Follies – Grand Opera House, Belfast

Jacqueline Dankworth in Follies at the Grand Opera House, Belfast. Picture: Neil Harrison, Northern Ireland Opera

Follies at the Grand Opera House, Belfast is also performed on 16, 19 and 20 September 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

With the arrival of Follies at Belfast’s Grand Opera House, it looks as if Northern Ireland Opera (NI Opera) is making a bit of a habit of mounting stellar productions of Stephen Sondheim’s work. The company produced Into the Woods in 2022 and this time, delve into the thicket of the human psyche via James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking work.

It all begins of course with an ending. The theatre where Mr Weismann and his Follies entertained inter-war audiences is closing, to be turned into a parking lot. Stars of the era walk and talk their way onstage, descending a rickety staircase with nice symbolism. Genial Mr Weissman (Marty Maguire) says they’ll sing some songs “and lie about themselves”. The spectral young doubles of our not yet fading stars are wonderfully glossy, poised. Some enter via the auditorium.

Director Cameron Menzies’ production has a clear sense of now and then, the present (1971, when Follies was first staged) and the wartime past, in this non linear show with what he calls bubbles of memory.

The maybe over-lit first scenes show us the two generations in sharp focus. Later we have a magnificent rendering of the mirror number, ‘Who’s That Woman?’ with Pippa Winslow on song as Stella Deems plus the mature chorus line and their younger selves.

The married couples, two middle-aged ex showgirls and their husbands, at the centre of it all, initially accept a romanticised past but wake up to their broken world as if a blindfold has been ripped off. For Ben has never carried a torch for Sally and Phyllis has been playacting her way through marriage, and Buddy has a mistress.

The big name casting works well and Jacqui Dankworth as Carlotta Campion singing ‘I’m Still Here’ is the undoubted star of the show. Her smoky voice, panache and great delivery, with something of her mother Cleo Laine’s grace and pizzazz get a rousing roar from the stalls. So too Lesley Garrett giving her unmistakable vocal quality and chutzpah to Heidi Schiller’s ‘One More Kiss’.

Anna-Jane Casey as Sally may not have quite the tremulous angst of Bernadette Peters singing ‘Losing My Mind’ in the 2011 Kennedy Center production, but she has her own take on the character’s tragedy with quite a bit of anger.

The second act of Follies is a revelation and Menzies has shown genius in his styling of the section where the musical goes slightly, enjoyably bonkers. As the couples work out their relationships and what they really desire, he takes his cue from the vaudeville number performed by excellent Mark Dugdale as Buddy, who in striped suit sings ‘The-God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me-Blues’. There is a massively pink Loveland set designed by Niall McKeever for this section, male hoofers and a Toile de Jouy backdrop full of roses.

Ben, ably played and sung by Alasdair Harvey, breaks down in his number, falling into paroxysms of grief for the more meaningful life he could have led, before Phyllis (Annette McLaughlin) scoops him up. It’s fast, pacy, clever and the big neon light spelling Follies says it all.

You can see why critic Frank Rich described this show as being about the death of the musical though. The Follies-style old school genre, with lavish costumes and happy endings don’t work with the 20th century angst being lived by Sally and Buddy and Phyllis and Ben. The American dream has turned into something of a nightmare and the musical needs to evolve.

Musically, the orchestra of Northern Ireland Opera plays the different tempi and moods to perfection under musical director Greg Arrowsmith.

Yet as the stars exit to a diminishing future and the couples, reunited with their right partners, move on to a not necessarily happy ending, there is a kind of hope. After all, this revival marks 50 odd years since Follies first beguiled an audience and it’s still here.

Jane Hardy