Rock Follies was a groundbreaking television series about an all-female rock band that originally aired for two seasons in 1976 and 1977. It wove fantastical, trippy and campy rock-musical numbers together with the often less glamorous realities of show business. The television show also led to two soundtrack albums, Rock Follies and Rock Follies of ’77, that charted in the UK.
Now, nearly 50 years after it first aired, the show has been reimagined as a stage musical with a new book by Chloë Moss that showcases the TV show’s original music from Howard Schuman and Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay.
The Chichester Festival Theatre staging is a successful update for a contemporary live audience. It pays musical homage to the glam decadence of 1970s rock while simultaneously illustrating how far women still have to go in the ongoing struggle for equality. As political as it is fabulous, the new musical plainly shows how the patriarchy is not merely a relic of history.
