There are places that have a hold on us.

Churches, theaters, old ballrooms—spaces shaped by ritual and repetition—can feel as though they have absorbed something from everyone who has passed through them. 

Joy, longing, devotion, disappointment: these emotions linger in the walls and gather in the shadows. Such places seem to vibrate with human experience. We call them haunted, perhaps because the past feels unusually present there.

The theater in Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies is haunted in precisely this way. Once filled with music, beauty, ambition, and applause, it now awaits demolition. Former performers return for one last reunion, bringing with them the people they have become only to find the younger selves they never entirely left behind.

Each character confronts aging and regret differently. Some romanticize the past. Some mock it, deny it, or try to outrun it. Some cling to the belief that one different choice might have produced an entirely different life. Others have learned to carry disappointment with humor, dignity, or a hard-won tenderness. Their memories do not merely accompany them; they walk beside them, visible and insistent.

Sondheim’s extraordinary score gives these inner lives their fullest expression. The music is lush, witty, dissonant, romantic, and devastating, often all at once. It evokes the dazzling traditions of an earlier Broadway while quietly exposing the desires and compromises beneath their polished surfaces. Songs that initially appear to be entertainment become confessions. Melodies summon lost possibilities. Harmonies reveal fractures that conversation cannot conceal.

At the heart of Follies is a question without an easy answer: How do we live with the lives we chose, when we can still imagine the lives we did not? The follies of the title are theatrical spectacles, but they are also our illusions about love, youth, success, and ourselves. Some illusions sustain us. Others imprison us. Letting go of them may be painful, but it can also be an act of grace.

Tonight, this theater becomes a vessel for another theater and another gathering of ghosts. Perhaps every performance is such a gathering: artists and audiences bringing their memories into a shared room, making the air resonate for a few brief hours.