Now everyone can see the fabulous Follies via NT Live

THE musical Follies — starring Imelda Staunton (far right) and Janie Dee (right) as Broadway showgirls who meet up at a reunion — will be broadcast via NT Live into cinemas worldwide on November 16. The 1971 musical, by James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim, is in its second week of rehearsal, and director Dominic Cooke is working with Goldman’s original and some pages from the Eighties revision. Sondheim has ‘tweaked’ lyrics that had been changed in various productions over the years. ‘Just little tweaks, nothing wholesale,’ a source close to the composer in New York told me. I also heard that Cooke has been toying with the idea of running the show without an interval, replicating a point from Harold Prince’s original staging. However, a spokeswoman for the NT stressed that the idea is ‘all very much to be confirmed at this early stage’. Follies, which begins performances in the Olivier Theatre from August 22, includes Tracie Bennett, Zizi Strallen, Dawn Hope, Adam Rhys-Charles, Alex Young, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Peter Forbes, Fred Haig and Philip Quast.