Encores! Season Celebrates the American Musical Revue; Follies on Tap

Encores! is offering an unusual season in 2007. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Ziegfeld Follies, Encores! is celebrating the American musical revue. With that in mind, the season will be comprised of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies, Irving Berlin's Face the Music and Stairway to Paradise, an original Encores! production presenting immortal highlights from the great revues of 1907-1952.

Follies takes place onstage at the once-spectacular, but now crumbling, Weissman Theatre, where on the eve of its demolition, ghosts from its past return and showgirls from decades ago reunite—and remember—one last time. Follies is an odd choice for the Encores! treatment because it was seen on Broadway fairly recently, in 2001, and the Encores! mission, according to the festival's own press materials, is to celebrate "rarely-heard works." The concert mounting of Follies will run at City Center from February 8 through February 11.

Running March 29 through April 1 is the 1932 tuner Face the Music, featuring music and lyrics by Berlin and a book by Berlin and Moss Hart. The show centers on a desperate New York producer trying to raise the money for his latest revue, Rhinestones of '32. This is indeed a rarely revived work not seen on Broadway since 1933.

The season will conclude with Stairway to Paradise, playing from May 10 through May 14. This will mark the first time ever Encores! has specially created a piece for its season. Stairway to Paradise will include material from a half century of Broadway revues and will feature numbers and sketches from Florenz Ziegfeld's shows and other legendary musicals and revues of the era.

Broadway revues—plotless, bookless, sketch-driven shows featuring girls, gags, star comedians like Bert Lahr and Fanny Brice—flourished until the 1950s. Ziegfeld was the king of the revue and the Ziegfeld Follies was generally considered the defining achievement of the revue format.