Ms. Stritch, long known for her work with Mr. Sondheim, has replaced Angela Lansbury in that role, and, for her adoring fans, she's a treat to watch as she mugs her way through her first Broadway appearance since her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, eight years ago. She is joined by Bernadette Peters, another Sondheim vet, who steps in for Catherine Zeta-Jones as Madame Armfeldt's daughter, the legendary actress Desirée, around whom the show's love triangle revolves.

The point now is the two leads; otherwise, the production is essentially the same as it was in December, enjoyable and lovely and darkly lit. (Why that lighting on a Scandinavian summer night when the sun never sets remains unclear.)

Ms. Stritch's Madame Armfeldt is a deliciously bawdy old broad; she milks the character's one-liners and can get a laugh with a well-placed sidelong glance. But the audience's adoration is also a necessary crutch, because the 84-year-old Ms. Stritch isn't up to the demands of a leading musical role. She talk-sings, rather than sing-sings-which works well enough, as it did in her Sondheim tribute show at the Carlyle earlier this year, and as it did for Rex Harrison throughout his career-and she can't remember her lines.

In "Liaisons," Madame Armfeldt's big number, a nostalgic recollection of the great affairs of her youth, the lyrics suggest the difficulties of an old woman's memory-"Now where was I? Where was I? Oh, yes," she sings at one point-and at the press preview I saw, Ms. Stritch forgot the words. It was, in some ways, a poignant echo, a symbiotic meshing of character and performer, but it was also a tense, awkward moment that took the audience out of the show.

I do not, on the hand, adore Ms. Peters. Her odd little-girl manner often rubs me the wrong way. And Ms. Zeta-Jones, who, despite her dreadful "Send in the Clowns" at the Tony Awards, sang more than adequately when I saw her Night Music performance in December, is a better fit for the character: a knowing, world-weary, sex-symbol celebrity.

But, here, Ms. Peters-glamorous with her mess of red curls sitting atop her head-is a fantastic Desirée, funny with her suitors, tender with her daughter and singing beautifully. Her "Send in the Clowns" is thrilling.

Indeed, aside from Ms. Stritch's frailties, the entire evening is thrilling: two musical-theater legends, in a fine production of a canonical show. And those frailties might make it even more rewarding: Night Music now provides both the pleasure of a great evening of the theater and the relief of seeing Ms. Strich make it successfully to the end.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Riedel had been questioning the casting of Ms. Peters as the hard-charging Mama Rose. He was spoiling for a fight, and he soon got it. While industry wags were heaving blissfully about the new production of the Arthur Laurents–Stephen Sondheim–Jule Styne classic, the 36-year-old Post columnist was preparing to report that Mr. Laurents had "charged up the aisle" at the first preview and given the show's producers an earful about the production and its casting, later sending a " War and Peace" –sized sheaf of production notes to Mendes & Co.

"ANGRY CREATORS WONDER IF PETERS IS REALLY A … 'GYPSY' WOMAN," read the April 4 headline, a throwback to the old-fashioned waspish, heard-on-the-Rialto Broadway columns.

"Putting tender, vulnerable, lovely Bernadette Peters in the role gives new meaning to the phrase 'non-traditional casting,'" Mr. Riedel wrote. "Whether Mendes can pull ferocity out of a woman who is frequently compared to a kewpie doll remains to be seen."

Before long, Ms. Peters started missing shows, and Mr. Riedel's assessment that the revival was in full sprawl appeared prescient. Gypsy 's producers said that Ms. Peters had contracted a respiratory infection. (Neither Ms. Peters nor anyone associated with the present production would speak to The Observer .) But theater gossips-who had questioned whether Ms. Peters' gossamer cords would snap under the pressure of a role championed by heartier types like Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly-found a champion in Mr. Riedel who, on May 7, published a column with an image of Ms. Peters on the back of a milk carton bearing the legend: "Have You Seen Me?" and trashing the show for charging premium ticket prices for regular understudy performances.

Mr. Riedel is no Addison DeWitt, the acid-tongued stage gossip who made and broke stars in Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve . The theater is no longer so dramatic a place, though it's not for lack of trying. It is arguably a sign of Broadway's resurgence that after 14 years on the beat, Mr. Riedel's moment-in which he can at least simulate just such a figure-is near. Perhaps DeWittedly, the controversy over Mr. Riedel's Gypsy Love Song-the first real fun a reporter has had with a Broadway show in a long, long time-may have brought it closer.

"I like being able to go after someone's show. I like the battle, a little swordplay," Mr. Riedel said on a recent evening in the top-floor dining room of Angus McIndoe, a popular spot for theater heavies that also happens to be down the block from the Shubert.

A David Hyde Pierce look-alike in a gingham Polo shirt and chinos with a woven belt, Mr. Riedel was eating a burger with a side of steamed vegetables and drinking a Diet Coke. The actor and comedian Eddie Izzard was sitting by the window; the New Jersey Star-Ledger theater critic Michael Sommers was filling out his Tony Awards ballot at the bar; and the choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who worked on Gypsy , ate with two friends at a nearby table. It was almost like Sardi's in the old days. Mr. Riedel waved at Mr. Mitchell, and Mr. Mitchell waved back.

Mr. Riedel brought up Gypsy . Mr. Mitchell didn't deter Mr. Riedel; on the contrary, he seemed to look in Mr. Mitchell's direction and raise his voice.

"I went to the first preview of Gypsy ," he said. "Everyone was wondering: Could Bernadette pull it off? Once I saw it, I could tell that she was really going to struggle through the run of the show. I think the Mendes production is very pedestrian. It's a tired old boring production of Gypsy ."

Even critics who disagreed with Mr. Riedel couldn't help but address his reporting in their reviews.

"You can tear down the black crepe, boys!" raved The New York Times ' chief drama critic, Ben Brantley, in his own review of Gypsy , as if to acknowledge the dark mood that ushered the musical onto Broadway, inspired by Mr. Riedel. He called Ms. Peters' performance "the surprise coup of many a Broadway season."

"Ben Brantley wrote his review of Gypsy from on high, and it was obviously a slight at what I was writing," Mr. Riedel said recently. "'Don't listen to the vultures,' he said. That kind of exchange is fun. I was taking on a much-beloved figure in the theater world. I was not reporting on bad behavior; I was saying she was taking off performances. You're asking people to shell out $100! It's legitimate to report, and quite unfair to the paying customers. It was a tremendously exciting story."

In August, Mr. Riedel angered the producers of Movin' Out when he wrote that negative buzz surrounded the show's pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago; in January, he irritated Barry and Fran Weissler when he cracked Helen Keller jokes on behalf of their production of The Miracle Worker , which closed out of town; in March, he reported with glee that the box-office receipts for Baz Luhrmann's staging of La Bohème were quickly dropping.

Mr. Riedel was having a ball.

"Last year he trashed my show, Sweet Smell of Success ," the theater and film producer David Brown said from his midtown office. "He took us on mercilessly, and I came close to getting a contract out on him from some of the boys I used to know. He has a tendency to destroy. He is the enfant terrible of the New York press."

But in Ms. Peters, Mr. Riedel had found Broadway's soft spot, and he drove the sword in to the hilt. "Bernadette's a trooper. She's done a lot of shows for a lot of people," said Emanuel Azenberg, who produced Movin' Out and La Bohème and worked with Ms. Peters on the musical The Goodbye Girl for 188 performances in 1993. "Everyone who's worked with her really likes her. Whether she's the perfect Mama Rose is irrelevant; she's a nice lady."

And taking care of your own is an important thing for producers, who count on stars like Ms. Peters to headline, whether it's Annie Get Your Gun , which ran for over 1,000 performances, or Gypsy , which has an estimated $8.5 million budget and may need to sell more than $525,000 worth of tickets a week to break even.

Liz McCann, a longtime New York producer who serves as managing producer of the Tony Awards, often fires off angry letters to Mr. Riedel, which he happily excerpts in the Post . "Michael's column has the power to make mischief rather than create trouble," Ms. McCann said. "Who's that little imp in fairy tales? He's kind of like Rumpelstiltskin stirring the pot. That gets to some people."

John Barlow, a publicist who worked on Dance of the Vampires , which opened and closed this season, doesn't entirely agree. Mr. Riedel reported that people were calling Michael Crawford, the star of Vampires , a "fat rooster" behind his back, and that Mr. Crawford didn't want his co-star, René Auberjonois, to get laughs.

"Michael does have a significant amount of influence," Mr. Barlow said. "Next thing you know, there are stories in The Times , in Newsday , the Daily News , Variety , sometimes even Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood . Michael Riedel doesn't work for the producers or the publicists; he works for the reader. Sometimes we're glad of that, sometimes we're not-but at the end of the day, that's the reality."

That evening at Angus', Mr. Riedel finished off his hamburger and ordered a cup of tea. He realized he was late to meet Ms. Haskins, his Theater Talk co-host, to record a segment on the Tony Awards for Batchelor and Alexander , a late-night radio talk show on WABC.

He grabbed his green Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker and umbrella and went over to kiss Jerry Mitchell, whose show he had just finished loudly trashing, on the cheek.

"Do you hate me?" Mr. Riedel asked Mr. Mitchell.

"I hate no one," Mr. Mitchell said.

On the walk to 2 Penn Plaza for the radio appearance, Mr. Riedel called Ms. Haskins. "Calm down, I'm coming," he said.

When he arrived, Ms. Haskins, a graphic artist who teaches English at Pratt University, was waiting anxiously in the green room.

"The interesting thing will be if Michael lets me talk on air," Ms. Haskins said. "The running joke on the show is that Michael won't let me talk, but it's because he has so much to say and has such a dominant personality. He's been learning to allow me to talk a little more, though. Now we just have to work on him paying the slightest attention to what I say."

Ms. Haskins and Mr. Riedel met on a public-access talk show discussing theater in 1992; she was 41 and working at La Mama, and he was 23.

"Susan was the Mary Tyrone of public access. She was addicted to it like a morphine drip," Mr. Riedel said. They wanted to make a theater program in the vein of Meet the Press or The McLaughlin Group .

Theater Talk premiered on public access in early 1993, and when they were moved to a 2:30 a.m. time slot in 1996, they submitted the show to PBS, where it airs directly after Charlie Rose on Friday nights. The show has attracted as many as 200,000 viewers, but the number regularly hovers around 60,000.

On a recent show, Mr. Riedel said how much he liked Movin' Out ; Ms. Haskins said viewers should know that it's not quite a musical, but really modern dance.

"Michael said, 'You're drunk-you don't know what you're talking about,'" Ms. Haskins recalled. "He just sort of flattened me out." Then she said, "I don't want to be rude in front of the company, so I can't flatten him back.

"At other times, people have said I was an abuse victim. Nathan Lane said I should join a 12-step program. Arthur Laurents said we're George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "

Ms. Haskins and Mr. Riedel went into the studio, where host Paul Alexander introduced them to his co-host, John Batchelor, who was preparing his notes for the show.

Mr. Alexander said that Mr. Riedel wrote a "vicious column" in the New York Post .

"Even I say he's vicious," Ms. Haskins said.

"He's determined to close Bernadette Peters," Mr. Alexander added.

When the show began recording, Mr. Riedel almost immediately piped up about Ms. Peters.

"I think Bernadette Peters is terribly miscast, and I also don't think she's capable of singing this score," he said.

"You were awfully nasty to her in the press. The Broadway world loves Bernadette Peters," Ms. Haskins said.

"You hear about her with such reverence. There is a Bernadette Peters claque that takes offense to everything," Mr. Riedel said.

When the taping was done, Ms. Haskins had to get home to give a shot of insulin to her diabetic cat, but she had a quick drink with Mr. Riedel on his walk home to the West Village. Mr. Riedel ordered a glass of red wine that he promptly returned because it tasted like "mouthwash." Ms. Haskins sipped from a seltzer with Rose's lime juice.

"Susan looks at everything in the theater through rose-colored glasses," he said. "Everybody's a saint; everybody loves everybody. We're always bickering. It's all an act. You gotta have a gimmick, as they say in Gypsy . We're like Burns and Allen. Or Leopold and Loeb."

Like so many of the city's verbal sharp-shooters, Mr. Riedel grew up in a small town-in his case, Geneseo, N.Y., population 8,000. His mother was a school librarian, and his father was the athletic director at SUNY Geneseo.

His first love-politics-took hold early. In elementary school, he was named president of "Fourth Graders for Ford."

"I wanted to be a Senator, or a Supreme Court justice, because that's where all the power is," he said.

Mr. Riedel left Johns Hopkins University after his first year because of a broken heart.

"I was in love with her; she wasn't in love with me," he said, recounting his transfer to Columbia University, where he acted in plays and appeared regularly on a radio show devoted to musical theater. The summer after his sophomore year, Mr. Riedel interned in Liz McCann's office while she was producing the Broadway production of Dangerous Liaisons . "I interned for Liz McCann, and I still didn't know what a producer did. I got coffee and was sent to find out whether Alan Rickman's air-conditioning was working. If my parents had left me with a $10 million trust fund, I would have been a producer."

Ms. McCann says she has only a vague memory of Mr. Riedel working as an intern. "He didn't make much of an impression," she told The Observer . Through friends, Mr. Riedel found a slot at Theater Week magazine, where he took the job of managing editor for $18,000 a year. But the job had its perks: He got free tickets to go to the theater and could write whatever he wanted.

In Mr. Riedel's case, that turned into a regular column about Alex Witchel, who wrote the "On Stage, and Off" theater column for The Times , and Frank Rich, the paper's chief drama critic.

"Walter Winchell said, 'The way to become famous fast is to throw a brick at someone who is famous.' And I threw my brick at Alex Witchel and Frank Rich. People think I'm mean, but I'm never as mean as she was. I was creating what we'd now call buzz," Mr. Riedel said.

Mr. Rich and Ms. Witchel, who are now married, didn't return phone calls seeking comment.

"I suppose, looking back, I should have sucked up to her. Maybe I'd be writing for The Times if I had," Mr. Riedel said. "I look back and think what a prick I was, what a prig I was. I've mellowed out, as they say."

After a three-year stint at Theater Week , Mr. Riedel found his way to George Rush's gossip column at the Daily News , which led to covering the theater beat, which landed him at the Post , where he says he now spits "spitballs from the sidelines."

In the best circumstances, Mr. Riedel makes more friends than enemies with his column. He'll say something nasty about a show or person in print; they spar, and then they become friends for life, or at least until that person's next show is on the boards.

"I don't think there's anyone I couldn't have a laugh or a drink with," Mr. Riedel said. "Except Frank Rich and Alex Witchel."

David Brown wrote Mr. Riedel a nasty letter during the run of Sweet Smell of Success , and Mr. Riedel printed it in the Post verbatim, without comment.

"It was a great ad for me," Mr. Brown said. "After the letter ran, Michael called me and asked if we could have lunch, and he and I have been friends ever since. It's long been the practice on Broadway for enemies in print to become friends. After a decent review comes reconciliation. Should he find favor with my next production, I'll take him to dinner."

Mr. Brown wasn't the first: When Liz McCann told the Tony committee last season that they were not going to be inviting Mr. Riedel to the Tony awards because he had written a series of articles about how bad the theater season had been, Mr. Riedel heard about it and the next day invited Ms. McCann onto the show. Ms. McCann happily agreed, and Mr. Riedel did attend the Tonys.

"Susan was eager for Liz to destroy me on air," Mr. Riedel said. "She lives in hope that someone will squish me like a bug."

I must confess I didn't see the sainted Ethel Merman in the original 1959 production. I understand that more than eight million people have, this being approximately the entire population of New York. Everyone claims to have been there. But I've yet to meet anyone who actually was. The myth of the old sandblaster, as Merman was affectionately known, has magnified over time, as all iconic theater performances do. It's why the knowing sigh always comes with every new version of Mama Rose: "Ah, yes. But compared to Ethel …. "

Thank goodness Ms. Peters is her own uncompromised invention. Her first gesture is actually to shove some cute tiny tot who's covered in balloons into the background. Make way for Rose, the "pioneer woman without a frontier"! Except for, I'd suggest, the frontier of stardom or being noticed at any cost. Ms. Peters is best known for her more vulnerable, peachy roles ( Sunday in the Park with George ) and, until now, she seemed forever the adorable ingenue, even as a shaky Annie Oakley. In fact, her theater roots are very similar to the shabby, second-rate vaudevillian world of Gypsy . The transformation is no accident. She hurls herself into the killer role-stomping toward the footlights at one point as if about to charge at us with a verve that suggests she knows exactly where the neurotic ambition and vitality of Rose comes from. Ms. Peters, at the peak of her power in her mid-50's, has channeled everything she knows into giving the best reading of Rose I've seen. She leads the way of admired predecessors like Tyne Daly precisely because, in some mysterious alchemy, her monstrous stage mother compels both our amazement and pity.

Is there a more thrilling overture, a better welcome to any musical, than Gypsy 's? I once asked Michael Bennett, the creator of A Chorus Line , what was his happiest moment at the theater. His answer was unequivocal: hearing the overture to Gypsy . The first sweeping, romantic, urgent notes of Jule Styne's masterful score-the best he composed - promises the world, and delivers it, with lyrics by the young Stephen Sondheim.

Curtain up,

Light the lights,

You got nothing to hit but the heights!

You'll be swell,

You'll be great,

I can tell-

Just you wait!

That lucky star I talk about is due!

Honey, everything's coming up roses for me and for you!

Now there's an unbeatable case for real, live musicians in the orchestra pit. This is the way-we all surely think-this is the way it was, and should always be. And with it comes the inevitable nostalgia for a golden age that such shows always induce. The overture alone, perfectly orchestrated by Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler, receives an ovation.

It's clear from the start, as we meet that frightening tribute to obnoxious, nightmare stage children in the miniature shape of squeaky Baby June ("Let Me Entertain You"), that the show's British director, Sam Mendes, and his designer, Anthony Ward, have wisely decided not to mess with the original. Choreographer Jerry Mitchell has kept the essence of Jerome Robbins' original choreography (as well he might). The show isn't treated as a museum piece, though. It's been modernized, with minimalist sets speeding the action along. The mise en scène suggests both storybook vaudeville and seedy reality, an effortless illusion of stages within stages.

Only a British director, perhaps, would stage a burlesque tradition of clapped-out old grotesques with quite as much relish as Mr. Mendes does here with the show-stopping strippers' anthem, "You Gotta Get a Gimmick." As is well known, one adorable slag blows a bugle charmingly out her ass with the classic bump and a bump and a bump-bump-bump; the more refined one grinds to an airy ballet; and the one who doesn't move too good lights up with electric bulbs in strategic places. She's electrifying, Electra tells us, and she's not even trying.

We forget with all its drama how much fun Gypsy can be, and how charming, too-as easeful vaudeville always charms the socks off us (Rose and Herbie's romantic swoon together in "Small World"; the showbiz song-and-dance pleasures of "Together, Wherever We Go"). The winsome sugar high of "Little Lamb," when lonely little Louise sings to a little lamb, is the score's deliberate mistake. The baby lamb on the lap of Louise is live. It shouldn't be. It should be on a warm plate with some nice peas and potatoes.

Otherwise, the book by Arthur Laurents has taken one of America's favorite metaphors-showbiz-and made it adult. (Mr. Sondheim later took it further with Follies .) On the one hand, Gypsy is Mr. Laurent's valentine to showbiz; on the other, it's a backhanded tribute to what it takes. He has a weakness for overblown showdowns (no fatal thing with big, brassy musicals). The ambitious, Oedipal story is based on the true one of Gypsy Rose Lee and her primal struggle with her domineering mother.

"Do you know what you are to them?" Momma Rose curses her now-famous daughter in the dressing room. "A circus freak. This year's novelty act."

"Nobody laughs at me," comes the response from the queen of burlesque. "Because I laugh first! At me! Me -from Seattle; me-with no education; me with no talent-as you've kept reminding me my whole life …. "

The gawky, apple-cheeked adolescent who finds herself-who's noticed at last-by transforming into Gypsy Rose Lee is played by a lovely newcomer (new to me, anyway), Tammy Blanchard. I must also at least mention, among several winning performances, the smashing, cool dance solo of young David Burtka in "All I Need Is the Girl," and John Dosset's most affecting Herbie, lapdog suitor to Rose. The title role belongs to Gypsy, but the focus always shifts back to Momma Rose. The word "gypsy," of course, refers to all performers. The aging, quintessential stage mother who wanted to be a star is made redundant and destroyed. Yet "Rose's Turn," her ultimate meltdown mini-opera that closes the show, is often seen as a hymn to survival. Who are we cheering for, exactly?

Well, there's Ms. Peters. In Act I, she delivered "Some People"-"Some people sit on their butts / Got the dream-yeah, but not the guts"-with the bounce of swaggering resentment against mundane life, humdrum people. She tore into the big first-act closer, punching the air with her fists in "Everything's Coming Up Roses," which roused us all to the inescapable feeling that it better come up roses. But wait. Didn't Momma Rose's terrible ambition for her two stage daughters brutalize them? Haven't three or four husbands walked out on her? Why are we cheering?

This time, boys, I'm taking the bows

And everything's coming up Rose-

Everything's coming up roses

Everything's coming up roses

This time for me!

Her spirit is quite something. And lives unfulfilled, lives unlived, are always poignant. So we rise to this indomitable tummler , as we do to her bruising cry from the heart about lost chances and certain dreams that yearn in vain for recognition. "Rose's Turn" tops everything even in this great American musical, arguably the greatest of them all.

Diane Lane's progression from the screen's most appealing ingenue to one of the screen's most grounded and attractive women has been interesting to chart. It seems only days ago that she was skipping rope and climbing fences in such fare as A Little Romance and Cattle Annie and Little Britches . But after The Cotton Club and the television production of A Streetcar Named Desire , in which she was a smoldering Stella opposite Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange, it was clear that an adult career was about to hit the ground running. Now, in a small, satisfactory and sweetly touching no-frills movie called A Walk On the Moon , the jury finally reaches a verdict. The pigtails are history, and Ms. Lane has arrived to stay.

Any movie that features Wayne Newton singing "Strangers in the Night" offers a regurgitation factor that is inescapable, but A Walk on the Moon is true to the period. Things were pretty awful in 1969, and this little movie, honestly and affectingly written by Pamela Gray and sensitively directed by actor Tony Goldwyn, gets it right. It was the year of the Apollo Mission, the Vietnam protests, flower power and the sexual revolution, but for the Kantrowitz family, it was just another summer in the Catskills.

Ms. Lane plays Pearl Kantrowitz, a loving mother and responsible kosher housewife who feels life is passing her by. On her family's annual trek to a Jewish summer resort in the borscht belt, it becomes clear that Pearl needs a change. Too old for romance magazines and too young for the rocking chair, she's in that midlife vacuum where every alternative seems more glamorous than the boring life she's in. She feels trapped and I don't blame her. Days of mah-jongg and shopping for bargains at Moishe's butcher shop are not exactly what Gloria Steinem was preaching in Ms. magazine.

At Dr. Fogler's Bungalows, Pearl is stranded with her achingly adolescent daughter (Anna Paquin, who is doing some growing up of her own these days), her precocious young son, and their superstitious tarot-reading grandmother (Tovah Feldshuh) while her loyal but dull husband Marty (Liev Schrieber), a square who abandoned his own dreams years ago to become a TV repairman, spends much too much time back in New York. The only occasional bright spot in this deadly summer of repression is the weekly visit by the Blouse Man (Viggo Mortensen), an uninhibited hippie who sells hideous discount fashions from his gypsy van to idle yentas who are always in a frenzy for bargains.

On the weekend of the Apollo space mission, Marty is stuck in New York repairing TV sets so his customers can watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. With eyes wide open and nobody to talk to but the Blouse Man, Pearl nervously walks right into a sexually charged affair with this dangerous but seductive advocate of free love and experiences a liberating effect on her barren life she's never known. While Grandma frets and Ms. Paquin experiences her own trauma with the arrival of her first menstrual cycle, Pearl abandons her responsibilities and dives right into the Blouse Man's van. As Neil Armstrong exits the space capsule during one of Pearl's greatest orgasms, he's not the only one taking "a walk on the moon."

It's also the summer of Woodstock, and when Pearl and her 14-year-old daughter both end up in the swirling, body-painted, pot-smoking hedonism of it all, the truth comes out and changes everyone's lives. The one time she decides to make one small step into life to see what freedom feels like, this decent, goodhearted woman pays a terrible price. All the Blouse Man can offer is a vagabond existence, sleeping under the stars. With him, she sees stars. All Marty can offer is structure, security and ennui. With him, she sees slavery. The choices Pearl makes give this quiet, realistic and admirably underplayed film bravery, resonance and dignity.

Mr. Goldwyn, a fine actor himself, shows a lot of promise in his directorial debut, never overplaying his hand and studiously avoiding soap-opera clichés. The cast is first-rate and Ms. Lane is a true revelation–a ripe peach on the verge of bruising and ready to be picked. I can think of better actors to do the picking than the sour, humorless Mr. Mortensen. He never shaves, rarely speaks above a mumble and appears to have never met a bar of soap he likes. He also seems to be making a career of messing up beautiful women for sport (after whopping the living daylights out of Demi Moore in G.I. Jane , he was last encountered trying to murder Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder ). I'm not sure what the fuss is about, but as one well-bred, elegantly coiffed lass remarked as we exited A Walk on the Moon together, "It's not a guy thing; most women have a secret fantasy about rough trade." Oh. I still have my doubts.

But about this fresh and absorbing look at taking chances and finding adventure in unexpected places in life, there is no debate. It's a lovely antidote to war epics, Elizabethan costume pageants and smutty teenage sex comedies–a woman's picture with the potential for a wider appeal.

Broadway's Wild, Wild Mess

So much has been written about how awful the new Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun is that the thought of adding my two cents makes me yawn. Still, I must confess that I have rarely seen a musical that annoyed me so much and made me smile at the same time, with its idiotic political correctness, cheesy sets, ho-hum choreography, unnecessary plot changes and the baffling deletion of "I'm an Indian, Too"–a bona fide show-stopper–there's plenty to grouse about.

Starting the show with "There's No Business Like Show Business" is one of the most suicidally, self-destructive decisions imaginable. This production is a mess that must have Irving Berlin turning over in his grave. It is also a hit that proves, when the dust settles, audiences still love to leave the theater humming the songs they know. Even in a miscast, misguided and decidedly second-rate production such as this, I'll take Irving Berlin over Frank Wildhorn and Andrew Fucking Lloyd Webber any day.

P.C. (as in political correctness, not personal computers) will kill us all. By softening or removing the references to American Indians, Peter Stone probably thinks his revisionist book has improved Annie Get Your Gun . The man must be delusional. He's smart and a real pro, but his new book chops a chunk of fun out of any sane resemblance to life in a Wild West show. There's nothing remotely racist about "I'm an Indian, Too," a song in which Chief Sitting Bull adopts Annie Oakley as an honorary member of the Sioux Nation. It comes at a spot where the show badly needs a hit number (not to mention some snazzy staging). So how could it offend?

And to really insult the Indians, the audience and the show, Mr. Stone has reinserted a dull subplot about Dolly Tate's little sister Winnie and her marriage to Tommy the stagehand, making the roustabout a mincing chorus boy who is now half-Indian himself. Hey, guys, this may not be politically incorrect, but it is historically preposterous. In a real 19th-century Wild West show, in the days of Buffalo Bill Cody, if a blue-eyed blonde married an Indian there would not only have been an annulment, there would have also been a lynching. If you're going that far, then why leave out "I'm an Indian Too"? The show is about a woman whose only way to happiness is to pretend to be inferior to the man she loves, so the whole thing is politically incorrect, anyway.

There are so many things to grouse about here, but contrary to what some critics would lead you to believe, Bernadette Peters is not one of them. Sure, she's miscast. As a hillbilly sharpshooter raised on possum stew, she's more frosted cupcake than buttermilk biscuit. But Ethel Merman was miscast in the original 1946 production, too, unless you think the West means West Bronx. By the time I saw her in the 1966 revival at Lincoln Center, she was already 30 years too old for the part and should have played Annie Oakley's grandmother.

The only perfect Annie I've ever seen was–and probably always will be–Betty Hutton in the fabulous 1950 M-G-M musical version, which, for mysterious reasons nobody can explain to my satisfaction, has never been shown since its original release. Hutton combined the indefatigable ambition of a buckskin tomboy in love with show business with the dreamy makeover of a woman in love with a handsome rival sharpshooter to produce real fireworks. And she's the only Annie in the world who ever sang "Doin' What Comes Natcherly" and "You Caint Get a Man With a Gun" with the proper country inflections on mispronounced words.

But Bernadette Peters has her own kewpie-doll charm and she sings the living crap out of "Moonshine Lullaby" and "I Got Lost in His Arms." Alas, the arms she gets lost in belong to Tom Wopat, the first Frank Butler I've ever seen with no glamour, no stature and no charisma. We expect Howard Keel or John Raitt and this short, scruffy, hairy-faced and slightly lumpy performer gives us Yosemite Sam. The show-stopping duets "An Old-Fashioned Wedding" and "Anything You Can Do" have all the chemistry of a fairy princess singing with a toad.

But damned if Bernadette Peters and all those songs don't put a grin where it ought to be. They make you want to "go on with the show," even if it's the wrong one.

Skip, for the moment, that Graciela Daniele's production is as woeful as some cheap road company that we'd caught one miserable night in Idaho, or that its miscast star, Bernadette Peters, appears to be playing that mythic Mack truck of musical comedy, Annie Oakley, like a gurgling Dolly Parton. I'll come to the production and its one saving grace-the ease and stage charm of Tom Wopat's super performance as Frank Butler, the misogynistic sharpshooter whose defenses are down.

No, what disturbs me more than anything is the farcical belief that the original 1946 version of Annie Get Your Gun must be rewritten lest it offend anyone. Here we have a romantic musical comedy whose timeless central message is no more, or less, than "Have fun!" And, for a half-century, fun is exactly what it has achieved, in company with Irving Berlin's sunny, masterly score. There are at least a half-dozen irresistible Berlin standards in the show, including "There's No Business Like Show Business," "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun" and "I Got the Sun in the Morning."

Berlin wasn't a sophisticate like Cole Porter or a dark ironic wit in the manner of Lorenz Hart. His genius was that he unfailingly plugged into the heartbeat of purely American vernacular and sentiment, its confident, elegant zest and patriotism. In strict P.C. terms, his "God Bless America" is still O.K.; his "White Christmas" questionable.

But what's causing such offense in the original Annie Get Your Gun -a nice, dopey story about two rival sharpshooters who fall in love-that contemporary audiences must be protected from at all costs? Handsome cowboy meets cowgirl; they sing; they dance; they shoot; we go home happy. What is it about Irving Berlin's evergreen musical comedy that threatens the very social fabric of the nation?

It offends feminists and American Indians, apparently. In other P.C. words, Annie Get Your Gun is now considered racist and anti-women. By whom? Speaking on behalf of the American Indian and women, the veteran librettist Peter Stone ( Titanic ) has drastically reshaped and revised the musical, whose book was originally written by Herbert and Dorothy Fields. For example, "I'm an Indian Too," Berlin's flip homage to a show-biz Wild West, has been cut from the new version.

"Just like Battle Axe, Hatchet Face, Eagle Nose,/ Like those Indians, I'm an Indian too/ A Sioux," sings Annie Oakley in the original, having been made an honorary member of the Sioux nation. Now, forgive me, but I don't know a Sioux-do you? So I cannot speak for Native Americans. I would be sorry if Irving Berlin's lyric offended anyone, and would ask only if they could possibly see a way to live with it.

Nevertheless, Mr. Stone is quoted, with approval, in The New Yorker for wondering how Broadway purists would react if somebody on stage sang: "I'm a Hebrew too/ A Jew-ooo-ooo."

Fair enough. But that only proves that when it comes to the songwriting game, Peter Stone is no Irving Berlin.

Does he remember, I wonder, the Yiddisher Indian chief in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles ? A Jewish Native American! Now there's a happy compromise! Wasn't there a black sheriff, too? We trust that the politically correct Mr. Stone didn't run screaming from the movie theater.

But his imaginary lyric-"I'm a Hebrew too/ A Jew"-doesn't offend me, for one, least of all to the point of censorship. The only thing that offends me is bad writing. Of course, social values have changed in the 50 years since Annie Get Your Gun was created. Does this mean that our cultural heritage, warts and all, should be rewritten? Political correctness is the death of good theater. If theater can't be free and challenging, what can it be? Even an entertainment as lightly innocuous as Annie Get Your Gun has rights.

But the outcome of Mr. Stone's revisionism-or airbrushing-is a double whammy of dubious taste. In his craven need to please, he ends up patronizing both the American Indian and the audience. Now all the Indians are good and smart Indians. "How the hell did we ever get this country away from them?" observes one admiring white man in a coarse moment. For good measure, a lady called Dolly is introduced to the show as a racist. That's why-we assume-desperate Dolly can't get her man. She's a stereotypically prejudiced ugly old cow. But isn't this meant to be a pro-feminist musical? Isn't it meant to be fun?

Frank Butler, the sharpshooting stud, no longer sings "I'm a Bad, Bad Man." It's a song about loving women, you see. Today, it's a high crime for a guy to fancy so many women he wants them all. Still, Mr. Stone goes in for boob jokes (and old jokes). In fact, the script still remains antifeminist! Annie famously sings "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun." It's why, of course, she ultimately throws the sharpshooting competition against handsome Frank. She makes herself seem inferior to get her man. Oops!

The holier-than-thou political conscience of the show is a wee bit muddled. Its artistic mediocrity is another story. Mr. Stone has introduced a new concept: Annie Get Your Gun is now the hack concept musical of a play-within-a-play. The tired idea, which is never sustained in any case, would have us believe that we're watching Buffalo Bill's circus tent production of Annie Get Your Gun . If so, Buffalo Bill isn't my kind of producer.

But why this muddling "new" concept? Mr. Stone believes it's a distancing device that makes the show's innocence acceptable to a 90's audience. Spoken like a true cynic. The dispiriting presumption is that we are no longer capable of open hearts.

My goodness, I'd sooner shoot myself than accept such bleakness. Great artists have struggled for generations with this question of theater's innocence. "Theater is a long-promised, long hoped-for child," said Konstantin Stanislavsky in search of naturalness. Shortly before Bertolt Brecht died, he told Peter Brook: "Do you know what my theater of the future would be called? 'Theater of Naïveté.'" And Mr. Brook has with others, in all manner of sophisticated ways, held up a mirror to innocence-an imaginative sharing, a naïve trusting theater, born out of a child's necessity to play.

That is why the City Center Revivals of Great American Musicals in Concert are such a joy. They convey the great pleasure of the past-and, yes, the politically incorrect, silly past-and they leave us exiting the theater literally singing. Those productions trust the audience.

And that's why Tom Wopat's performance stands alone so pleasurably. He sings the songs -freshly minted, unaffected, unjaded, with utter belief, doing what comes naturally. He conveys what it's like to enjoy a great score.

Ms. Peters isn't doing that: She's struggling uphill, playing cute. Her hokey Southern accent is incomprehensible at times, an exaggerated cartoon. Her vulnerable fragility is inappropriate for Annie, whose tomboy toughness must be seen to melt. "I got lost," goes the memorable lyric. "But look what I found." Ms. Peters-the star-sings mostly alone, as if appearing in her own cabaret act with low-rent choreography borrowed from other shows.

Perhaps the role of Annie belongs forever to Ethel Merman, who triumphed in the original '46 production and the 1966 revival. I was listening to the old sandblaster, as she was affectionately called, on the cast recording of the '66 revival. To hear Merman sing "There's no business like show business" is to believe her. You'd better believe her!

She cuts to the chase and rockets into orbit. She sings, "They say that falling in love is wonderful," belting it out as " waaander-full !" Love makes the lady ecstatic, and her sense of wonder overflows in its fullness to touch all hearts. So it is; so it should be.

But not with this joyless production, I'm afraid.