the past selves of Stella and the Weissman girls, dancing a re-
flection of their every step. Another dimension is middle-aged
actresses like Dorothy Collins and Alexis Smith dancing those
steps too, having the nerve to put themselves into the area of
vulnerability, the stage, bringing off a song-and-dance number
when they could be home with the grandchildren. The result is
that the numbers performed by the ghosts and the actual per-
formers criss-cross the book characters, the Weissman girls,
with dimensions of flashback time and lyric time that encircle
the ordinariness of middle age with music.
Why is this called “The Mirror Number”? The lyric is
about Stella and the other Follies dancers “seeing themselves”
in their account of a sophisticated lady who is really the “sad-
dest gal in town.” But we are seeing another version of “them-
selves” in the mirroring of the ghostly tap dancers performing
behind, and in the performances of the real veterans playing
the roles. The “mirror” of the lyric is complicated by the “mir-
rors” of the ghostly dancers and the celebrity performers. The
question of “who’s that woman” admits of no single answer,
but the dancing is filled with elation. The question of identity
is raised throughout the show for the leading male characters
too, Ben and Buddy, who are also ghosted by their younger
selves and played by celebrities. “Who am I?” is the persistent
question of this musical.
Numbers as Resistance to Such Talk
Such a heartfelt, earnest question—the sort musicals refuse to
answer. The resistance that occurs between book and number
wants to rule out simple answers to questions of identity. Musi-
cals have been written on the premise that “I am what I am,”
but this is a reduction of the form itself, which is capable of rec-
ognizing that “I am what I am and then some” through the
double order of time. When Stella sings “Who’s that woman,
that woman is me,” her younger self is dancing too, not to men-
tion Mary McCarty, and there are the other old-girl/younger
self combinations in the number too. “Who are we?” gets closer