LITTLE ROCK — A dozen years after its final live performance, the Farkleberry Follies is taking a curtain call of sorts this week.
The occasion is a public showing Thursday evening of the video Hello Folly! A Brief History of the Farkleberry Follies, at the Main Library’s Darragh Center in Little Rock’s River Market District.
Sponsored by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, the free 6:30 p.m. screening marks the opening of its Leroy Donald Collection. That trove of archival material covers the career of the late Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newsman, whose labor of love was producing and directing the show staged by local journalists each odd-numbered year from 1967 to 1999.
The 45-minute video, directed by the Butler Center’s Nathania Sawyer and produced by Sara Thompson, serves as a reminder that the Follies at its finest delivered stiletto-sharp political and social humor lampooning the state’s public figures and foibles.
The gibes were vigorously nonpartisan, aimed without fear or favor at the high and mighty, whether the target was Bill Clinton or Mike Huckabee, Joycelyn Elders or Tommy Robinson, Don Tyson or Jennings Osborne. The audience regularly included some of the same bigwigs being spoofed on the stage.
There’s also evidence in taped snippets from the last seven biennial productions that the high-spirited humor dispensed by the news-media cast was often enough ribald - and that the recurring chorus-line costumes were designed to showcase the legs of the female hoofers in the amateur cast.
In fact, the video being presented Thursday is a slightly bowdlerized version of the one shown on April Fool’s Day to a reunion of the show’s cast and crew. Excised have been mentions of Donald’s roving eye for the fairer sex, along with a few racy backstage moments.
The footage features effusive tributes to Donald’s showmanship, as well as clips of him in skits - most hilariously playing the late sports editor and columnist Orville Henry in worshipful thrall to Frank Broyles, longtime Razorbacks’ football coach and athletic director, played by the late Bill Rutherford.
Staged for most of its run at Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, the Follies was consistently sold out. The sponsoring Arkansas chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists donated proceeds averaging $17,000 per production to college journalism scholarships. There was even a facetious biennial newspaper, Farkle Finger, copies of which are preserved in the Donald Collection.
In the absence of visual footage from early Follies, there’s nothing in Thursday’s video from the very first show, staged in November 1967, with tickets priced at $12.50 including dinner, drinks and the performance.
As reported in a 1993 Democrat-Gazette story, ex-Gov.Orval Faubus was played by John Robert Starr, then on The Associated Press staff, with Democrat cartoonist Jon Kennedy as Sen. J. William Fulbright, Democrat city editor Marcus George as Sen. John L. McClellan, Gazette reporter Jerol Garrison as Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt, and Donald as Justice Jim Johnson.
A highlight of that first opening night, according to the Democrat-Gazette story, “came when Faubus appeared as himself at the end of the show and drew a standing ovation from many in the audience, excluding the [Winthrop] Rockefeller and [Jim] Johnson delegations.” (Republican Rockefeller had succeeded Faubus as governor after defeating Johnson in the 1966 general election.)
That 1993 account reprinted a paragraph from the Gazette’s review of the 1991 show:
“This version of the Follies happily maintains the long tradition of tastelessness and vulgarity. The prudish and the politically correct need not attend. There are sexist portrayals of women, dirty jokes and infantile remarks about fat people. Most of the time, it is hilarious.”
A similar critique could be made of this week’s Hello, Folly! Suited in parts to a chronologically mature audience, the video is salted with a great deal of hilarity - even if, to some extent, you had to have been there.
Hello Folly! A Brief History of the Farkleberry Follies will be shown free of charge at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Darragh Center of the Central Arkansas Library System’s Main Library, 100 S. Rock St., Little Rock. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Craig Douglass, Bill Lancaster and Ben Combs, skit creators and performers for some of the shows. Donors of $25 or more to the Butler Center to continue programs like this one will be sent a copy of Hello Folly! as a thank-you gift. For information, visit butlercenter. org.
Style, Pages 51 on 06/12/2011