the song better than Alexis Smith could.^9 Alexis Smith was then
to do a mock striptease, “Ah, But Underneath,” in which Phyllis
was to admit there is nothing beneath her surface appearance,
but Sondheim then came up with a different solo, a vamp num-
ber in which Phyllis is both “Lucy and Jessie”—that is, a split
personality. “Ben’s Folly,” a suave, top-hat-and-tails piece in the
manner of Fred Astaire called “Live, Laugh, Love,” amounts to
a performance breakdown over the discovery that he is worth-
less, a “nothing.”
I have called the stage an area of vulnerability for singers
and dancers. Vulnerability is the keynote for all four of these
characters in the book of Follies, and now, transported to a Fol-
lies within the Follies, they become song-and-dance figures be-
yond the range of the book, threatened with the vulnerability
of performance itself. Three of them will make it through.
They will finish their numbers and be so good at performance
that their musical selves will outdistance their self-pitying book
selves. Buddy in his clown’s routine, mastering the tongue-
twisting lyric and making a fool of himself, too, rises above
anything else we have seen him do. Sally’s “Losing My Mind”
is her finest number. Elegant, perfectly dressed and made up,
going crazy—she is startling, unexpected, hardly the earnest
“little Sally” we have seen before. Phyllis has mastered the
vamp routines so that she can swing between “Jessie” and
“Lucy” without missing a beat. But disaster is always waiting
to happen in the area of vulnerability, and in Ben’s number
the disaster breaks open. He loses track of his lyric, he asks the
conductor—the actual conductor in the pit—for his words, he
trips, he collapses, while the chorus line cuties behind him
keep on singing and dancing as though he were not even there.
Then, with Ben collapsed and calling for help, the Follies
apparatus disappears and we are back into the book, which is
all that the main characters have left. Performance is now be-
yond them. Their subtexts have been played out, and they have
no performance versions of themselves left. They cannot be
imagined singing and dancing again, and book time may have
194 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^9) See Chapin, Everything Was Possible, p. 94.