Follies Man

RIFF MARKOWITZ

CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR

Recently, Follies Co-Founders Riff Markowitz and Mary Jardin sat down to discuss their show's 20-year journey and how it all came to be.

JARDIN: Happy anniversary, Riff.

MARKOWITZ: Did I get married again?

JARDIN: Very funny. How can you forget something SO important? It's the Follies' 20th anniversary!

MARKOWITZ: Say it isn't so. If the Follies is 20, that would make me 72, which certainly isn't possible. Lord, I feel like Jerry Lewis!

JARDIN: Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it is and you are.

MARKOWITZ: Can you just imagine . . . how many shows have we now done? 4,000?

JARDIN: Yes, and you've never missed a performance. Congratulations. That's an amazing accomplishment.

MARKOWITZ: What else would I do? I hate golf; the clothes are dreadful.

JARDIN: I know, but even when you've been seriously ill, I've seen you step onstage and no one's the wiser.

MARKOWITZ: It's a little-known fact that even our Plaza Theatre ushers have tuxedos hanging in their automobiles just waiting for the day when I'm too sick to perform and they can step in. Hell, even my mother is waiting for me to break a leg so she can host the Follies. It's a cutthroat business.

JARDIN: That may be a slight over dramatization, but you are the maestro and no one else can possibly "fill your shoes."

MARKOWITZ: Thank you, but 20 years ago there were those who begged to differ. If I recall, one member of the Fourth Estate opined, "'Riff Markowitz' sounds more like the name of a Polish rock star than a legitimate theatrical producer."

JARDIN: And there was that other comment in the newspaper: "Who wants to pay to see old ladies' legs?"

MARKOWITZ: Approximately three million, to date.

JARDIN: And, fortunately, three members of the Palm Springs City Council back in 1991 believed in our idea and voted to lease us the theater, which the City had then recently purchased.

MARKOWITZ: Mayor Pro Tem Tuck Broich rallied tirelessly for this lease to be granted. Without his support, the Follies would have never been.

JARDIN: And what a fluke it was that you even got to know him! After you sold your television production company and post-production facility in Toronto, you were bored silly with nothing to do all day.

MARKOWITZ: Tuck's feisty wife, Alice, was in charge of "recruiting" volunteer "security officers" to help patrol the rowdy Spring Breakers who overran the town for a week every year. She placed a notice in the newspaper and I "suited up."

JARDIN: I was told you were better outfitted than actual members of the Palm Springs Police Department, although they later had to counsel you on proper "security protocols."

MARKOWITZ: If you're referring to the teenaged twit who decided to bump me with his father's Porsche convertible when I wouldn't let him drive past the barricade, then yes. After that incident, I accidentally "bumped" him on the head with my flashlight. Apparently some of my methods weren't in the official handbook, but I already knew how to direct traffic because, after all, directing was my career.

JARDIN: Nonetheless, Tuck knew that you had co-founded Canada's first pay-TV network. You and your partner created the popular television series, The Hitchhiker, which I think was the first dramatic series on HBO. You also had produced HBO's first major variety, special honoring Neil Simon, and numerous other TV music programs and game shows, so he asked you to take a look at the then-vacant Plaza Theatre and what might be done with it.

MARKOWITZ: Yes. It was dusty, dead and dreary. It had a single light bulb illuminating its interior, but I knew it could be something special again. In its day—the theater opened in 1936—it had functioned as a "presentation house," which meant that it not only showed theatrical films but also served as the stage for such local luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, not to mention the often-used winter home for Jack Benny's famous radio broadcasts. It needed to come alive again with not just live performers but performers who had actually lived that era; not kids who didn‘t even know who these Greats were. Hence, the Follies was born.

JARDIN: And hence, "Riff, the Performer" was born.

MARKOWITZ: Not my first experience "out front," though. I ran away and joined the circus at age 15. With all due respect to Red Skelton, whose specials I later produced, clowning wasn't all it was cracked up to be. So, at age 16, I told a radio station that I was 22 and landed a job as a disc jockey in the remote Canadian town of Kirkland Lake, Ontario. The place was so far north that the Northern Lights were viewed by looking South! The closest train depot was in the hamlet of Swastika, Ontario; not a good omen for a frightened Jewish teenager. Television was the future, though, so I soon became a TV weatherman then newscaster, even doing commercials.

JARDIN: How did the infamous The Randy Dandy Show come to be?

MARKOWITZ: I was assigned to create a children's program and, for better or worse, Randy Dandy was born. (Rand was a nickname I picked up in radio.) The show was fun and idiotic, but it worked.  Later, I produced a kid show that has lasted to this day in repeats and became a kind of cult favorite, The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.

JARDIN: And who played the role of "Randy Dandy"?

MARKOWITZ: Oh, please; don't tell me you have pictures!

JARDIN: Didn't your kid sister, Merrilee, charge her girlfriends a nickel each to watch their favorite TV celebrity, Randy Dandy, sleep?

MARKOWITZ: Yes, Merrilee was quite the little capitalist back then. More and more, though, I was moving behind the camera writing, directing and producing. With the enormous delays of taping a television show, I began to talk to our studio audiences, who could become quite hostile when the delays went on and on. I seemed to have the ability to hold their attention; mostly by inflicting them with my own hostility and angst. Little did I know how this "skill" would ultimately serve me well in my role here at the Follies.

JARDIN: How has your onstage persona evolved from what it was back then to that of The Follies Man we know today?

MARKOWITZ: Actually very little. Fortunately for me, we old people have a great capacity to be kidded. We have a sense of humor about the inherent unfairness of our world and our own foibles. This trait is not so easily found in young people today.  Perhaps it's just that we've seen so much in our old lives that we have come to be more amused by all that is inopportune. We also come from a generation of folks who were not so concerned with "political correctness."

JARDIN: But the reason audiences visit the Follies is so different from those TV show audiences.

MARKOWITZ: Maybe not. We all want to laugh and cry and be entertained. We all want to escape into a world that is more amusing and exciting and hopeful than the real world in which we live. The Follies definitely has that, but there is also a secondary reason why people attend our shows.

JARDIN: And that is?

MARKOWITZ: People come to be inspired by our amazing Follies cast. These indomitable performers have quite simply defied popular notions on aging and are shining role models to us all. No one in the Follies cast is permitted to feel old. It's attitudinal. Even though they're not 20, they still view themselves—from the inside—as being the same, unchanged by the years: sexual, sensual and still able to move where they want to go and when. They see what is still possible.

JARDIN: Can you give an example?

MARKOWITZ: Sure, just look into the faces of our audience prior to the show. Look at their body English as they file in from the streets of the "outside world" and take their seats. Their demeanor reflects their disappointment with how things have turned out; not necessarily the way they'd hoped when they were young and bright and gay. Two hours later look at these self-same people; it's a whole other world, for they have seen the light and it's not the light we're all going to walk into soon enough. It's the brilliant light of hope and of what can still be done and accomplished by all of us.

JARDIN: It's always interesting to listen to the conversations between our patrons and cast members after the show in the lobby.

MARKOWITZ: Our experience in the lobby following the show is a very important part of the overall Follies experience. Since audiences easily forget the age of our cast five minutes after the curtain goes up, the opportunity for patrons to meet them afterwards helps to close the circle. Audience members may be in awe of the beauty and talent of the World's Oldest Showgirl onstage; in the theater lobby afterwards, they trade stories about their respective grandchildren. Inside of us, we're all the same.

JARDIN: What have our audiences taught YOU?

MARKOWITZ: Throughout these 20 years, I think I've personally met close to one million of our patrons. People who've suffered from every infirmity and disability known to man; people who've survived unimaginable atrocities both on the battlefield and just in life; and people whose struggle to have made it even this far in life is almost beyond comprehension. They all possess, though, one constant: HOPE. They have inspired me, as I believe we've inspired them. The Follies is all about hope and seeing life's finale in a much different light.

JARDIN: A final thought?

MARKOWITZ: Yes. Don't EVER walk into the Light. Turn and run like hell. Make them take you kicking and screaming . . . or, if you're a member of the Follies cast, then while you're taking your final bow at the end of a nine-show week during a standing ovation.