An elderly man walks slowly down the aisle of a dark decayed theater. The beams of his flashlight bounce jaggedly from crumbling cornices, and the shadows they cast are of ghosts. Ghosts of glamorous stars, beautiful chorines, beguiling songs, glittering romance, the ghosts of this and all Broadway theaters. Even the man with the flashlight is a ghost: a once powerful impresario, long retired, but stepping up on stage for one last celebration of the past— an evening in which, as he puts it, we can glamorize the old days, stumble through a song or two, and lie about ourselves.

Thus begins the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Follies at the Belasco —the stylish prologue of the latest attempt to dodge the show’s indestructible paradox: song for song, it’s a glorious summation of Broadway’s illustrious past; yet, as a whole, it denies the possibility of any kind of future. For its original producer and director, Harold Prince, Follies started with an image, a famous photograph by Eliot Elisofon of Gloria Swanson standing in the ruins of the Roxy Theater. The Roxy opened in 1928 with The Loves of Sunya, and, when it was torn down in 1960, some sly flack thought it would be a neat idea to bring Swanson back. In 1971, that was what Prince wanted Folliesto be about: “rubble in the daylight.” The show is set in the Weismann Theatre, now scheduled for demolition but once the home of Dimitri Weismann’s spectacular Broadway