Show Business: The Once and Future Follies

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

—Peter De Vries

THE newest hot ticket on Broadway these days—$55 a pair from scalpers —is an admission to a haunted house. Elegiac strains of the '20s, '30s and '40s hover in the wings. Ectoplasmic chorines, all beads and feather boas, wander across the stage like Ziegfeld girls come back to life. Characters are at once 19 and 49. Time bounces off the walls, like sound and light brilliantly altered and distorted.

The show at the Winter Garden Theater* is called Follies, a title...