sang in one of her numbers, “I’m Still Here”). There is a shadow
of difference between the celebrated actress and her role.
There is also a difference between the ghostly chorus girls in
the background and Stella and the other Weissman girls at the
party. These identities are supposed to be unified. Stella and
her ghostly younger self in the background are supposed to be
one person, but the ghost is a young woman wearing a cos-
tume from the Follies of 1941, while Stella is getting old and is
in party clothes of 1997. What about Mary McCarty, playing
Stella? She is supposed to be the same as Stella too, but we
are aware that she is really Mary McCarty. Stella and other
veterans at the Weissman party are reflections of their own
past selves, the ghostly background insists. Stella and the other
Weissman girls are also reflections of their present-day Mary
McCarty/Alexis Smith selves, the celebrity casting insists. These
Weissman girls are double reflections of other selves, the back-
ground ghosts and the foreground celebrity performers, which
means that the ghosts and the celebrity performers have some-
thing in common.^8
The reason Folliesis so moving, despite the inadequacies of
the book involving the four main characters, lies here, in the
reflection between Dorothy Collins and the ghostly Young
Sally, or Alexis Smith and the ghostly Young Phyllis, or Ethel
Barrymore Colt and the ghostly Christine who dances behind
her in the mirror number. The list could go on—ghosts abound.
One cannot shy away from the nostalgia of seeing these old-
timers do their numbers as though they were young, or the
ironic humor that attends the presence of actually young cho-
rus girls mirroring their moves in the background. I am no
longer talking about Phyllis and Sally, the book characters. I
am talking about their reflections, the foreground and the
background performers, for that is the heart of Follies. The ge-
nius of the show is that it complicates the book characters by
layering them with dimensions of performance that can be
seen at once, as the number is performed. One dimension is
190 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^8) For the “ghost” effect, see Carlson, “Ghosts and Follies.” My thanks to
Tom Herson for information about Ethel Barrymore Colt.