Theater Talkback: 'I Lost It to Stephen Sondheim' New York Times (blog)
In 1971, when I was 16, I took my first trip to New York – a place I’d fallen for hard from a distance – with my parents, and the first Broadway show I ever saw was Mr. Sondheim’s and James Goldman’s “Follies,” about the reunion of the surviving performers from an old Ziegfeld-Follies-style revue. The second show we saw was “Applause,” a star vehicle for Lauren Bacall that conformed more to what I expected a Broadway musical to be: brassy leading lady on a shrine; tuneful, silly songs, lots of pep and bounce.
But “Follies” – wow! – that was something from a more rarefied galaxy, a big, beautiful and utterly modern elegy to a vanished era of show biz that took apart and analyzed the very forms it entertained us with. A self-conscious kid who was painfully in love with the theater couldn’t have had a more appropriate introduction to Broadway than this self-conscious show that was painfully in love with the theater.
I had just started to realize that one of the reasons people (including me) so often cry at musicals was the disparity between the rosiness of the world these shows created and the grayness of real life. And here was a work that explored that disparity with the affection that I felt and an intelligence I could only be in awe of. I was a bookish little fellow, who probably read too much and too earnestly, and found much to disapprove of in Mr. Goldman’s conventional script about two disintegrating marriages.
RT : I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that. Lauren Bacall
“I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.” ~ Lauren Bacall 
RT : I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that. Lauren Bacall 
RT : "Imagination is the highest kite one can fly." ~ Lauren Bacall
RT : "Imagination is the highest kite one can fly." ~ Lauren Bacall