The most important musical of the Broadway season is Follies, concocted by some of the collaborators who made Company the best musical of the last two seasons. The new work uses song and dance to suggest our evolution from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, when we counteracted our comparatively simple problems with childishly glamorized entertainments. But it resolutely resists the audience's wish to find these eras nostalgic and charming. Instead, it presents the ghosts of the past as painful exhumations.

Indeed, the theater itself has been turned into the gutted shell of a former Broadway pleasure palace….

Into this special environment march the living remains of some of the old show girls and their husbands, who are meeting for a last reunion before their theater is totally demolished…. They are all bona fide members of the "Whatever Became of—?" Club.

Soon there is more applause for a run-down...