets his parents Lorraine and George as teenagers and must help them fall in love after he disrupts the events that led to their romantic coupling.On its yearslong path to Broadway, “Back to the Future” has faced some challenges that are common to musical adaptations and others unique to this property.While the show’s creators sought actors to play the roles indelibly associated with the stars of the film and decided which of the movie’s famous scenes merited musical numbers, they were also trying to figure out how the stage could accommodate the fundamental elements of “Back to the Future” — like, say, a plutonium-powered sports car that can traverse the space-time continuum.Now this “Back to the Future” arrives on Broadway with some steep expectations: After a tryout in Manchester, England, its production at the Adelphi Theater in London’s West End won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical. The show also carries a heavy price tag — it is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Throughout its development process, the people behind it — including several veterans of the “Back to the Future” series — tried to remain true to the spirit of the films and keep intact a story that has held up for nearly 40 years.Bob Gale, who wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis, said of the stage adaptation: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs Gale, now 72, put it: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”But, he added, “It cannot be a slavish adaptation of the movie. Because if that’s what people want to see, they should stay home and watch the movie. Let’s use the theater for what theater can do.”Gale’s inspiration for “Back to the Future” came in 1980 after seeing a photo of his father as a teenager in an old high-school yearbook, and he has become a passionate custodian of the franchise. That role dates back to at least 1989, the year a notorious “Back to the Future” Nintendo game was released. “One of the worst games ever,” he said. “I was so horrified by that I actually gave interviews to tell people, ‘Do not buy it.’”In 2005, after Zemeckis and his wife, Leslie, attended a performance of the Broadway musical “The Producers,” the “Back to the Future” creators began to contemplate a stage adaptation of their film. They hired Alan Silvestri, who wrote the scores of the “Back to the Future” movies, to create new songs with Glen Ballard, the pop songwriter who had worked with Silvestri on Zemeckis’s 2004 film version of “The Polar Express.”Gale said that as he and Zemeckis started to meet with Broadway producers, “They said all the right things. But their agenda really was, let’s get Zemeckis and Gale off this and give it to our own people to do it.”That was something Gale said he would never allow to happen. “These characters are like my family,” he said. “You don’t sell your kids into prostitution.”Instead they enlisted the British producer Colin Ingram, whom Ballard had worked with on the musical adaptation of the film “Ghost.” They hired the highly sought-after director Jamie Lloyd, and then parted ways with him in 2014. “The creative differences and the chemistry just didn’t work,” Ingram said. (Through a press representative, Lloyd confirmed that his departure was a mutual decision over creative differences but declined to comment further.)Behind the scenes: The show’s designer, Tim Hatley, was charged with evoking the spirit of the beloved film.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesUpon regrouping, the creators met with John Rando, who had directed “Urinetown” and “The Wedding Singer.” Rando said that after their initial meeting, “I grabbed Bob by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Bob, I love these characters. And I promise you I’m going to take really good care of them.’” Within a half-hour Rando said he got the call that he was hired.In conceiving “Back to the Future” for the stage, Gale said certain signature moments from the movie could never work: No scene of Doc Brown being attacked by disgruntled Libyan terrorists. (Now Marty speeds off in the DeLorean after Doc is overcome by radiation poisoning.) No set piece in which Marty races through the town square on a skateboard while the meathead bully Biff pursues him in a convertible. (Now the chase occurs on foot at school.) No pet dog named Einstein for Doc Brown. (Sorry, there’s just no dog.)A scene from the film where Biff is stopped before he can assault Lorraine remains in the show, though Gale acknowledged that this moment was “edgy.”“We want the audience to feel the jeopardy, and they do,” Gale said, adding that there were many elements from “Back to the Future” that might not withstand scrutiny if the film were being pitched today.Yet other familiar scenes presented opportunities for invention. Silvestri said he and Ballard were not given an exacting road map for where songs should go or what they should sound like. “We just kept trying to find our way,” Silvestri said. “It’s calling for a song here. It’s demanding music there.”The composers felt there had to be a rousing opening number to establish the show’s popped-collared, neon-colored version of the year 1985 and use the “Back to the Future” fanfare, and that became the song “It’s Only a Matter of Time.” There also had to be a love song for the smitten young Lorraine to serenade the enigmatic visitor she doesn’t realize is her own son, which yielded the doo-wop pastiche “Pretty Baby.”The curtain has lifted on “Back to the Future: The Musical,” but the creators of the franchise said they have no intention of pursuing more films.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThroughout the show’s development, there was a consensus that high-tech engineering and video projections would help recreate complicated scenes like Doc Brown’s perilous ascent of the Hill Valley clock tower during a fateful lightning storm.But Rando said he entrusted these elements to the show’s designer, Tim Hatley, and his production colleagues while the book, songs and performances were being nailed down.“They would keep asking me, ‘Hey, let’s talk about the clock tower sequence,’” Rando explained. “And I said, ‘Not until we get this musical right.’ And we would do readings and readings, and then finally there was a moment where we’re like, OK, now we can do it.”The actor Roger Bart, who has starred in musical comedies like “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein,” was an early candidate to play Doc Brown. He landed the role with the help of a video audition in which he wore a lampshade on his head (to mimic a mind-reading device Brown uses) and sung the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.”Though Christopher Lloyd is associated with the Doc Brown character, Bart said he felt it was not his job to copy that performance.“I’m 60,” Bart said. “There’s a certain point where I have to go, I know I’m entertaining. I’ve been in front of enough audiences to know that. If you really get bogged down with that thinking, you’re going to paralyze yourself.”The best way to play Doc Brown, Bart said, is to honor the spirit of Lloyd’s performances, “which is to create the idea that anything can happen at any moment, by being unusual in your choices.”Casey Likes joined the show as Marty for its Broadway run, after making his Broadway debut last year in “Almost Famous.” He said that his mother often compared him to Michael J. Fox when he was growing up. (The actor, who is 21, was born 16 years after “Back to the Future” was released in theaters.)At his audition, Likes said, “I wanted to convey something that was reminiscent of Michael but not an impression.”He added, “I went with the kind of vocal inflections that he had done, while trying to deliver the bright-eyed, somewhere between cool and dorky thing that he did. And I guess it worked.”As the curtain goes up on this “Back to the Future,” its creators are hopeful that it is a faithful representation of the franchise — one that they say they have no intention of continuing cinematically. As Gale put it, “We don’t need ‘Back to the Future 18.’”For its stars, their day-to-day hopes are more focused on steeling their courage when they step into the show’s mechanical DeLorean and trusting it will execute its stunts consistently.With a wry chuckle, Bart said he’d rather not have a day of work that ends with anyone “being sent to the hospital while the stage managers say, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I called that wrong,’ and you go, ‘Oh, it’s OK, I have insurance, it’s all good.’ I don’t ever want to have that conversation.” More

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      On the Scene: ‘Music Man,’ a Big Broadway Bet 🎺

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      On the Scene: ‘Music Man,’ a Big Broadway Bet 🎺Matt Stevens🎭 Reporting from BroadwayThe Omicron variant has made this a tough winter for the theater. “The Music Man,” a big-budget, star-studded musical, opened Thursday hoping to provide Broadway with something of a booster shot in the arm. 
      Here’s what the night looked like → More

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      Hugh Jackman Announces He Has Covid-19

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      Hugh Jackman, who is starring as Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man” at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway, announced on Tuesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.“I just wanted you to hear from me that I tested positive this morning for Covid,” Jackman said in an Instagram video. “My symptoms are like a cold: I have a scratchy throat and a bit of a runny nose, but I’m fine. And I’m just going to do everything I can to get better, A.S.A.P., and as soon as I’m cleared, I’ll be back onstage.”Shortly after Mr. Jackman posted his video, “The Music Man” announced on Instagram that all performances would be canceled through Saturday. Tickets can be refunded or exchanged where they were purchased. Performances will resume on Sunday, and Mr. Jackman will return to the show on Jan. 6. Several other Tony winners star in “The Music Man” alongside Mr. Jackman: Sutton Foster as Marian Paroo, Shuler Hensley as Marcellus Washburn, Jefferson Mays as Mayor Shinn, Jayne Houdyshell as Mrs. Shinn and Marie Mullen as Mrs. Paroo.Preview performances for “The Music Man” began on Dec. 20, with opening night scheduled for Feb. 10.While “The Music Man” has managed to stay open, other shows have not. The New York City Ballet announced Tuesday that it was canceling its remaining performances of “The Nutcracker.” The producers of “Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations, also announced on Tuesday that their show will close on Jan. 16. The show has not run since Dec. 15, citing coronavirus cases. It is planning to resume on Tuesday, Dec. 28, and hoping to run for three more weeks before closing for good. Last week, the musicals “Jagged Little Pill” and “Waitress,” as well as the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man” announced that they had closed without so much as a farewell performance — all were already on hiatus because of coronavirus cases among cast or crew.The efforts of “The Music Man” to stay open had just been highlighted on Thursday night, when the actress Kathy Voytko, a swing and an understudy for Marian Paroo in the musical, filled in for Ms. Foster, who had Covid, at the last minute. After the show, the actress and dancer Katherine Winter posted an Instagram video of Mr. Jackman praising understudies and swings as “the bedrock of Broadway.”“Kathy, when she turned up at work at 12 o’clock, could have played any of eight roles,” Jackman said at the curtain call. “It happened to be the leading lady. She found out at 12 noon today, and at 1 o’clock she had her very first rehearsal as Marian Paroo.”As the coronavirus and its Omicron variant spread, understudies and swings are becoming more important than ever: Shows are relying on them to step in for sick or unavailable leads.“This is unprecedented,” Mr. Jackman continued. “It’s not only happening here at the Winter Garden, but all over Broadway. This is a time we’ve never known.” More

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      Broadway Theater Owner Cited by OSHA in Stagehand’s Fatal Fall

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      Federal regulators cited the Shubert Organization for four workplace safety violations in the death of an employee in the Winter Garden Theater.Federal regulators have cited the Shubert Organization for four serious workplace safety violations and proposed a fine of $45,642 in connection with the death of an employee who fell from a ladder while working at the Winter Garden Theater last fall.The citations, from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, were issued on May 11, six months after Peter Wright, a 54-year-old stagehand, fell nearly 50 feet from a narrow, raised platform while performing routine maintenance in the theater.OSHA issues these serious citations when, according to its review, lapses have led to hazards carrying a “substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result.” In the Shubert Organization’s case, OSHA did not find that the violations were willful ones, in which an employer “intentionally and knowingly” violates the law.The Shubert Organization has set up a meeting to discuss the citations and penalties, James C. Lally, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor, said. If the two parties do not reach a settlement, the company can still contest the citations, Mr. Lally said. Otherwise, they will be obligated to pay the full amount.A spokesman for the Shubert Organization declined a request for comment, citing the ongoing investigation.The violations issued to the group, which is the largest landlord on Broadway, included having a wooden ladder coated with a material that could obscure structural defects and two instances of a ladder used for a purpose for which it was not designed.Mr. Wright, who was from Milford, Conn., was a stagehand for Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the labor union that represents professional stage employees in New York, for 34 years. He and his wife of 23 years, Marcie Lowy Wright, met when they were both working as stagehands for a 1990s “Grease” revival at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.James J. Claffey Jr., the president of Local 1, wrote in a tribute in November that Mr. Wright “had a work ethic that was nothing short of exemplary, was extremely talented and skilled in his craft, and he was one of the finest riggers/flyman in our industry.”The last show to play at the Winter Garden Theater had been “Beetlejuice,” which had been set to end its run on June 6, 2020, before the theater, like all on Broadway, shut on March 12 because of the pandemic; “Beetlejuice” was not slated to return. A revival of “The Music Man” that will star Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster is set to begin performances in December and open next February.Bill Evans, a spokesman for the Shubert Organization, said at the time of Mr. Wright’s death that most stagehands had not been working at the organization’s other theaters during the pandemic shutdown.“We mourn the loss of our valued colleague,” he said in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences go out to the family during this difficult time.”Dylan Foley, who was a friend and co-worker of Mr. Wright’s, wrote in a Facebook tribute in November that Mr. Wright was “completely fearless in how he lived his life as a stagehand” and often did the work of three men.“He had a dry wit, an unstoppable work ethic, and a trademarked grin,” Mr. Foley wrote. “If you asked for something from Pete, his line was, ‘For you, the grid’s the limit.’” More

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      ‘Follies’ Was My First Broadway Show. 50 Years Later, I Remember It All.

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      On a thrilling trip to New York, a 16-year-old budding critic learned that the insistent optimism of musical theater was a beautiful lie.At long last, I was exactly where I had yearned to be for most of my young life. I had arrived in the holy land, which for me was a show palace in New York City, the world capital of my childhood fantasies. My very first Broadway musical, a form of entertainment I regarded as a religion, was about to begin.Then the lights went down in the cavernous Winter Garden Theater. It got dark, which I had expected. It stayed dark, which I hadn’t. The stage was flooded in shadow, and you had to squint to make out the people on it. Some were tall, spectral beauties from another era in glittering headdresses, and others were as ordinary as my parents, dressed up for a night out. None of them looked happy.The grand orchestral music seemed to be eroding as I listened, like some magnificent sand castle dissolving in the tide, as sweet notes slid into sourness. This was definitely not “Hello, Dolly!” or “Bye Bye Birdie” or “Funny Girl,” whose sunny, exclamation-pointed melodies I knew by heart from the original cast recordings.I didn’t know what had hit me. I certainly didn’t know that it would keep hitting me, in sharp and unexpected fragments of recollection, for the next 50 years.It was the spring of 1971. The show was“Follies,” a title that turned out to refer to both bygone Ziegfeld-style spectacles and the delusions of its main characters. It had a score by a rising composer named Stephen Sondheim and was directed by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, names that didn’t mean much to me then. The cast included Yvonne De Carlo, Gene Nelson and the divine Alexis Smith, whom I knew from old movies on television.A ghostly showgirl in the original production of “Follies.”Martha Swope, Billy Rose Theatre Division/The New York Public LibrarySince the show was still in previews, there had been no reviews to cue my expectations. And word of mouth hadn’t reached Winston-Salem, N.C., where I was a 16-year-old public high school student.My parents had finally succumbed to my pleas to be taken to Manhattan, where my older sister lived. We were all side-by-side in orchestra seats, and I could feel my mom and dad basking in my excitement.That excitement was tinged with a thrill of illicit betrayal. Yes, “Follies” was undeniably a big Broadway musical, staged with an opulence that would be unthinkable today. But this tale of two unhappy couples, stalked by the ghosts of their younger selves during a showbiz reunion in the ruins of a once stately theater, was telling me that the optimistic promises of the musical comedies I had been weaned on were lies.In a cover story that came out a month later — its pictures would adorn my bedroom walls, along with posters of Humphrey Bogart and Vanessa Redgrave, until I left for college — Time magazine enthusiastically (and accurately) described “Follies” as anti-nostalgic, a modern corrective to the cheery, escapist camp of hit revivals like “No, No Nanette.”Time’s assessment was the opposite of that of the New York Times critics Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr, who didn’t like “Follies” at all. The plot, they wrote, was hackneyed and formulaic. As for the songs, with their homages to styles of showbiz past, Barnes called them a “non-hit parade of pastiche.”I couldn’t disagree about James Goldman’s book, which felt like a rehash of the best sellers about middle-aged disenchantment I borrowed from my parents. (I already suspected that my future was in criticism.) But the songs stuck with me, along with piercing images of aging performers clinging to a waning spotlight. And I had a vague sense that I would be destined to forever recall this odd and majestic show “like a movie in my head that plays and plays,” to borrow from its script.In some ways, “Follies” was a perfect match to my adolescent self. My parents had always encouraged me to understand that old people hadn’t always been old, to look for the layers of what they had been. (I was fascinated by the culture of my grandparents’ generation, which meant that references to Brenda Frazier and “Abie’s Irish Rose” didn’t go over my head.)And part of what I found so affecting about musicals were the differences between their exalted forms and the often ordinary lives they portrayed. (I would restage classic musicals in my head with my friends and family in the leading roles; it made me cry happily.)What I didn’t get then — and couldn’t have as a teenager — was how the music was the very sound of memory. It was the cleverness of Sondheim’s lyrics that attracted me in my youth. I loved quoting their sophisticated rhymes.But the older I got, and the more I listened, the more I appreciated the complexity of the pastiche songs, like “The Story of Lucy and Jessie,” “Broadway Baby” and the torchy “Losing My Mind” (which I confess to having sung, drunk, in a piano bar). These aren’t just facile imitations from another era; they’re inflected with the echoes and distortions of all the years that have passed since. As a memory musical, I came to realize, “Follies” approaches Proustian dimensions.When I hear anything from “Follies” now — or see a new production (I’ve written about seven incarnations for The New York Times) — it’s with the memory of watching that first cast of characters remembering. Every time what I’m listening to sounds deeper and richer, and sadder and funnier. And I recall, with a tightening of my chest, that 16-year-old boy staring at the stage in rapture and bewilderment. More