“That’s Where They Knew Me When”: Oklahoma Senior Follies and the Narrative of Decline

For two years I served as musical director and arranger for a musical revue, consisting entirely of performers over the age of fifty-five, known as the Oklahoma Senior Follies. As part of the much larger Senior Follies movement, the Oklahoma Senior Follies makes a place on the musical stage for aging musical theater performers. I experienced up close the remarkable local talent represented by the cast members and likewise witnessed the importance of having an opportunity to express one’s voice in all stages of life.

Yet the ageist conditions that necessitate a theater like the Senior Follies call for a complicated response. Inasmuch as the Oklahoma Senior Follies attempts to reframe aging as positive, performers frequently resort to the same ageist stereotypes they hoped to frustrate. I see this complicated response to conventional narratives of aging arising from a conflict between the musical format of the follies and constraints effected by the local theater industry. I use my experience with and proximity to the Oklahoma Senior Follies to construct a case study that gives explicit attention to how seniors have attempted to resist marginalization through performance. I examine the effects of the Senior Follies movement in Oklahoma City and also bring into relief what I perceive to be problems in the way the musical theater industry marginalizes the aging.

Aging and Musical Theater

Musicals notoriously tell stories of redemption or of overcoming seemingly impossible odds, and the genre’s treatment of age seems, at least in notable cases, to fit within this narrative. Stephen Sondheim’s Follies (1971), for instance, moralizes the theme of second chances and buoys an indefatigable refrain in Carlotta Campion’s torch song “I’m Still Here.” Fans allow space for doyennes like Elaine Stritch and Bea Arthur to work into old age under the allowances of divahood.¹ Until a few years ago, Ted Neeley continued to spellbind audiences as the title character in Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), never mind that his aging body and voice betrayed any sense of resemblance to the thirty-three-year-old martyr.² Renowned lyricist Fred Ebb was working on the new musical Curtains when he died. He was seventy-six.

Yet these are exceptions that prove the rule. Despite the prominence of well-known and senescent characters like Mother Superior in The Sound of Music and Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, most performers today find their careers curtailed by the musical theater industry’s limitations on meaningful avenues for the aging performer. A Broadway star has little room to evolve over the course of her career because the industry favors the young; even lateral moves are limited. Particularly in popular dance musicals like West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Grease, and 42nd Street, where almost all performers have to dance at some point, lead characters must of necessity be around the same young age. Even more, the grueling schedule of eight shows a week certainly makes a career on Broadway hazardous and largely unfit even for the most disciplined (and youthful) bodies. The intense physical requirements for a Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, for example, crimps performance possibilities beyond a certain phase of life. Musical theater’s tendency to look past aging performers further positions musicals as reflections of mainstream societal practices that also marginalize those growing older. Raymond Knapp has recently argued along these lines regarding other marginalized populations, writing that “commercial calculation, standards of believability, and the dynamics of assimilation” have all “reinforced the dominance of the mainstream in musicals.”³ This realization comes despite the genre’s reputation for problematizing cultural and societal norms.⁴ Musical theater thus stands distinct as a sometimes-progressive space where depictions or presentations of the elderly onstage, as with other frequent tokens of marginalization like race or gender, nonetheless reaffirm mainstream sensibilities.

These mainstream sensibilities affirm a particularly distorted image of aging. Like other forms of popular culture, the Broadway musical contributes to a presumed connection between aging and deterioration, what cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette in her book Aged by Culture...