Three and a half stars, and I mean every one of them. “The Last Revue” at the Aldridge Theatre is the kind of show that trips over its own ambition for ninety minutes and then, in the second act, earns everything it promised. It is not a perfect evening. It is, some nights, a magnificent one.
The premise: it’s 1928, the talkies are killing vaudeville, and the performers of the Sutton House, a variety palace just blocks from the real palaces that ate it, refuse to close. Composer Adela Ferris has written a score that earns that premise. These aren’t pastiche songs dressed up to sound old. They are old, or they feel it, which is better; but they also do something that surprised me. When Nora Kildare, playing the house’s aging headliner Bess Connelly, stops mid-number in the second act and sings the same melody she opened with in Act One, you hear everything that’s been lost. The harmony doesn’t resolve the same way. The orchestra, under conductor Syl Marchetti, doesn’t even try to cover it. It’s the best kind of theatrical economy: one moment doing twelve things.
Kildare. Let’s talk about Nora Kildare. She has been in this city for twenty years doing work that gets admired and not quite seen, and this is the performance that changes that conversation. What she does with “The House They Built for Us” in Act Two, specifically the moment just before the final chorus when she stops moving entirely and just stands there, isn’t acting. It’s the kind of thing you can’t teach. The audience at the Aldridge went completely, physically still. No rustling. No coughing. That sound a room makes when it forgets to breathe.
So why only three and a half? Because the first act, mija, earns its problems. Director Clement Okafor, who did beautiful, specific work in the second act, has allowed Act One to sprawl in ways that cost the show its stakes. The central conflict, whether building owner Marcus Finch, played by a too-cheerful Garrett Solano, will sell to a real estate consortium, needs to feel like a death sentence. Instead it plays like a minor inconvenience, and the comedy Okafor layers over it reads as stalling. By the time we reach intermission, we’ve had three terrific numbers and one confused subplot about a romance that goes nowhere and matters less.
The physical production is something else entirely. Set designer Marta Villegas has built a theatre-within-a-theatre that is crumbling in real time; the gilded proscenium arch drops plaster chips through Act One, and by Act Two the flies are visibly bare. It is a smart design that tells the story without any of the characters having to. The lighting by Jonah Carew makes the Sutton House feel both warm and valedictory: gold wash in the remembered scenes, a colder and flatter light every time the present intrudes. I noticed it and I wasn’t supposed to. That’s how good lighting works.
Pero here’s what I want you to understand. Shows this interested in the death of an art form usually have nothing to say about the people inside it. “The Last Revue” has a great deal to say. The supporting ensemble, particularly Dionne Adeyemi as the contortionist-turned-soubrette who is the only one making clear-eyed peace with what’s coming, fills the stage with lives that feel lived. Even the underwritten romance lands better than it should, because the two performers in it are giving it things the script doesn’t.
You should go. Go because of Nora Kildare, who is giving the performance of her career on a stage that finally fits her, and go because Adela Ferris has written a score that will hold up. Bring patience for the first act. Find your way to the Aldridge and sit in the dark and let it work on you. Some shows earn their run. “The Last Revue” is making that case every night. Estamos aquí.
