Footlights and Fools

Manhattan explores how the life of a middle-aged television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.

From the moment she glimpses her idol at the stage door, Eve Harrington is determined to take the reins of power away from the great actress Margo Channing. Eve maneuvers her way into Margo's Broadway role, becomes a sensation and even causes turmoil in the lives of Margo's director boyfriend, her playwright and his wife. Only the cynical drama critic sees through Eve, admiring her audacity and perfect pattern of deceit.

After going down in the fifth round, boxer Bud Gordon bowed out of the limelight. Now residing in a fixer-upper apartment in New Jersey with his girlfriend, Bud longs for his former Manhattan glory. In an effort to get back in the game, he makes a deal with a crooked restaurateur. But quick schemes rarely bring easy pay-offs and as the consequences of his business negotiations unfold, Bud has to make a choice between his integrity and his aspirations.

Bertram Pincus, a cranky, people-hating Manhattan dentist, develops the unwelcome ability to see dead people. Really annoying dead people. Even worse, they all want something from him, particularly Frank Herlihy, a smooth-talking ghost, who pesters him into a romantic scheme involving his widow Gwen. They are soon entangled in a hilarious predicament between the now and the hereafter!

It's five years later and Tony Manero's Saturday Night Fever is still burning. Now he's strutting toward his biggest challenger yet - making it as a dancer on the Broadway stage.

A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider whom takes the youth under his wing.

Manhattanite Ashley is known to many as the luckiest woman around. After a chance encounter with a down-and-out young man, however, she realizes that she's swapped her fortune for his.

Jeffrey, a gay man living in New York City with an overwhelming fear of contracting AIDS, concludes that being celibate is the only option to protect himself. As fate would have it, shortly after his declaration of a sex-free existence, he meets the handsome Steve Howard, his dream man - except for his HIV-positive status. Facing this dilemma, Jeffrey turns to his best friend and an outrageous priest for guidance.

Joe Gideon is at the top of the heap, one of the most successful directors and choreographers in musical theater. But he can feel his world slowly collapsing around him - his obsession with work has almost destroyed his personal life, and only his bottles of pills keep him going.

Liza Minnelli in concert at the London Palladium.

Third in the Nunsense series of musicals.