Sentencing is scheduled for January 16. False imprisonment carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, and while such a harsh sentence isn’t likely, the AP is reporting that the 46-year-old may get some jail time. Now would be the time to cry, George.

Meanwhile, Chuck may soon have a new half-brother—Lily van Der Woodsen ("Kelly Rutherford") is pregnant! [Us Weekly]

Ivana Trump is divorcing Rossano Rubicondi, her 36-year-old husband of seven months. Apparently, the couple has been broken up for a while, but Ms. Trump kept quiet because she didn't want to spoil his chances of winning I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! [R&M]

Kate Moss was overheard at a party explaining that the recently noted scratches on her face were not, as she had claimed, injuries sustained in a Christmas ornament accident, but the result of a "scuffle" with boyfriend Jamie Hince involving her "chunky ring." [P6]

At his false imprisonment trial, Boy George admitted that, while he "absolutely" handcuffed a male prostitute to his bed, he "certainly wasn't going to kill him." [NYDN]

In her newest Myspace update, Lindsay Lohan assures the world that she and Samantha Ronson are not breaking up. [Us Weekly]

Amy Winehouse is back in the hospital after a bad reaction to medication. [Us Weekly]

Ann Coulter broke her jaw and had to have it wired shut. Really. [Page Six] 

Boy George is standing trial for false imprisonment after a male escort accused him of handcuffing him to a wall and beating him with a metal chain. [People]

Last week his managers said that the singer was denied a visa to the States because he was awaiting trial in London on charges of falsely imprisoning a man. Boy George, whose real name is George O'Dowd, reportedly pleaded not guilty to accusations made by a 28-year-old man who claimed he was imprisoned in the singer's home.

In a statement sent out to press outlets, Mr. O'Dowd said:

Mr. O'Dowd's North American tour will be rescheduled for next winter.

Two years ago, the 80s pop singer pleaded guilty to falsely calling in a break-in at his downtown apartment. Police officers found 13 bags of cocaine.

The show will take place on August 17th as part of the DSNY Family Day in Brooklyn and will include his Culture Club hits.

"The people I worked alongside showed great kindness to me at a very difficult time, and I wanted to thank them all in a way that would show my appreciation," he said, according to AP.

Michael A. Bimonte, a first deputy commissioner with the department, is quoted as saying, "Keeping New York City safe and clean is a daunting challenge — as Boy George well knows — and we welcome his generous offer to entertain those who have made our city the cleanest it has been in more than 30 years."

An awkward, husky man with alabaster skin, made up in lipstick, a jet-black wig and a foppish Peter Pan cap, he peered into the darkness, listening to the bartender loudly chip away at the ice.

"I feel like we're in a coal mine," he whispered to the crowd. "And you're all … diamonds."

The audience laughed.

Pressing soft, slow chords out of the piano, his eyes squeezed shut and sweat glistened on his forehead as he began to sing rich blue notes in a warm, soaring vibrato: " Lo-lo-lo-lonely / Lo-lo-lo-lonely."

Nobody breathed. It was one of those spine-tingling moments in a small New York club when an audience senses that it's witnessing something rare, possibly legendary.

Towering well over six feet tall, Antony Hegarty, known as Antony, can be an arresting sight to the uninitiated: a bit like an outer-borough beat cop dressed up as an ethereal Cat Power, and singing like Nina Simone. He may not go over in the provinces-but he is just as surely the authentic voice of the city in popular music today, so much more than the "vintage" 70's sounds that are dominating the current scene.

Just ask Willem Dafoe, who wept when he heard him. Or Lou Reed, his mentor and supporter, who has called him an "heir to the sublime Jimmy Scott."

The artist and producer Hal Willner introduced Antony to Mr. Reed during an audition as a backup singer on the Poe-inspired album, The Raven.

"I was told that if Lou didn't like me, I would be escorted out of the studio," Antony recalled. "He would walk into the back room and I would be escorted out-Hal warned me."

But Mr. Reed liked him. A lot.

And word spread. In 2004, Antony was selected as the official musical performer for the Whitney's 2004 Biennial. He collaborated with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, a close friend of the late theater legend Leigh Bowery, the man on whom the musical Taboo was based. A concert at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn featured a dozen women-born and made-each taking turns twirling on a rotating platform under a spotlight, projected like waxen starlets on a big screen while Antony sang his new songs.

"It felt like a secret revue of the things that are most beautiful in New York," he said.

In the last few years, Mr. Reed hasn't had much to say about the much-lauded New York rock revivalism fueled by indie bands like the Strokes and Interpol-the ones who took old New York acts like Television and Blondie and made them sound, well, old again. And what could he say? From the start, the fashionistas and bedheads who piled into Pianos to see them were a decidedly suburban lot, not marginalized Factory eccentrics. In another age, they would have been Huey Lewis fans. Even red-state moms who voted against gay marriage could embrace scruffy li'l Julian Casablancas, if need be. It's hip to be square! How shocking was it that four-piece haircuts with guitars hailing from Cincinnati could so easily ape their chic? Not very. The imitators and follow-ups weren't bad little bands, mind you-just common as coal. Not diamonds.

And then there's Antony: too weird, too gay, too emotional, too … New York. And like the best New York, he was utterly unreproduceable.

On the evening of Saturday, Dec. 11, he emerged from his ivy-covered apartment building on West 15th Street in Chelsea, wearing a thick, pink cashmere sweater and a swooping burgundy muffler. The wig was gone; his hair was short and blond, eyes a crystalline blue, face open and cherubic. He walked through the West Village to a quiet Italian café, ordered a chai tea and removed his muffler.

Most of the neighbors in his S.R.O., he explained, were "artists and trannies."

"I have some gay neighbors next-door who get really annoyed when I sing too loud," he said. "In fact, when I sing at all. They used to pound a lot on the wall. Sometimes I'd find that a little ironic."

His whole life, he said, he had thought of New York City as an "island of lepers" where he would one day end up-a haven from the rest of the country. He was angry with gays who fought for marriage during the Presidential election and ended up playing into the hands of the conservative right. For him, gay was different, and therefore powerful. As a result, he said, "The gays haven't really embraced me as a masthead for their agenda, because I'm a little too weird and complicated."

Is Mr. Casablancas having these problems?

Antony's forthcoming album, i am a bird now (Secretly Canadian), due out in February, is filled with aching gospel, rhythm 'n' blues, rock and soul, expressing androgynous longing and transsexual soul-searching-a quest for sisterhood inside the body of a man. It's that ambiguous Velvet Underground–Andy Warhol–David Bowie gestalt that led Mr. Reed to take a walk on the wild side back in the 1970's-when there was a wild side in New York. With Antony, it feels like that lineage is restored, but freshly, viscerally, and in a way that resists identification with any city but the one that Warhol built.

The cover art on the new album features the first publication of a Peter Hujar photograph of legendary New York transsexual Candy Darling lying on her deathbed in 1974. Since Antony met Mr. Reed, the prickly, leather-clad hipster-who wrote "Candy Says" for Darling in 1969-has become his friend, mentor and collaborator, singing and producing on a stirring new single called "Fistful of Love."

"And I feel your fist," quavers Antony, his words punctuated by rising R-and-B horns, "And I know it's out of love!"

"He's become my greatest advocate and mentor in a way that I never could have imagined," said Antony. "There's isn't anything he hasn't been through. He's really sage in all that stuff. And he cares about me. He's a man of passion. And he devotes himself to the things he really cares about."

Antony tried out as an understudy in the original London production of the flop Broadway musical Taboo. He didn't get the role-but like so much of Antony's career so far, it hasn't hurt him. For one, Boy George has become another one of Antony's gushing fans. At Joe's Pub, Mr. George joined him onstage-wearing a giant, glittering fedora on his powdered head-and sang a new Antony number called "You Are My Sister." Mr. George's part went: "You are my sister / And I love you."

Like Mr. Reed and Mr. George, Antony adores the black soul tradition: Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday. But with Antony, the soulful melodies are paired with a 1980's British New Wave sensibility, which gives the songs their ghostly androgyne quality. He cites Elizabeth Fraser, the ethereal songbird of the Cocteau Twins, and Marc Almond of Soft Cell.

"He was the first person I heard say, 'I don't care if I hit the notes, it's only the feeling that matters,'" he said of Mr. Almond. "I remember reading that when I was 12 years old, and I was like, 'God, what does that mean?' And it was something I later heard Nina Simone say: 'Don't put nothin' in it 'less you feel it.'"

Creating his songs seems to come with some amount of suffering.

"I just have scribbles in books that slowly grow," he explained. "I find a scribble, take that scribble and make it a little more scribbling, start a song, plunk away, start crying, do this, do that, start crying, eat. Make phone calls."

But the songs weren't all tragedy-they're just all likely to induce tears.

"Maybe it started there, and then you shake it and shake it and transform it into a source of light," he said. "That's what I'm interested in with all songs."

When he was 11 years old, Antony said, Boy George determined his destiny-as much for his gender-dysphoric image as his singing.

"When I heard him, I thought, 'O.K., that's what we do when we grow up-we become singers,'" he said. "That was the first time I'd ever seen anyone like me. Before that, I'd wanted to be Kate Bush.

"It was what we do when we're wearing makeup and getting the shit kicked out of us," he said. "That's what we do-we sing."

In the late 1980's, while attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, he wrote absurdist musicals inspired by John Waters, featuring barnstorming love songs in the finale.

"I had just gotten into Ray Charles, and I had a recording of Ray Charles singing the ballad 'Yesterday,'" he said. "Which is just riveting. So I sort of co-opted that, but sang it as a transvestite nun singing to Jesus on the cross."

He found himself standing onstage, crying uncontrollably.

"It was the first time I fell upon this realization that there's all this emotion involved in singing for me," he said. "That cathartic potential for singing occurred to me."

His love affair with New York began when he saw the cult film Mondo New York, which explored the drag-queen universe of Manhattan, featuring legendary drag performers like the Cockettes and the New Wave Teutonic diva Klaus Nomi, and clubs like the Mineshaft and Escuelita. He was especially floored by transgender drag artist Joey Arias singing "Hard Day's Night" as Billie Holiday.

"That was the most punk thing I'd ever seen," he said. "And I thought, 'Wherever that is, I have to be.' It was so beautiful and so subversive and so hard-core and so … beautiful."

Later, he moved to Manhattan to attend New York University, and found the world he had come for was already slipping away. He caught Arias at the Palladium "singing some pervy song to Liza Minnelli for her birthday when I was 19 years old."

But he also discovered that AIDS had devastated everything.

"Half the people I came to New York to see," Antony said. "I'm at the wrong place at the wrong time, and all I can do is carry the weight of this story."

"My womb's an ocean full of grief and rage," he sings on "My Lady Story."

In the late 1990's, Antony formed the Black Lips Performance Cult, "20 of the tawdriest, punkest, most toothless degenerates" he could find, who regularly played the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. Saturday nights there tended to feature the kind of drag shows that rely heavily on lip-synching renditions of sitcom themes like Alice and The Brady Bunch. The jokes were about hustling for sex-change meds, but the performers turned up in sell-out movies like To Wong Foo before very long.

"No one was doing shows at Pyramid except for, like, the half-baked Minnesotans," Antony said. "I was like, 'Where's the punk drags?' It was like all this sort of middle-Americans-dressed-as-your-mom drag. Any old kind of cheesecake drag, and it's like: Who cares? I wanted something that resonated."

He eventually shed his theatrical ambitions altogether for singing.

"I'm waiting three years to get a grant from the Jerome Foundation, this mold burger?" he said. "Those sea cucumbers with wigs saying I don't have a right to exist? My idea isn't good enough? I just have to do music."

Also in the late 90's, he received a grant from NIFA, which allowed him to record his first album, Antony and the Johnsons. That was followed by an EP featuring the single "I Fell In Love with a Dead Boy," a baroque R-and-B elegy that earned him a cult following for its slow-burning, high-drama crescendo. At the time, Antony would float onstage with a canvas sack over his head and a billowing robe over his body and sing a devastating rendition of "Child of God (It's Hard to Believe)" by the 1970's soul singer Millie Jackson. At a 2002 performance at P.S. 122 in the East Village, Mr. Reed performed the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says" in public for the very first time-at Antony's request.

The song channels an era before AIDS, when the New York waterfront was like something out of Genet: an orgy of punks, prostitutes, trannies and johns.

"The end of the Jane Street pier," Antony specified. "I just laid on the end of that pier night after night after night, just looking at the sky and listening to the water.

"And now there's a play area for yuppies' children and newly developed condos," he added.

If Antony's world is beautiful, it may be because it's rare-and seemingly impossible to conjure up.

"That stuff only exists in a city by default. No one's ever going to legislate the existence of seedy, run-down areas," Antony said, before imagining a landmarks provision for the departed ancestors he worships. "Let's protect these urban wildflowers of tranny prostitutes and street youth and drug addicts! Let's try and protect these crack-addicted minorities in their natural habitat!"

But Antony still harbored that world in his blackest heart, manifested it in the blues of the marginalized. He recalled how, during the Republican National Convention, 79-year-old black jazz singer Jimmy Scott-the only singer Billie Holiday claimed to have liked-was persuaded by friends to do a four-night stand across the street from Madison Square Garden, in hopes of attracting huge crowds of visiting Republicans.

"Of course I went up there to see the show, and there was like 15 people in the audience," said Antony. "And there's Jimmy Scott, like, 'What's going on?' He's like eightysomething and can barely stand-and the voice of the purest angel."

But Antony saw light at the end of this tunnel.

"To try and find hope as an artist, I think, is the most radical thing you can do," he said. "I threw in my apocalypse towel-I don't have to do that anymore. The government is doing it for me. I don't need to foreshadow the apocalypse. Now it's about: Can we dream our way out of this?"

"I found out about it at 9:30 the night before the announcement," said Mr. Greenberg. "George called me from the car and said, 'There's an announcement going to be made.' I thought, 'All right, well, I guess I'm with C.A.A. now.'" Three months later, virtually all of Mr. Lane's clients had decamped from William Morris to C.A.A., including directors Sam Mendes ( Gypsy ), Robert Falls ( Long Day's Journey into Night ) and Michael Mayer ( Thoroughly Modern Millie ); writers Kenneth Lonergan ( This Is Our Youth ), Martin Sherman ( The Boy from Oz ), Suzan-Lori Parks ( Topdog/Underdog) and Eve Ensler ( The Vagina Monologues ); and actor and writer Eric Bogosian. In 2003, C.A.A.'s stable of directors represented by Mr. Lane and fellow agent Michael Cardonick helmed 13 of the 32 shows running on Broadway.

C.A.A.'s new home in New York is on the sixth floor of a prewar building on lower Fifth Avenue, across the street from Restoration Hardware and Club Monaco. Mr. Lane, who stands above six feet and favors dark, stoic pinstripe suits, used to have a regular table at Michael's; now he can choose to do business at Union Square Cafe, Craft and Gramercy Tavern.

"People on Broadway have been asking C.A.A. to be involved in New York for years. If you're thinking of opening a New York office, you would want to open an office for someone who has some sort of power," said Richard Kornberg, the head of a public-relations firm that represents Hairspray and Rent . "By bringing George Lane into this quotient, you get sort of edgy writers, you get directors who are important, and you get George's encyclopedic knowledge. And it was a very smart move for C.A.A. to do."

Mr. Lane, who declined to be interviewed, is said to be fanatically devoted to his clients and to have something of a temper, though the volume has been lowered recently.

"No one describes George as warm and fuzzy," said producer Hal Luftig. "George is a tough agent. He knows what his clients want, and he just gets out there and states it."

"When George got married and had a wife, I thought, 'My God, he has another life?'" said Mr. Kornberg.

Mr. Lane's friends and associates say he's mellowed.

"George and I at times had a confrontational relationship," Mr. Kornberg said. "George, basically, he can be fucking rude. And I can be someone who answers someone back as well. But he finds a way to get things done. I don't know many other agents who are that dogged."

"He doesn't even do the yelling anymore. That's the young George of 15 years ago," said Mr. Bogosian. "As passionate as he gets sometimes on the phone, I know it's all an act. It's very fun to sit in his office and watch him do it; often he's laughing while he's yelling at people."

"I have noticed continually over the past few years that every year, George gets more self-confident," said producer David Richenthal, whose version of Long Day's Journey into Night won the 2003 Tony for Best Revival. "And I think that was true again, having this adventure at C.A.A.; it is something he has more control over by running the whole office, compared to just running William Morris' theater department. George is C.A.A. New York."

The fact that C.A.A. is in New York at all is a bit of a surprise. "I think it's kind of an interesting development that C.A.A., who had absolutely no interest in the theater in the [Michael] Ovitz era-and, furthermore, was at least reputed to actively discourage their clients from theater … that they would do this means they must feel there's some money in it," said The New York Times' Frank Rich. "Now does this mean that the theater is in fantastic financial shape? Is this a great bonanza for Broadway? Not at all. What it does mean is we're going through one of those periods-and it's happened in the past-when movie studios take a great interest in Broadway, for whatever reason. And it's exemplified by Disney, but also Warner Brothers, Universal and Fox-they have all been involved in recent Broadway productions."

Recent examples would be Miramax's $45 million screen version of Bob Fosse's Chicago (six Oscars, including Best Picture; $170 million at the box office) and HBO's $60 million version of Tony Kushner's Angels in America . Mr. Kushner's latest stage production, Caroline, or Change , opens on May 4; the success of HBO's Angels has generated more-than-usual buzz for the show. This December, Warner Brothers will release a screen version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera , directed by Joel Schumacher.

All this doesn't necessarily mean we'll suddenly start seeing C.A.A. clients such as Julia Roberts, Tobey Maguire, Adrien Brody, Cameron Diaz and the Toms (Cruise and Hanks) gobbling burgers at Joe Allen's. (Though C.A.A. client Nicole Kidman famously undraped in David Hare's play The Blue Room in 1998.)

"I have a theory, which is: Really big stars come to Broadway for the most part to prove an artistic point, or to revive careers that need repositioning, or for some kind of character rehabilitation," said Mr. Rich, noting the recent appearances of Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh, Christian Slater in Side Man and Edward Norton in Burn This . "Theater pays more like HBO than starring in a Hollywood movie."

George Lane was born at St. Vincent's hospital in Manhattan in 1952 and grew up in an adopted family. He attended Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, N.Y., and, after graduation, worked on Governor Hugh Carey's 1976 campaign. He soon ended up in the William Morris mail room, the same place that Mr. Ovitz began in 1968. Mr. Lane rose through William Morris by bargaining hard and showing up everywhere his clients happened to be. "When George and I have done several shows that started at the Goodman Theater, I always find George at the first preview or the opening in Chicago. And then back in New York. He finds a way to be involved in the whole process," said Mr. Richenthal.

William Morris has alrready taken steps to counter C.A.A.'s New York expansion which includes the market research firm Youth Intelligence that C.A.A. acquired last year, its advertising division and its music-touring department. Now, William Morris has bulked up its theater department, installing Peter Franklin and Jack Tantleff to lead a group that represents Full Monty writer Terrence McNally, Hairspray book writer Mark O'Donnell and Avenue Q book writer Jeff Whitty, among others.

"The point is, William Morris has a stronger list now than when George was here," said Mr. Tantleff. "George has his own way of working, and it works for George, but it's not how Peter or I like to work. When we joined William Morris … we are both old enough to remember the days when the William Morris theater department had no equal. Nobody even came close. If you were in theater in any capacity-a playwright, a director-this is where you wanted to be. Our vision is to restore it to that, and you don't do that with a kind of take-no-prisoners modus operandi . William Morris didn't get that way by beating other people up."

"I see competition among the agencies as a good thing," John Breglio, a prominent entertainment lawyer, said. "The more players, the better; more and more Broadway producers are looking to Hollywood's talent and titles to bring to the theater, and it's helpful to have a C.A.A. presence in this community. For William Morris and I.C.M., more competition means competition will be rather fierce among a few agents. All the agents are now vying for the best clients."

"I'll tell you, there are four kinds of agents: nurturers, deal-makers, schmoozers and sharks," Mr. Franklin said. "The great agents can be all four things. But if all you can do is nurture, your clients will grow up and leave home. If all you can do is schmooze, you're going to be a hand-holder and you're not really going to be the agent. If all you can do is make a creative deal, you won't be able to hang onto your clients. And if all you are is a shark, eventually the buyers will kill you ."

And while the return of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick to The Producers has injected Broadway with a jolt of media attention (the show grosses more than $1.3 million per week), New York theater is still struggling to recoup from a post–Sept. 11 economy that has seen the number of international tourists attending Broadway drop from 12 percent to less than 5 percent, according to Jed Bernstein, the president of the League of American Theaters and Producers. Last fall, the comedy Bobbi Boland, starring Farrah Fawcett, closed during previews; Rosie O'Donnell's $10 million Boy George musical, Taboo, will close on Feb. 8 after critics savaged the show, which has played to 60 percent capacity. Overall, according to Mr. Bernstein, Broadway attendance was down 5 percent in 2003, though revenues were up slightly, reflecting higher average ticket prices. Mr. Bernstein said the presence of C.A.A. and Mr. Lane in New York may help revive the theater-especially if he can lure C.A.A.'s Hollywood talent east.

But Mr. Lane, for one, isn't talking. Which is the way he likes it.

"I was really taken aback, because I knew nothing about his decision to leave William Morris," said Carol Shorenstein Hays, the producer of Mr. Greenberg's Take Me Out and Mr. Kushner's Caroline, or Change . "It's so like him; he plays things very close to his chest, I find that incredibly shrewd, honorable and powerful. I mean, Richard Greenberg didn't know, Suzan-Lori Parks didn't know-and those were his clients . "

You will have heard of the mess and uproar involved in the making of Rosie O'Donnell's $10 million vanity production, Taboo . Now, whether a musical about the drag queens and freaks of the 1980's London club scene will make it on Broadway is almost beside the point. But this I can guarantee: More or less anyone-including you and me and your mother-could have told Ms. O'Donnell what's fatally wrong with her show before the curtain went up. Had she listened (which is doubtful), perhaps she could have fixed it and saved herself a bundle.

Risking life and limb, this is what you would have whispered to her by way of tactful advice: "I'm very sorry, but I don't know what story you're telling."

To which Ms. O'Donnell would have replied, "Get lost."

"You see, Rosie," you would surely have added patiently, for you've only the good of Broadway and Rosie at heart, "when you say, as you did so movingly on the courthouse steps, that ' Taboo emits light and yellow and God and love,' are you O.K.?"

And the lady would have sweetly replied, "Who the fuck are you?"

We're the public! The central confusion of Taboo for all to see is its serious identity problem. I thought the show was about Boy George, the androgynous, waif-like Culture Club star of 20 years ago who looked like a sweet geisha girl. But, among several, sketchier stories crowding in on the action, there's also the life story of the notorious fashion innovator and drag-queen performance artist Leigh Bowery, who's played by the now middle-aged Boy George.

Let's take stock.

The music and lyrics are by Boy George-the composer, of course, of 80's bubblegum songs like "Karma Chameleon" and "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?" He also co-conceived the show, which comes from a limited success in the West End to its revamped version at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway. It certainly starts out as the Boy George story: He first appears in a London telephone booth looking like Jesus in lipstick or-depending whether he's wearing the plumed helmet-Brittania. The appealing young British performer Euan Morton, who originated the role in London, is a Boy George look-alike singing wanly:

Someone make me a star 'cos I sure

as hell

Can't be a man.

Anyway, on the one hand, Taboo seems to be telling the story of Boy George's life. (Decadent rise to fame, fall from grace as a heroin addict, re-emergence from India as a vegetarian Buddhist.) But then it veers off suddenly into someone else's life story during the urinal scene. There, the "Lord of the Latrine," Leigh Bowery, appears on a toilet looking like a Kabuki grotesque dressed in a charming black crinoline frock with rhinestone-studded leggings. I must say, it's good to see the real Boy George back with us again. He may have been at the burgers and chips since the days of wine and roses, but he's still fun in his knowing way.

Not so sure about Leigh Bowery, though. As the male chorus members of Taboo take a leak in the urinals, Bowery bursts from the toilet to sing an upbeat "I'll Have You All":

I've had a man or two

In fact, I've had a few

In dark and dingy places

I've fallen to my knees.

It isn't as thrilling as it might seem. Bowery's demimonde of lust and lipstick seems to leave him strangely incomplete. In real life-as they say-Leigh Bowery was also the scary nude model for some of Lucian Freud's best paintings. Always the muse; never the star. Taboo makes out that the gay renegade, a fantastic art installation personified, craved stardom as much as Boy George. Perhaps he did. But for all the intended daring of the show's dated, scuzzy creatures of the night promising rude rebellion, the soft center of Taboo makes it about as shocking as American Idol .

Yet London in the 80's was the last time street fashion meant anything in terms of libertarian self-expression versus middle-aged, prissily disapproving orthodoxy. The dregs and the dispossessed became the artists! It was their inspired, homemade art-art to be worn and painted on yourself-that created a genuine avant-garde of the streets and clubs. But Taboo reduces the brief, shining moment to showbiz mush like a sentimental video for 14-year-olds. Here goes needy Boy George again, pining behind his geisha mask for the love of a good bloke:

Wanting love so desperately,

Oh so desperately

If you see all the hurt in my eyes

Will you laugh, will you run, will

you carry me … ?

Whose life is it, anyway-Boy George's or Leigh Bowery's?-is the unresolved, schizo dilemma of the show. The two of them never meet during the action, incidentally. There's enough confusion between the real Boy George and the pretend one as it is. But the foggy balance of the show turns in Bowery's favor when, following his death scene in the hospital, his own muse, Nicola, sings a rousing tribute entitled "Il Adore" accompanied by a photo montage of the real Leigh Bowery.

There are also the stories of street urchin Nicola and Big Sue, her rival for Bowery's blessing. There's Boy George's friend, the ill-tempered drag queen Marilyn, who wants to be a famous singer too, and Boy George's lover, Marcus, a confused photographer tempted out of the closet. There's our underworld host for the evening, Philip, the "pied piper of lost souls," played by a manic Raúl Esparza in a torn frock. Philip, the former queen of the London clubs, looks back nostalgically on the good old days and quotes Jean Cocteau, if you please: "Cultivate whatever people condemn you for, because that's what's truly original about you."

That's what Cocteau, also truly original, pense . Be that as it may, the book of Taboo is by the well-known intellectual and female impersonator Charles Busch, to whom the whole of life is a Joan Crawford movie. "Making threats, are we?" says brittle Big Sue. "Everybody else may be fooled by your fragile-princess routine, but I've always known you were a conniving little toad !"

"Well!" Nicola replies before exiting in a huff. "You haven't seen anything yet, you overstuffed rhino."

That's telling her! Mr. Busch ( Die Mommie Die , Vampire Lesbians of Sodom ), hasn't found his best drag-queen bitchery in his rewrite of the original, cozier book by Mark Davies. But at least he has a great moment during Leigh Bowery's death scene.

"I thought you'd be all wasted away," Big Sue says to the rotund Bowery, who's lying in a hospital bed with AIDS. "You haven't lost a single pound."

"Neither have you!" he snaps back from the jaws of death.

The spastic 80's choreography is by Mark Dendy with a reported eleventh-hour assist by Jeff Calhoun. Tim Goodchild's threadbare set adds little or nothing, I'm afraid. The superior costumes are by Mike Nicholls and Bobby Pearce. The director is Christopher Renshaw, best known, perhaps, for his revival of The King and I , and the sole producer is Rosie O'Donnell.

"I think it's a beautiful show," Ms. O'Donnell said proudly after opening night. "You want to know what I am about? Go see the show."