Milano is the Michael’s of D.C. But it’s still in D.C. The air buzzed with the chatter of heavily hair-sprayed women wearing pink blouses, dangly earrings and bright shades of lipstick who, ever so subtly, craned their necks around the room to catch glimpses of some of the visitors who had descended upon their sleepy town, which until Tuesday was ruled by a teetotaling president and his charming but demure wife, a couple with a reputation for 6 o’clock dinners and early beddie-byes.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The day before Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States, the lunch seating at Café Milano, the Italian restaurant in Georgetown, was booked solid.

Milano is the Michael’s of D.C. But it’s still in D.C. The air buzzed with the chatter of heavily hair-sprayed women wearing pink blouses, dangly earrings and bright shades of lipstick who, ever so subtly, craned their necks around the room to catch glimpses of some of the visitors who had descended upon their sleepy town, which until Tuesday was ruled by a teetotaling president and his charming but demure wife, a couple with a reputation for 6 o’clock dinners and early beddie-byes.

When was the last time, you could almost hear them thinking, that the comely young actress Olivia Wilde, who made her name French-kissing Mischa Barton on the late, lamented teen soap opera The O.C., was perched at a discreet round table in the corner? Or when Sharon Stone, in tight black leather pants and high-heeled booties (“She must work out a lot,” said a woman sitting at the bar), swanned in and double-kissed Milano’s suave owner Franco Nuschese before saying hello to still-blond Bo Derek (“Why is Bo Derek here? Isn’t she a Republican?”) and taking over Table 100, which had just been vacated by Senator Chuck Hagel and former World Bank president James Wolfensohn; or when Bill Murray had dined in the Washington Room, which has images of monuments painted on the ceiling, wearing what appeared to be pajama pants?

“There’s getting to be a real L.A. look around here from all the celebrities coming around,” said Milano’s publicist Janet Staihar. Saturday night the restaurant had been visited by Governor David Paterson, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews, Charlie Rose and Arianna Huffington, as well as Ms. Derek and Ms. Stone.

“D.C. seems a lot more accessible,” said Mr. Murray. We wondered whether a New York–type social scene would ever spring up in Washington. “You gotta get people committed to caring about the arts. But there’ll be an influx. There’ll be a lot more sizzle here than there’s been in a long time. It just seems like it might be a lot more fun.”

Mr. Nuschese, dressed in a well-fitted black pinstriped suit and orange tie, was clearly in his element; at various points he had his arm around Mr. Hagel, Ms. Stone and seemingly everyone else in the restaurant. “We can’t judge the next year by this week, but yes, obviously we’re getting a lot more interesting clientele,” he said in a heavy Italian accent. “But I think it’s probably going to be a very interesting year for us. During the Clinton years, we had a lot of celebrities here, too. I think we’re going to see a lot of international people around here and, of course, a lot of people from the entertainment industry, who will support and help whatever this administration needs to do.”

In the private dining room, the brunette Washington hostess Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, wife of the late Archibald Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy), was hosting a lunch. Ms. Roosevelt, who served as chief of protocol in the Reagan administration and is a registered Republican, was wearing a diamond-encrusted Obama 2008 pin on her lapel.

“Without meaning to be disparaging in any way, but I think money is a big factor in New York,” Ms. Roosevelt told The Observer. “Whereas here, your proximity to power is what the social scene is based on. I don’t know how the Obamas plan to entertain, but they look to me like they’re very outgoing—and utterly charming, I might add. I think they just like people.”

After eight years, the city’s grande dame hostesses—the ones still standing, anyway—are champing at the bit to start entertaining again. Really entertaining again. And based on this inauguration weekend, they think the Obamas will give them what they need to start the party.

“The Reagans was the last time this sort of thing existed,” Ms. Roosevelt, who was wearing an orange sweater and gray slacks, continued. “Mrs. Reagan was wonderful. As a first lady, she knew how to entertain and she did it beautifully. They liked doing it and they did a great many both official and unofficial events. Naturally, I was involved in a lot of those, and I had a chance to observe close up. But just to give you an idea, in the years that I was chief of protocol, they did 70—seven, zero!—state dinners. Whereas, in the entire last administration, in eight years, I believe there were six.”

Socially, it’s reminiscent of the Carter-Reagan transition to power; President Carter had banished liquor from the White House, banned the use of limousines and even sold the presidential yacht, The Sequoia, which had been used for entertaining. His staff was said to be insular and unschooled, if by choice, in the ways of Washington society. Reagan brought Hollywood glamour; Mr. Obama brings Camelot glamour.

Fred Cannon, a New Yorker who’s vice president for government relations at BMI, the music-licensing organization, was dining alone. “I think the energy here right now with Obama taking office has created an interesting integration between the Washington scene and the New York scene. They seem to be on the same wavelength for a change.”

He continued: “I think it was more insular under Bush. Now it’s a lot more open and a lot more transparent. And a lot more accepting of people from different genres.”

FRIDAY NIGHT, however, you could find most people from what might be called big Washington society at the Fairfax Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue for a party sponsored by the magazine Washington Life, which had dubbed its most recent issue “The Insider’s Guide to Obamaland: Special Collector’s Handbook.” On the guest list were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, who was leading the Obama transition team; and Warren Haynes, most famously of the Allman brothers but also a regular performer with the remaining members of the Grateful Dead. Purple lights projected slow-moving lava-lamp bubbles on the ceiling, and crystal chandeliers reflected without prejudice off the bald pates of Washington power brokers with their frosty-haired wives, and those of middle-aged rockers, who wore what hair they had left in dreadlocks.

“The spirit of openness has really not been seen in this town for a very long time,” Mr. Podesta told The Observer. “Not just through the Web sites but through real dialogue, through listening to people and respecting each other and breaking down that sense of war. The town will definitely be a cooler place to live.”

Mr. Podesta’s sister-in-law, Heather Podesta, stepped over.

“It’s been really interesting to work downtown because all of a sudden we have a president,” she said. “What’s been amazing in the last few weeks is to realize that Bush never left the White House. And all of a sudden we have traffic jams.”

“When was the last time Bush went to Ben’s Chili Bowl,” Mr. Podesta asked. That’s the Washington institution favored by Bill Cosby, which has declared the Obama family nonpaying customers.

“Or Equinox,” his sister piped in. She was not referring to the gym chain but the restaurant near the White House on Connecticut Avenue.

Bruce Kieloch, a 43-year-old Democratic consultant, was wearing a purple tie and sunglasses like a headband to keep back his dreadlocks.

“It’s going to be a much sexier city,” he said as he stood in the front row listening to Mr. Haynes play. “You know what Carville said about it being Hollywood for ugly people, and Chicago is like a nice New York with no fashion sense? Well, D.C. is about to get a lot sexier.”

ON SATURDAY EVENING, in a mostly undecorated house in rapidly gentrifying Columbia Heights, some of the city’s young, left-leaning blogger elite were celebrating. Matthew Yglesias, the 27-year-old Think Progress blogger, reclined on a shapeless couch, drinking a can of Miller Lite. On the wall, under a clock that looked to have been lifted from a diner, was a poster of Obama and the words “Yes We Can.” By the stairs, a knot of bloggers discussed a party thrown by The New Republic earlier that evening, featuring a performance by the cellist Yo Yo Ma.

“He was sponsored by pharma,” said one blogger.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What?” said another.

“We should’ve gotten Canadian pharma sponsorship like Yo Yo Ma!” said the first, adding, “He played my cousin’s bar mitzvah.”

The following night, a man named Adam Waldman, who helps wealthy people manage their philanthropic interests and is on the board of the Center for Global Development, hosted a cocktail hour at his mansion in Spring Valley, a lush neighborhood in northwest Washington that was home to Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush before they became president. Cher, one of Mr. Waldman’s clients, arrived in a black sequined shirt beneath a leopard-print overcoat.

Another client, the singer Wyclef Jean, wore a handsome pale green vest and a black skull cap. Mr. Jean runs a charity, the Yéle Haiti Foundation, which tries to raise the self-esteem of children in Haiti, where Mr. Jean lived until the age of 9. He was saying something about deforestation when Anthony Shriver, Maria’s brother and the son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, walked in and caught his eye.

“What’s up, baby!” said Mr. Jean.

“You, baby!” said Mr. Shriver, who was wearing a leather jacket..

“Lemme just say what’s up to my man,” Mr. Jean said, by way of excusing himself. “He’s one of the Kennedys, you know?”

Monday night, the Creative Coalition dinner at Teatro Goldoni restaurant on K Street was    with people like Tim Daly, Marisa Tomei, Spike Lee, Matthew Modine, Alfre Woodard and Kerry Washington. “I think the Obamas have made it clear that they want the White House to be open to the people,” said the actress Ellen Burstyn, who had glammed up her simple black dress with an elaborate beaded necklace. “I think they’re going to be inviting lots of people. And they say they want to have art events, they want to have lunches, they want to have music. I think [New Yorkers] will certainly want to come here more. I haven’t wanted to come to Washington, and I love this city! I’m very happy that it’s our house again.”

Susan Sarandon, clad in a black dress and knee-high Ugg boots, was hiding out on a red velvet chair in the back of the room talking to the actress Lynn Whitfield about Obama’s daughters. “I think people feel they have a right to be here now, which is what I find to be so moving,” she told The Observer. “It’s like the people have come to reclaim the capital.”

dshafrir@observer.com

Reporting from Washington: Irina Aleksander, Jason Horowitz, Leon Neyfakh.

This column began out of a longing for hawking parties and men on thundering horses, a brutish-invading-tribe sort of thing with big stone columns—English, maybe Hogwarts, or then again French. A trip to St. John the Divine would have been enough. But the subsequent journey, not unlike that of Victoria Winters in Dark Shadows (“My name is Victoria Winters. My journey is beginning … ”) took a detour and became a fall into the rabbit hole of American Gothic, a turning, twisting, woody world of sofas, tables and chairs from 1830 to1860.

The hard-core collectors of American Gothic are a closed and inbred society. David Scott Parker, an architect, estimated that there are perhaps 10, including him: three men named David (one is a scholar); Cher (at least before she sold a lot of her pieces at Sotheby’s last year); Richard Iversen, an ornamental horticultural professor with a Gothic country house in his Queens basement; Timothy Husband, the curator of medieval art at the Cloisters; artist Hunt Slonem; and a sprinkling of others, though more may be hidden under pointed arches across the country. “Hard-core” means owning 100 or more pieces each. These collectors cannot get enough of the furniture’s crockets, finials, steeples, dripping arches, milk thistle leaves—some lunatic, all transcendent, and a favorite among America’s intellectual aristocracy back then (Thomas Jefferson among them), given the style’s subliminal English longings. American Gothic was particularly fashionable for libraries, for it was good to have the remotely medieval appropriate chair for reading the Bride of Lammermoor. Mr. Parker’s collection, distributed throughout his 1848 Gramercy Park townhouse and his Carpenter Gothic house in Southport, Conn., includes a chair that used to belong to Cher, upholstered with leopard-printed calfskin, which is six feet tall and looks like it is trying very hard to get to heaven.

American Gothic collectors get a twitch in their cheek if their collections are confused with 20th-century American Gothic Revival, or English Gothic Revival, French Gothic Revival, Muscular Gothic Revival, Modern Gothic Revival, or pretty much any other kind of Gothic revival. Much of Modern Gothic Revival was mass-produced, they say, nostrils flared. And English Gothic Revival is so common. It was the American cabinet-makers who came over from Europe in the 1800’s—New York City was the center of furniture-making—and, throwing off the rules of their teachers, went off on their own, creating sometimes wild and innovative work.

American Gothic chairs are charming (one of them is 10 feet tall). They win one over with their self-importance, almost like hammy actors sitting up straight and inviting one to sit on their laps. For the unknowing, sitting in an American Gothic chair could mean two bites on the neck after a somnambulant sleep. There’s a bit of frontier vampire and Hawthorne noir about this furniture. Many of the chairs are painful to sit in, with all the carvings on the back. In a Charles Addams cartoon, vaguely remembered, Gomez says to Morticia, who is sitting in one: “Morticia, are you uncomfortable?” She says, “Marvelously so.”

After spending enough time with American Gothic—a week—it came to mind that modern life and its minimalism is actually a denial of life, with its smooth surfaces and synthetic veneers (natural materials bring with them the continuing realization that life has a beginning and an end). Looking at American Gothic, one cannot help but think of beginnings and endings, of embracing the inevitable, of heaven (if one believes in it) and where one might be going, or not. Its collectors insist that the work isn’t ecclesiastical and get upset if the pieces are perceived as memento mori in any way. But “Gothic revival was very popular during the Civil War,” said collector and textile designer Douglas Hartman, who, with his partner Michael Villani, a businessman in real estate and diamonds, has a townhouse with 170 American Gothic chairs and photographs of people from the Civil War era. “I think there was so much death and destruction that the Gothic revival helped bring a spiritual calm, helped people reflect, to come to terms with death.” Some of the furniture pieces do look like churches in miniature, especially the chair with the rose window in its back.

Lee B. Anderson, 89, the éminence grise of the circle, used to bring his boys together for long evenings in his spidery, six-story, 13-room James Renwick Jr. townhouse, circa 1855 (he prefers not to disclose the neighborhood), with the skinny, winding stairway that leads from one inky, yellowing room full of paintings and marble statues up to the next. The group would talk about quatrefoils and sandwich-glass sugar bowls and drip stones—though now, it is said, hardly anybody talks to anybody else.

“That’s true,” said David Marshall, everybody’s dealer, who operates out of his command post at his Antique Room on Atlantic Avenue, the sun barely coming in and falling briefly on the dark wood of a highly vertical sofa set and some dolls in a cabinet. Mr. Marshall said that an American Gothic chair today could cost $2,000 to $8,000. (The highest price ever offered was $225,000, at Hirschl & Adler Galleries’ 2006 American Gothic show.) Mr. Hartman and Mr. Villani got their first two chairs 10 years ago for $550. Mr. Slonem remembers that rainy day on Bleecker in the 1970’s when he got his—for $50. Now he has at least 150, he said, distributed among his painting studio in the Village, his house upstate and his two plantations in Louisiana.

Their set could get contentious. In better times, the parties at Mr. Anderson’s “always ended up down in the basement, in the little room full of chairs, looking at stretchers and undersides and [asking,] ‘Was it really American?’” said collector Timothy Husband, 61, curator of medieval art at the Cloisters. His entire dining room is American Gothic, though he said that he goes into other areas, including “Muscular Gothic—Lee would be horrified.”

Mr. Anderson, 89, a retired art-education teacher, is almost completely blind now and, of course, furious about it. “All my friends have died. It happened to me; it will happen to you,” he said, sitting in his lower level crowded with paintings and marble statues and glass globe lamps.

During the Second World War, while stationed in London, Mr. Anderson fell in love with Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s 18th-century ultimate Gothic villa. After he came back to the States, Mr. Anderson worked as an art teacher and began collecting 19th-century Hudson River School landscape paintings. “I sold 12 for a million and a quarter, and I became a playboy,” Mr. Anderson said. “I was very naughty—Paris, London, three, four times a year …. ”

What about Cher’s collection? Did he know Cher?

“She came here.” He was wearing a leopard printed belt. “The first time, she stayed five hours. I found a lot for her for her house in Miami. She had better taste than the curators at the Met. But she went more off into English Gothic.”

While that idea fits nicely with Mr. Sullivan's theories on the continued blurring of straight and gay culture and identity, it doesn't quite deliver, as Out's new editor, Aaron Hicklin, is actually not a heterosexual.

Mr. Hicklin and Mr. Sullivan have never met, although Mr. Sullivan did once write approvingly of a review by Mr. Hicklin in Gear magazine of a Moby album.

"He's going to be very disappointed when he sees my first issue devoted to Judy Garland," Mr. Hicklin said from the Black Book offices. "And the Cher issue!"

Mr. Hicklin is staying at Black Book long enough to close the June/July issue; he will then immediately transfer to Out, without a break.

—Choire Sicha

- Riva Froymovich

Madonna's reaction was a bit more meditative when she came to look at this co-op apartment (in a townhouse!), which has just opened up again at 828 Fifth Avenue, for $9,975,000.

"The story is that when Madonna was considering buying the apartment, she lay down on the floor of the former ballroom," wrote architectural historian John Tauranac, about six years back in the New York Times. "For 15 minutes or so, she simply gazed upon the ceiling."

"The style is unabashedly Louis XV and about as close to Versailles as residential New York has to offer," he wrote.

But Madonna opted instead for a personal renovation, trading her nasal Michigan accent for an International Accent and moving to England.

The mansion--built in 1896 for coal magnate Edward J. Berwind--has housed several celebrity tenants, including fashion designer Adolfo, television producer Norman Lear, and Cher.

The parlour floor apartment is listed with luxury specialist Paula Del Nunzio at Brown Harris Stevens.

- Michael Calderone

A quintet of wonderful actresses, a richly evocative story set among the frescoes and Renaissance sculptures of Florence on the brink of World War II, and a chapter from the autobiographical memoirs of distinguished filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli, add up to an uncommonly rapturous cinematic experience in Tea With Mussolini . If it doesn't exactly achieve the epic grandeur or universal, historic significance of a David Lean spectacular, it is still a film to cherish.

Supposedly a true story, the screenplay by acclaimed British novelist John Mortimer and director Mr. Zeffirelli tells with sensitivity and affection of Luca, the illegitimate son of a seamstress and a married businessman. Luca's mother dies, leaving the money she has earned in the safe hands of a zany American client and ex-Ziegfeld showgirl (played with panache by Cher) who dallies in free love and modern art by Picasso and Léger, making her an object of vulgar ridicule by the arrogant, snobbish British expatriates who live with reverence among the Florentine ruins of another era.

Luca is disowned by his father and abandoned to the care of these eccentric British ladies, called the " scorpioni " for their biting wit. Joan Plowright is a spinster who teaches him Shakespeare, Judi Dench is a failed artist on a mission from God to protect Italian artifacts for future generations against all threats of war, and Maggie Smith is an aristocratic widow of a former diplomat who naïvely believes she enjoys the personal protection of the Italian dictator because of her most treasured possession–a photograph of her enjoying tea with Il Duce himself. Colorful and strong-willed, these surrogate mothers take it upon themselves to raise and fashion the orphaned Luca into a perfect British gentleman. Add to this bizarre group of guidance counselors a butch lesbian American archeologist named Georgie (Lily Tomlin, in one of her saltiest wise-cracking roles), and the stage is set for a most unconventional adolescence.

In 1935, Luca is sent to Austria to study German by his fascist father, who pretends to care about the boy at a safe distance while his wife calls Luca " bastardo! " on public streets. The situation grows dangerous at home, although the ladies remain undaunted in their adopted Italy, still blind to the reality of Nazi storm clouds over the green hills and fertile valleys of Tuscany. Il Duce falsely reassures members of the British colony that they have political immunity, but by the time Luca returns in 1940, England is in the war and his beloved " scorpioni " are arrested as "enemy aliens." When the dictatorship cracks down on the Jews, things turn equally black for the hedonistic showgirl (Cher), who loses her villa, her money and her priceless art collection to her Nazi lover, and both she and the hard-boiled Georgie join the others in detention, facing possible death. Now it is up to Luca (played by handsome teenage newcomer Baird Wallace), who risks his life and spends the inheritance reserved for his future education to rescue the beloved women who raised him.

If we are to believe Mr. Zeffirelli's childhood memories, some of the most renowned and revered Renaissance cathedral frescoes in Florence were saved during the Nazi invasion by a group of oddball women in tattered lilac chiffon who chained themselves to the towers of a church to defy the German bazookas. Farfetched as it seems, it makes for one of the most moving scenes in recent film memory. By the time the town square is liberated by Scottish bagpipes and a regiment wearing kilts, tears are guaranteed.

Richly textured and filled with the kind of awesome scenery that takes the breath away, Tea With Mussolini is a fascinating story that consistently seizes and holds the audience captive, and you may never see so many great actresses sharing the screen again. Judi Dench may be giving the performance of a lifetime on Broadway in Amy's View , but on film the delicate glow behind her eyes lives up to everything you have read or heard about her artistry. Ms. Plowright as the goldenhearted voice of reason and logic among the frightened women is simply marvelous. Ms. Smith as the imperious, selfish and implacable

dragon cuts an imposing figure. Ms. Tomlin and Cher are undeniably contemporary even in period costumes, looking more like they're ready for tea with Elton John than with Benito Mussolini, but they are no less formidable in their sincerity and commitment than the others, adding atmosphere, wit and a sense of drama to the trajectory of diversity and danger. Mr. Zeffirelli directs them all miraculously, to give a sense of change and flamboyance among the timeless ruins.

Let the critical vultures pick apart this film like carrion if that is their desire. For me, its brave, proud depiction of the bonds of loyalty and love between generations in a time of war is a more moving parable to the invincibility of the human spirit than the arch, pretentious and largely preposterous Roberto Benigni film Life Is Beautiful . In an age of blasting digital effects and ballistic budgets, this warm film about real people with big feelings is a welcome relief from nihilism and ugliness. To Mr. Zeffirelli and his lovely, joyous accomplices, deserving roses all around.

Bring Back Boris Karloff

The Mummy was doing just fine as a classic 1932 horror film brought occasionally back to life from its resting place on the shelves of video stores. Dragging it to the big screen with goofy special effects, pounding noise and a campy screenplay that spoofs its original intentions pretty much stamps out what life it had left, in a pointless farrago of confusion and silliness. Bring back Boris Karloff in Ace bandages.

You know the lurid tale: Imhotep, an evil high priest who defiled the Pharaoh's mistress in 1719 B.C. in the Egyptian city of Thebes, is buried alive in a sarcophagus filled with flesh-eating scarabs. Three thousand years later, in the 1920's, his rotting corpse comes back to life after his crypt is opened by treasure-seeking adventurers, and the putrid old thing goes on a rampage.

This time, the object of his affection is a prim, perky British librarian (Rachel Weisz), and the hero who saves her from a thousand fates worse than death is a brawny, indestructible American legionnaire out of Gunga Din (Brendan Fraser) who has come across a map of the underground tombs where the ancient pharaohs hid their treasures. She's looking for a priceless book. He's looking for adventure. Their sidekick, who is the girl's doofus brother (John Hannah), is looking for jewels.

What they find is the dreaded Imhotep, who looks like a computerized Creature From the Black Lagoon in monster form and Telly Savalas when he turns human. Once awakened, this mean-spirited creep with 3,000 years of halitosis follows them back to Cairo, raining fire, breathing plagues of locusts and seeking human sacrifices. With all of its camel caravans galumphing along to desert sunsets, shootouts, explosions and mayhem, the hokey video-game effects were better used in Indiana Jones and the story's sinister sexual implications are sanitized to the point of tedium. There isn't one thing in it as bleak and scary as the Karloff original, and the laughable mummy himself was more of a handful when he met Abbott and Costello.

Do Re Mi , One Last Time

Do Re Mi , the season finale in the popular, sold-out "Encore!" series at City Center, made up for the disappointing production of Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 that preceded it by accomplishing what this run of neglected, forgotten or never-should-have-been Broadway musicals set out to do in the first place. It provided a second look at a second-rate flop concocted by first-rate pros and gave it a fresh kick in the pants for a delighted audience that never saw it the first time around.

Produced in 1960 by David Merrick as nothing more than a vehicle for the hilarious sparring of Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker, Do Re Mi had a sloppy book by Garson Kanin and some terrific tunes by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The story of a fast-talking, big-thinking loser and his long-suffering wife who get their 10 minutes of fame in a get-rich scheme to skim the profits of the music industry, by rigging jukeboxes with the aid of some Damon Runyonesque crooks who discover and market new talents under the guise of their own record company, is dated as a dodo. But Nathan Lane and Randy Graff stopped the show continuously while the romantic roles of their competitive music mogul and the Zen Pancake Parlor waitress who becomes a recording star (originally played by John Reardon and Nancy Dussault) were wisely changed to black roles (acted and sung to perfection by Brian Stokes Mitchell of Ragtime and libidinous, throaty Lion King star Heather Headley), lending a dramatic and timely slant to a tired subplot.

The absurd "acts" they came up with, with auditions that could only be envisioned on The Gong Show , were delightfully cameoed by veteran clowns Marilyn Cooper, Gerry Vichi and Tovah Feldshuh. What a treat to hear "Make Someone Happy," "Fireworks," "Cry Like the Wind" and the gorgeous "I Know About Love" dusted off with such style and paprika. Classy staging by John Rando threaded the disjointed elements together briskly. We won't be seeing this one revived on Broadway unless they change a Senate investigation of jukebox tampering into a scandal about the Internet, but seeing it once was a charm.

Clarification

Typos and deletions in last week's column made a mess of my reviews of the coming-out films Get Real and Edge of Seventeen . Ivan Lins' lyrics to "Evolution" should have read "Drive a mile through solid granite," not "Drive awhile through solid granite." The gay student played by Brad Gorton was the school jock, not the school joker. My point, deleted by space problems, was that with world leaders organizing summits on how to bring diverse people together for purposes of tolerance and peace, with the taunted, enraged and alienated kids in the Columbine High massacre leveling aggression at their community for not fitting in, with the recent headline-making cases of "fag bashing," and with other violent acts as tragic reminders of prejudice, the positive messages in both films are doubly palpable. Finally, I correctly identified Sean Connery as the screen's most sexy and durable "sexagenarian," which was mysteriously changed to "septuagenarian," aging Mr. Connery by a decade and insulting Paul Newman. My apologies to all.