Follies Quotes

(Ball is one of the few musical comedy artists to have distinguished himself equally as an interpreter of both Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim, who would seem to be polar opposites as songwriters.) I`m very lucky that I`ve gotten to work with both of them, ... I was in Andrew Lloyd Webber`s 50th party concert at the Albert Hall. That same year I was in a special show called Hey, Mr. Producer , a celebration of Cameron Mackintosh`s work. There was a Sondheim section, and Cameron asked if I`d be part of it. I`d already recorded `Losing My Mind` from Follies , which is one of my favorite songs of Steve`s. But I hadn`t yet done a particularly traditional treatment of it. Steve said he wanted me to do it absolutely straight, the way it was heard in the original show, which I was delighted about. And he worked with me on it--just him, and me, and a pianist in a tiny room, for an hour-and-a-half master class on this song. I came away knowing every nuance; why he wrote everything that he did; why every note was in its place; why the phrasing was like this--can you imagine how thrilling that was? And he is so articulate in explaining his work; you can be under no illusion why something is there. When you have that understanding, that is when his work opens up to you. Of course, they put me between Judi Dench singing `Send in the Clowns` and Bernadette Peters doing `Being Alive.` You try holding your own in that company!

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

They are the follies inherent to youth; I make sport of them, and, if you are kind, you will not yourself refuse them a good-natured smile.

The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn`t commit when he had the opportunity.

So long as thou are ignorant be not ashamed to learn. Ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and when justified, the chiefest of all follies.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth`s follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what`s going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

My dreams are all follies.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Every man has his follies - and often they are the most interesting thing he has got.

Of Ann Pennington’s official film debut in Susie Snowflake, the New York Times stated on June 26, 1916:

Many of those who went to the Broadway yesterday for the first showing of Susie Snowflake will be inclined to endorse this particular nomination. Miss Pennington is obviously put forth as a diminutive star of the Marguerite Clark variety, a style enormously in vogue at the moment. She is little and cunning on Mr. Ziegfeld’s stage and little and cunning on the screen. She has youth, a Mary Pickford like harum-scarum way with her and, except in the trying close-ups when her expression is somewhat adenoidal, she is pretty.

Of course she dances. As her frisky little dance is her sole claim to fame at the moment, it could no more be omitted from her first scenario than the “pump and washing tubs” in Mr. Crummles’s theater. So as a child of the music halls adapted into a staid, old New England community, Susie Snowflake disrupts a church sociable by doing her Follies dance there in her terse Follies costume.