by Tom Sellar

Follies was inspired by a haunting photograph. Now it’s returning to Broadway – along with ghosts from the neighborhood’s glorious past.

T.E. Kalem once described Follies in Time magazine as "the first Proustian musical." Set on the demolition day of an old show palace, Follies tells the story of its former stars and friends as they arrive for a reunion party. Like Marcel Proust’s novels, it explores themes of youth, aging and memory. It travels through time, remembering things past. It is a musical of and about ghosts.

James Goldman, the great Broadway bard who wrote the book, came across a newspaper clipping describing a real-life reunion of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls—and the idea was planted. From the beginning Goldman and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wanted to make time-travelling central to the musical.

Later Harold Prince, the original production’s director, was inspired by a haunting photograph, which he brought to the attention of his collaborators. When the Roxy Theatre, a legendary Broadway venue since its 1928 opening, was demolished in 1960, Life magazine photographer Eliot Elisofon had captured the nostalgia and loss of the event with a shot of former star Gloria Swanson poised in the rubble. Dressed in sleek and striking 1930s eveningwear, Swanson balances delicately on a girder. Her arms extend upwards to the sky in a graceful arc. Her face shines with a smile; she is radiant with memories. Behind her stands a collapsed wall, which the wrecking ball has already struck down. Daylight glares, harsh and dull. It is as if a glorious evening of dreams has come to an end, replaced and destroyed by the arrival of a new day.

Follies came to life in part because of this indelible image. As Sondheim recounts in Meryle Secrest’s Stephen Sondheim: A Life, he, Goldman and Prince were fascinated with the ghosts of this bygone era and wanted Follies to capture Swanson’s theatrical gesture and that same feeling of "rubble in the daylight." (The play even begins in the evening and ends as dawn breaks.) As the artists thought about these events and images, their dramatic potential became irresistible.

Ziegfeld advertisement.

Goldman and Sondheim resurrect the lost world of the Ziegfeld Follies, the legendary New York revue inspired by the Folies-Bergère in Paris. Impresario Florenz Ziegfeld billed his follies as "something new under the sun" at their 1907 debut, and audiences agreed. Until his death in 1931 Ziegfeld made sure the material was constantly updated to reflect current events and popular themes. New Yorkers adored his celebrated chorus line, the famous and alluring star performers, the spectacular sets and costumes, and the satirical brand of humor. Among the great performers who emerged from these productions were Fanny Brice, W.C. Fields, Lillian Lorraine, and Will Rogers. Each year Ziegfeld outdid himself, spending more and more money on increasingly lavish spectacles: girls dancing in an enormous cloud of soap bubbles; flying machines over the audience; 14 pianos and multiple orchestras playing along giant circular staircases—you name it.

Ziegfeld was also the first Broadway producer to construct a theatre to meet the requirements of musical comedy: he had Joseph Urban build the ellipse-shaped Ziegfeld Theatre to maximize the audience’s acoustic and visual experience. Every Ziegfeld spectacle became the hottest ticket in town and audiences simply couldn’t get enough; in the 1920s hundreds of similar revues opened on Broadway and many magnificent new auditoriums were constructed to accommodate them.

Every Ziegfeld spectacle became the hottest ticket in town and audiences simply couldn’t get enough; in the 1920s hundreds of similar revues opened on Broadway and many magnificent new auditoriums were constructed to accommodate them.

This glittering world disappeared more than half a century ago, but several theatres from Ziegfeld’s heyday are now being restored to their former glory along 42nd Street. In the early 1990s, the non-profit organization called The New 42nd Street Inc. successfully negotiated with the city and state for a 99-year lease on seven historic theatres on the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues (with two additional houses bringing their total to nine from the early 1900s). With several theatres once again functioning as performance venues, architectural refurbishment has opened doors to the block’s theatrical heritage.

The New Amsterdam Theatre in 1925.

The New Amsterdam Theatre, home to the Ziegfeld Follies from 1913 until 1927, has been leased and renovated by Disney. (It now houses The Lion King.) A theatre that once belonged to the early 20th-century impresario David Belasco has been restored and renamed the New Victory. And the neo-Renaissance Selwyn Theatre, which originally opened in 1918, has been transformed into the American Airlines Theatre, the Roundabout’s grand new home.

With Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum arriving on the site of the old Harris Theatre (where John Barrymore once starred), 42nd Street seems to be full of faces and legends from the past. In fact, construction workers have uncovered several of them. Architects renovating the former Eltinge Theater into a cineplex discovered a 60-year-old mural underneath layers of paint; it depicts Julian Eltinge, a famous female impersonator and the theatre’s namesake, in three different guises. (Movie audiences pass it on their way up the escalators to screenings.)

In 1988 the remains of the Earl Carroll Theatre’s old proscenium were discovered above the false ceiling of a Woolworth’s store, recalling the stars and showgirls who performed under its grand arch in the 1930s. (A sign above the stage door read "Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.") Pieces of the black velvet wall coverings were found intact, and the ruins of the dressing rooms contained still-shiny gold-painted window valences.

Wreckers razing the egg-shaped Ziegfeld Theatre on Sixth Avenue came across a copper box that Ziegfeld’s daughters had placed in the cornerstone. Inside they found a collection of programs and photographs (now in the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts).

How could Goldman and Sondheim have known that decades later 42nd Street would be reclaimed so dramatically? As The New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp observed in 1997, "Forty-second Street itself has become a piece of theatre, a metropolitan melodrama one might call the Boulevard of Broken Nightmares."

With renovation efforts turning up so many lost faces and artifacts, it may not be long before the block’s ghosts show up too. The New Amsterdam Theatre may now belong to the Magic Kingdom and Never-Never Land, but according to legend it is haunted by the ghost of Olive Thomas, a Ziegfeld girl who went on to become a Broadway and Hollywood star. Thomas died when she accidentally took bichloride tablets instead of her sleeping medicine. Before it was restored, cleaning staff, movie projectionists, and audience members at the theatre reported seeing a beautiful woman in the balcony late at night dressed in a white gown with a blue medicine bottle in her hand. A handyman saw her standing on the stage when the house was empty, recalling the theatre’s glamorous history. A security guard thought he glimpsed her gliding through a window out onto 42nd Street. In a letter to The New York Times, one reader speculated: "Perhaps the racket of reconstruction scared her away. Maybe she is waiting until the hoopla quiets down to reappear."

Then again, perhaps she has already reappeared, returning to 42nd Street along with the neighborhood’s glorious past. Perhaps the ghosts in Goldman and Sondheim’s Follies are not alone.

Tom Sellar teaches theatre history at Yale University.

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