follies

The fiscal follies are a welcome preelection reminder of Republicans’ inability to govern, and why voters should strip them of their majority in November.

And there’s where the follies could end.

His syncopated riffs on culture’s weirder turns and mundane follies have influenced younger writers from Jennifer Egan to Jonathan Franzen, Dana Spiotta to David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith to Richard Powers to Colson Whitehead to Rachel Kushner and many more.

The season also includes a foray outside the theater, when Pasadena Playhouse invites patrons to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for back-to-back weekends of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” and Sondheim’s “Follies” in concert.

By the time Johnson died in 2005, the five acres he’d bought in 1946 had grown tenfold to encompass 14 structures, including experimental follies, a subterranean painting gallery and three wooden homes from earlier periods, including a shingled 18th-century dwelling that Johnson and his partner, the curator David Whitney, would use as a refuge in hot weather.