There is wit, charity, stoicism, and enormous theatrical know-how in Waiting in the Wings. No need to detail the plot: the solarium the ladies crave but that a chintzy governing board would deny them; the breach of privacy by an unscrupulous columnist who pseudonymously infiltrates the home but whose gossipy column finally does much more good than harm, even humanizing the woman who wrote it; the long-standing rift between two former divas, May Davenport and Lotta Bainbridge, which the latter's reasonableness finally bridges.

Hard hearts may object to the good old-fashioned way in which laughs and tears are apportioned with an almost mathematical cunning, although I expect Wings to outlive most of the fashionable flavors of this era. Given a good production -- and the present one is near-perfect -- it provides the kind of civilized and civilizing pleasure that a less commercially greedy Broadway of yesteryear so satisfyingly offered. Here is soul-sustaining entertainment for anyone who can perceive that, even in a retirement home, all the stage is a world, one we all act on and must eventually bow out of without a curtain call.