About: It’s set at a Broadway reunion – the “first and last” for
Dimitri Weismann’s legendary vaudeville revue. With the theater marked for
demolition, making space for another blank office block, the stars and chorines
of the pre-war era revisit their old haunt. It’s 1971; New York’s run down and
its showgirls have aged. As they reminisce and trot through old routines, their
younger selves – shimmering in silvery, sequined ballgowns – hover on the edges
of this ruined auditorium like ghosts in the wings. They sit in dusty red
velvet seats, hang off skeletal staircases and stare into burnished mirrors
backstage. It’s like a showbiz séance of sorts; glittering and ghostly,
lustrous and spectral. At its center are two middle-aged couples – former
showgirls and their fellas – whose marriages have stalled in middle-age. Sally
Durrant (Imelda Staunton), now a small-town mother of
two, is toying with ditching her dull husband Buddy (Peter Forbes) to rekindle
proceedings with her old flame Ben Stone (Philip Quast). Rather than following
through on their fling, he married her friend and fellow “Folly” Phyllis Rogers
(Janie Dee). Reunited for the first time in years, the past comes flooding back
to them all. Their dashing younger selves – carefree and loved up – dance off
with one another. It all positively aches with sadness and regret – an elegy
for lost youth and missed chances; “The Road Not Taken,” as one song has it.
While the two young showgirls (Zizi Strallen and Alex Young) in their matching
floaty, floral dresses, are like peas in a pod, their older selves have seized
up. Staunton’s Sally has become a rattle of anxieties, breathless at a chance
to turn back the clock, while Dee makes clear that Phyllis has constructed her
classy exterior, teaching herself “the art of life.” Their husbands, meanwhile,
have filled out for the good: Buddy, an oil executive with a 29-year-old
mistress; Ben, a respected philanthropist and politician. Superficially, it
seems mighty unfair, but the men are no better off or happier with their lot.
They’re no longer the handsome suitors waiting at stage door, nor the young
soldiers bravely heading off to war. Cooke catches the mood of a night of
nostalgia: from the bubbles of champagne on arrival to the headache that
follows the hard stuff later on.