“It took four years to write Follies—not steadily. We wrote it first as a murder mystery—not a mystery, that’s not quite right—but a murder piece. It was about four people—two couples—who had been emotionally involved with each other a long time ago and who thought their lives had been damaged because of it. The notion was that one of them was going to murder one of the others, and the suspense, so to speak, was who’s going to kill whom. Every time we would do a draft, the atmosphere for the first few minutes would be fine, but then as soon as the plot came in it would start to get a little ratchety. So we decided to delay the plot, maybe for fifteen minutes. Again it started to get ratchety, so we delayed it for twenty-five. Finally, it struck us that maybe there shouldn’t be any plot at all, that it should be all atmosphere. That is, in fact, what it turned out to be. There’s minimal plot. It all takes place during a party. It’s about people getting drunk and their old emotions surging to the surface and interconnecting … all in the atmosphere of the Ziegfeld Follies. What it really is about is the loss of innocence—not only among the characters but in America between the wars, which the Follies, I think, represented.”
Stephen Sondheim, on the writing of Follies
(The Paris Review, Spring 1997)
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