I never thought Anton Chekhov was even mildly amusing. To me, his writing epitomizes what the Gershwins wrote in the lyrics to “But Not For Me”: “With love to lead the way, I’ve found more skies of gray, than any Russian play ... could guarantee.” I just didn’t know about Christopher Durang.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, his new comedy at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center, is chock-full of Chekhov characters, who have relocated to Bucks County, disguised as contemporary neurotics, and all brought together at the endangered family estate—located, I assume, near the rustic getaway Moss Hart made famous in George Washington Slept Here. Replete with exposed wooden beams open to the sky, old-fashioned hooked rugs and wicker, it’s a gorgeous stone house that reeks of country chic. Uncle Vanya (a stoic, grumpy David Hyde Pierce, who looks like a disagreeable baby with colic) waddles out in his nightshirt to argue with his adopted sister Sonia (marvelous, cow-eyed Kristine Nielsen) about the quality of the coffee. Instead of the seagull, she wants to know if he’s spotted any sign of the blue heron. (No seagulls in Bucks Country, I guess.) They’ve lived together in sour disarray ever since their parents succumbed to Alzheimer’s and died. Now they are invaded by the arrival of their fabulously successful movie-star sister Masha—air kissing, superficial as Auntie Mame’s foot-long cigarette holder, reaching out but never quite touching, and one hilarious composite of nervous tics and pretentious materialism. “If everyone took antidepressants, Chekhov would have had nothing to write about,” declares Sonia while she agonizes over what’s left of the family cherry orchard. It’s been their cross to bear that their eccentric parents named them all after Chekhov characters.

Masha’s invasion pierces the redolent country air and ruptures the peace. Played with great panache by Sigourney Weaver, she makes a number of game attempts to justify having starred in five sexy nymphomaniac serial killer movies that earned her millions. (I don’t think Mr. Durang would take offense if you drew uneasy parallels to Ms. Weaver in the Alien moviefranchise.) Anyway, Masha, like the famous actress Arkadina in The Seagull, has brought along a new boyfriend half her age—the buff, brain-dead Mike (an uproarious Billy Magnussen) who struts around wearing as little as society will tolerate, to the delight of the repressed, decidedly gay Uncle Vanya, while lamenting the fact that he just lost the lead on HBO’s Entourage 2. After Masha drops the bomb that she’s putting the house up for sale to pay the mortgage, cherry orchard or no cherry orchard, everyone goes a little ballistic, moping, weeping, whining and wondering who will feed the blue heron. There’s a girl named Nina who is visiting rich landowners next door, an obnoxious African-American housekeeper who keeps sticking pins in a voodoo doll, causing endless yelps of pain, and a disastrous costume party in which everyone dresses like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—except Sonia, who dons a crown and goes as “the Evil Queen as played by Maggie Smith on her way to the Oscars.”

At this point, I advise you to give up trying to figure out how everyone fits into assorted productions of Chekhov and just sit back and allow Christopher Durang’s Harvard-honed wit and fine sense of camp to creep over you like a parlor game, directed with economy and finesse by the brilliant Nicholas Martin. It doesn’t matter how much you know about Chekhov. Just suffice it to say that everyone is full of angst and suicidal despair, especially Masha, with five failed marriages and nobody to love. “Well, I’m unhappy too,” wails Sonia, whose life is empty and who, like Agnes Gooch, has never really lived. Not to mention Vanya, who is frustrated and gay and in his dotage—“and you can’t be all three and smile!” They’re all depressed and an awful lot of fun, including the nipple-pinching, crotch-massaging Mike, who is sad that there isn’t enough of him to go around. “Why does he take his clothes off so much?” asks Vanya. “Because he can,” shoots back Sonia. Everyone has a monologue that is nothing short of hilarious. (You’ll find yourself using that word a lot.) David Hyde Pierce stops the show with a long, impassioned, exhausting, coma-inducing speech delivered nonstop, with few pauses to catch his breath, about the joys of the good old days—remembering Ozzie and Harriet, popcorn in the kitchen, dial phones and licking stamps, instead of Twitter, Facebook, emails and video games. The ovation following this outburst is well-deserved, leaving the audience in tears of both laughter and philosophical agreement.

In the end, the cast is bloody but unbowed. They talk about going to Moscow, but they scarcely have the strength to get to Trenton, N.J. You’ll be worn out too—but exhilarated. You’ve only spent a weekend with these people, but you might want to spend the rest of your life with Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

More fun awaits anyone with enough energy to get through the Roundabout production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood at Studio 54. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth, Rupert Holmes’s musical version of the author’s final, unfinished novel is back, as it might have looked if had been staged in London’s Music Hall Royale in 1895, and featuring alternate endings that the audience gets to choose between.

If you never saw the original 1985 Broadway production, featuring Betty Buckley as a man and a chorus that included the then-unknown Donna Murphy, you may be unfamiliar with all the gimmicks. The orphaned Edwin Drood, here played by England’s leading male impersonator, Stephanie J. Block (who scored a success as Liza Minnelli in The Boy From Oz), arrives at the home of his uncle John Jasper (Will Chase) in the dreary cathedral town of Cloisterham. Drood is betrothed to lovely Rosa Bud (Betsy Wolfe), a fellow orphan with the voice of a golden angel. The villainous uncle has his own designs on Rosa, and hatches a plot to dispose of his interfering nephew. A pillar of the community, Jasper is the cathedral choirmaster and organist, but he sometimes slips away to the worst slum in London to spend lost nights in an opium den run by the depraved Princess Puffer (Chita Rivera, of all people, with a curly red wig and legs for days that can still kick like a Rockette). Drood mysteriously disappears, foul play is suspected, and every member of the cast, surrounded by dark forces and aborted clues, becomes a murder suspect, singing and dancing the night away until the plot comes to a dead end at the point where Dickens put down his pen without providing a proper ending. Like a joyous game of Clue, the rest is up to you.

The key word here is “busy.” The songs are musical jabberwocky, the cast is vast and lively, spilling out into the audience and utilizing every square foot of the theater space, with everyone doubling as gravediggers, constables, vicars and damsels in various forms of distress and danger. Directed by Scott Ellis, it’s a glorious mess—and it’s supposed to be. There’s a moving train, a full moon, a lavish but toxic dinner party, and people singing under gas streetlamps as they try to solve, resolve and conclude the mystery Dickens started and abandoned midway. Mr. Holmes, who wrote the book, music and lyrics, is a fine songwriter whose ballad “The People That You Never Get to Love” has been adopted by some of the best cabaret singers and recording artists in the business. His score here is substandard, but maybe it’s just me. The songs might be better than they sound, but everyone sings them at such breakneck speed that a good 80 percent of the lyrics end up garbled, swallowed and totally undecipherable, like newspaper in a shredding machine. This is regrettable, because some big talents are on hand to please—especially the powerful Will Chase (wonderful in the recent Encores! production of Pipe Dream), jazzy Jessie Mueller (the best thing in the catastrophic revival of On a Clear Day), and the booming voice of Gregg Edelman. The songs they sing are hardly hummable, and, clocking in at two hours and 30 minutes, the show would be more fun if trimmed by at least half an hour, but never mind. Like a cross between a tent revival, a musical courtroom trial where the audience votes for the guilty verdict and a 19th-century Christmas fair, The Mystery of Edwin Drood has nothing on its mind but entertainment. God knows what Charles Dickens would think, but the audience at Studio 54 is having a spree.

rreed@observer.com

The book recently received some attention for its conceit ("Celebrity Chekhov?!" wrote Huffpost, linking to a story in the Daily News), which is to replace the characters in Chekhov stories with modern stars like Alec Baldwin, Billy Ray Cyrus and Nicole Kidman. An excerpt is available here. The Observer recently had a phone interview with the writer and New Yorker editor just before he headed to Los Angeles to promote the book.

The Observer: We were already familiar with your work on celebrity musicals, but why drag Chekhov into all this?
BG: Well I've never met the man. But it's been ten years now of doing what I guess people call serious fiction. I've done mainly short stories, and it has a lot to do with having a day job, that's the size work that makes the most sense to me, so I'm constantly reading and rereading his among others. And I felt like they were constantly getting kind of stuck in that 19th century world. So rather than dragging him into it, I actually see it as more of pulling things into his work. There were certain stories that, when I read them, they seemed to me like they were the stories of celebrities that I knew. There's A Lady's Story that I gave to Brittany Spears remembering this early sort of ideal love that she had with Justin Timberlake, before age and gravity set in. I've known that story for years and in my mind they were sort of similar.

And one of the things you keep the same in the stories, to great comedic effect, is the dialogue.
I rewrote some, but wherever possible I used the dialogue that he had. So there are cases where it's very stage-y and formal. I think the way he uses it is to show people's internal states in very quick snapshots. It's often what people don't say, they'll leave off in the middle of a sentence. And then a couple of paragraphs later this torrent of confession will pour out of them. It's a nice mix. You really get to see the insides of people, which I think is the job of fiction. Celebrities now are absolutely media-trained to never say anything wrong, to the degree that when they do it becomes a national story.

There's this thing in journalism where you find the celebrity angle of a story and then blow that out so people will read it. Is this book, to any extent, a commentary on that?
I think that will happen. The way I see it, there will be people who say that it's opportunistic, that it's piggybacking on these celebrities. There will certainly be people who will say it's a travesty because I've taken these stories that are so comfortable in their original context and disemboweled them. To me I think it's a little different. I think it's an experiment. I hesitate to call it serious fiction, because it sounds ridiculous, let's say I think of it as literary fiction, and then humor pieces that are about pop culture.

I think it's a big set of questions. Why are we drawn to celebrities? Why when you see the name "Lady Gaga," even if you don't care about her, it's sort of like Pavlovian training, your eye just goes to that? People say I'm making fun of celebrities, which might be true, but the question isn't why are celebrities doing what they do, because in a lot of cases it's very obvious. They like acting, they like money, they like attention, they're attractive people, they're talented. So it's not so hard to imagine why Justin Timberlake is acting and going on talk shows: because he's good at it. To me the more interesting question is why for the rest of us you can just put that little name in there, all you do is take out a Russian name that you didn't understand anyway and everything changes. What's interesting is the strength and the magnet of, say, Oprah's name. You put Oprah's name into something and that suddenly bends everything around it; it has this forcefield. It's not Oprah's fault.

You ghostwrote biographies for Gene Simmons and Simon Cowell. How did that play into your interest in celebrity?
On some level these stories are kind of serious. It's hard to say that because I don't want to come off as self-important. They're an attempt to kind of reauthorize these people, celebrities, as three-dimensional people, and that may come a little bit from the ghostwriting. Because you see so much of these people, when you're working with them, that doesn't even make it into their own memoirs. You get to see the days that they're in good humor and they're really funny and kind and the days when they're worried. You get a more complete picture of them. That's what literature's supposed to do for its characters. So it's partially an attempt to re-inflate these people who at times have become cartoon characters. In those two cases, Gene Simmons has a very different way of dealing with it than Simon Cowell. Simon made a career out of being himself, as far as we know, obviously there's some distance. He was not concealed. Gene made a career out of being in costume for the most part.

We heard that there's an extra chapter to this book if you buy it on the iPad?
One of the things we found as we closed off this book is, obliviously, celebrity can be either be fleeting or slightly less fleeting. Certain celebrities that were on everybody's lips nine months ago have sort of passed. So we're looking for extra stories because a lot of publishers now want some incentive to encourage people to purchase the ebook. In the case of nonfiction books sometimes they'll add content like an interview with the author or primary documents but for fiction it's hard to imagine what you add. You've edited a novel, it's perfect, what do you do? You don't put in this part you took out because that seems stupid.

For this book we received a perfectly wrapped and beribboned gift from heaven: Mel Gibson came back into our lives. The timing couldn't have been better and the man couldn't have been angrier. At that time there was this one story that I loved and it didn't make the cut because I couldn't think of a celebrity to put in there. It's a story about a man and his wife, they're coming from home from dinner around Easter time and they run into this poor thin man, this beggar on the street, and how they treat him and the tension between them becomes the center of the story. And when Mel blew up at Oksana it was like a giant stinking flower blooming right in my garden. It was perfect. It fit him, I would say, like a crazily clenched glove. It's almost as if I went back and time and paid Mel to scream at her that he would like to burn her house down after she orally serviced him. It's like he's working for me, that's my feeling.

And the weird thing is, I did a musical for him and there are some celebrities that I thought would never die. Mel I think is one of them. There's just something about the man, whether it's his need for attention or that weird mix of talent and, from everything you hear about him, true kindness and generosity and also an anger problem. The other one who didn't make it into the book because he's an icon in a different way was OJ [Simpson]. OJ surfaced in the musicals a million times, but he's OJ, you know? There's no story about a Russian gentleman who takes somebody who's returning his little nose-pinch-y glasses and chops off their head. I couldn't find one of those.

Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman, available in print or e-book format.