Dorothy Parker reviews the Follies for Ainslee’s

One hundred years ago today … Dorothy Parker’s theater column for Ainslee’s included a lengthy review of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920, then winding down its season at the New Amsterdam Theater. Read it here. 

Note: We featured Parker on January 11 and 14, when we chronicled how she got fired from Vanity Fair–a tale intimately involving Florenz Ziegfeld–and the ensuing backlash. In May, Parker would start contributing an almost-monthly theater column to Ainslee’s, which was published by Street and Smith Publications, housed at 79 Seventh Avenue off 14th Street. Its 1920 table of contents is here.

In “National Institutions,” Parker reports on the Follies scene: “Nightly, the cheering citizens wedge themselves into the New Amsterdam Theatre to pay tribute--and four dollars and forty cents apiece-to the most widely advertised of our national institutions, the only dangerous rival of baseball and profiteering as an all-American sport.” Her sardonic celebration of the Follies’s popularity (and that of baseball and profiteering) leads into a lukewarm assessment. The Ziegfeld Follies of 1920 is missing some of the panache of previous editions, she writes. The 1920 Follies in fact, had a lot to live up to, as the 1919 edition “was considered the best of all Follies then and later” (Mordden, 180). 

Parker’s piece lists the impressive, now-legendary names that contributed to the 1920 Follies: Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, W. C. Fields, and Fanny Brice. The latter is, she says “the bright light of the show, and when she leaves the stage it is almost more than one can do to keep from shedding tears.” She notes, however, that “Bert Williams' absence is painfully conspicuous.” 

She ends with a resigned note: “The real point of the production, as it is of every Follies, is the girls. And the girls are there in luxuriant profusion.” The show’s publicity images would certainly agree:

It may be that Parker was subtly continuing her lacerating Ziegfeld on the subject of women that had been the subtext of the Vanity Fair affair. (See Jonathan Goldman’s article on the subject for Public Domain Review.)

The newspaper ads for the Follies include mention of a rooftop show at midnight: Midnight Frolics, which featured importantly in our post of March 29.

References/Further reading:

Mordden, Ethan. Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008.

WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, SEPTEMBER 1, 1920

TAGS: theater, review, revue, women writers, music, periodicals, publishing, vaudeville