A year after their production of Bernstein’s Candide, Victorian Opera has made another winning foray into the masterworks of American musical theatre with this finely wrought and brilliantly executed new staging of Follies at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda.

Based on a book by James Goldman, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical is loosely inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies, a dance revue that ran on Broadway from 1907 to 1931, and that was inspired in turn by the style of Parisian cabaret theatre made famous by the Folies Bergère.

As Sondheim later observed (in Craig Zadan’s book Sondheim & Co [1974]), Goldman was drawn to this style of theatrical entertainment because he considered it to be a kind of metaphor for the American state of mind between the two world wars. At that time, Goldman thought, the country could still believe it was ‘the good guy’ and, the Depression notwithstanding, ‘everything was idealistic and hopeful’. By the time Follies was first produced on Broadway in 1971 (the year in which its action is also set), he felt the country had become ‘a riot of national guilt, the [American] dream has collapsed, everything has turned to rubble’.