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date: 06 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter begins by comparing Sondheim’s 1971 musical Follies with Ravel’s La Valse. It uses that comparison to suggest that Follies exercises a complex form of nostalgia that hovers between pastiche and irony. Follies, then, both glorifies and criticizes the history of the Broadway and film musicals of the first half of the twentieth century, and behind them the ideologies of youth, innocence, and the American Dream, which they are so often made to represent. The latter part of the chapter is an initial attempt to strip away the complex layers of allusion to be found in the songs of Sondheim’s “antimusical musical.”

Keywords: Follies, nostalgia, Ravel, pastiche, Broadway, ruins, Ziegfeld, American Dream

Robert Lawson-Peebles

Robert Lawson-Peebles worked at the Universities of Oxford, Princeton, Aberdeen, and Exeter. He has been, amongst others, a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. He has published three books on the cultural history of the American environment, a history of earlier American Literature, and over 90 articles on subjects ranging from Sir Walter Ralegh to the relationship of ideology and the arts. He has a lifelong interest in American music. He edited Approaches to the American Musical, and is currently working on a two-volume history of the cultural impact of jazz in Britain.

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