Former 'Weekend Update' anchor Ebersole.

There’s a ripe adjective to describe every flavored, favored aspect of Christine Ebersole’s versatility, and before she throws in the towel and does something besides entertain, like run for president, the critics will probably get around to using them all. For now, I can think of only one—sensational!

In her elegant, witty and intelligent new show at Café Carlyle, she serves up a thoughtful, incisive master class in how to enhance cabaret and keep it alive with fresh new insights that should be required viewing by aspiring performers everywhere. She calls it “The End of the World as We Know It.” I call it “Christine Ebersole Sings the Apocalypse.” She does it with such panache that the swinging Matt Dennis evergreen “Show Me the Way to Get Out of This World” has never been more relevant. When she shakes her saffron yellow curls and smiles her survival grin in Technicolor, she makes the end of the old world, the beginning of a new one, and everything in between seem as rare and giddy as a Disney cow.

The premise, of course, is only an umbrella that gives her a lot of poetic license to peruse and reflect on the stuff that is sucking the joy and health and optimism out of our lives today, from the annoyance of cell phones to the rottenness of the economy. Warning against texting, checking emails and disrupting the other patrons, she begins her show with “—and remember, if you see something, say something!” What follows is more a celebration of the soul, a jubilation of life, basted with enough meaningful patter to keep us laughing while we “let the healing waters of cabaret comfort and guide us.” Tsk-tsking the negative forces that drag us down, she croons Irving Berlin’s blues-tinged “Get Thee Behind Me Satan” with an undulating tempo, fueled by the wailing sax of David Mann and packaged in a sexy arrangement by Rosemary Clooney’s long-time ace pianist, John Oddo. The jazz quintet behind her includes two more Davids—bassist David Finck and drummer David Ratajczak—and Tony Kadleck on trumpet. Five better men good and true do not exist.

You can always rely on the hip and supertalented Ms. Ebersole for exquisite taste in musicians and material, as well as an unusual program of underexposed jewels. And so Noël Coward’s “What’s Going to Happen to the Children (When There Are No Grownups)” rhymes “tiny fists” with “psychiatrists” and she makes the meaning inherent in both. The Depression comes to life with Yip Harburg’s lyrics to “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” conjuring images of bread lines, soup kitchens and penny apples. Then, Sophie Tucker’s licentious lament “Max From the Income Tax” reminds us that good times or bum times, there is always somebody in the wings forcing you to pay up whether you’ve got it or not. Sometimes she waxes ecstatic about the things that see us through the dark and lead us into the light, like her three adopted children, who provide the penultimate intro to a gorgeous, stunning rendition of Harold Arlen’s “Right as the Rain.” The songs don’t always seamlessly illustrate the challenges of the world she describes. But who cares? I would join any queue just to hear her sing her special arrangement of “I Loves You Porgy.” This show encompasses the kind of scope that offers a carefully selected Whitman’s sampler of her many inherent influences, from jazz, gospel and blues to Ethel Merman’s belting on Broadway show tunes like Cole Porter’s “Blow, Gabriel Blow.” Who else would close any show with an exquisite arrangement of an old chestnut like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Gently Down the Stream?” and make it sound brand new?

So save those pennies and take Christine Ebersole’s advice: Whenever it’s over and our coffers are empty, remember copper is a valuable metal. Impeccable phrasing that moves from glass-breaking high notes to perfect restraint to heartbreaking ruefulness helps enormously. She has a lot to give and at the Carlyle, she’s giving it all she’s got. When she floats away on her ark, I pray that she saves a lifeboat for me.

rreed@observer.com

Spinning gold with her hair and her voice, Christine Ebersole is warming up the entire month of February at the Café Carlyle with a collection of fresh and surprising love songs that you can truly label an unalloyed delight. We all know the two-time Tony winner can act. But what a treat to hear a beautiful and radiant lady with a flawless voice dispense gorgeous, meticulously selected musical tone poems without an annoying theme to hold her back. Oh, sure, she says that the funny, charming little short stories pruned from her own life that form the witty patter between songs do add up to certain introductory themes about sex, politics, religion and romance. But this is a stretch. Searching with my eye peeled for continuity, I found the glue in the cracks of this act with no name pretty runny. When she talks, it’s a kind of Faulknerian stream of consciousness. When she sings, she holds you captive. If you long for the old nightclub acts “in the day” that consisted of terrific entertainers singing songs they loved and longed to share with no motive except entertainment, then this one is for you.

On one of the coldest opening nights of the year, the band (led by Rosemary Clooney’s ace pianist-arranger, John Oddo, with a sensational trio of David Finck on bass, David Ratajczak on drums and David Mann on reeds) opened with a curious, head-scratching version of “Hawaiian War Chant” that paved the way for her entrance, followed by “Too Darn Hot,” calling it a global warming favorite of Al Gore’s. The act that followed promised “no holds barred”—and brother, she proves it. A brief discussion of how the Carlyle is a throwback to the old Walter Winchell days (“a hotbed of blind items”) leads into the great Sam Coslow ballad “I’m in Love with the Honorable Mr. So and So,” and you can just imagine one of the girls stashed away in an upstairs hotel room, waiting for a famous lover to show up after the flashbulbs stop popping. A sad story about wanting to put the name of a dead chihuahua named Chi-Chi on a souvenir hat at Disneyland and a call for security because the name was Spanish for a female body part was pretty funny, but what does it have to do with what came next—torching a soulful “Stormy Weather”? If you’re smart, you’ll stop trying to figure it all out, close your eyes and let the musical interludes move into your heart. Connecting the bizarre patter with the beautiful singing will only leave you bewitched, bothered and baffled.

But what songs! I have never heard Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to “I’ve Got a Crush on You” sung with more understated passion, or swooned so dreamily to the subtext of Jerome Kern’s ultimate retirement song “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” Ogden Nash’s sophistication comes through with rays of warmth on Kurt Weill’s melodic “That’s Him” (“You know the way you feel when you smell bread baking/ The way you feel when suddenly a tooth stops aching … that’s him”). Joyce Kilmer’s poem about how “only God can make a tree” leads into the most gently swinging “Sunny Side of the Street” imaginable. Tree? Street? Go figure. I told you it’s an “act” that is pretty darn next door to indescribable. She closes with Noël Coward’s heartbreaking “I’ll See You Again,” and with the sublime, soignée, carefree Christine Ebersole, you can only pray that she means it.

rreed@observer.com

Unlike everything else in the world right now, the stock benefits derived from watching Christine Ebersole do not depend on market stability. Even in times of stressful economics, she’s a bargain at any price. On the heels of her Tony-winning triumph in Grey Gardens and her recent CD with Billy Stritch, this superior talent who took so long to hit the top that you could call her a late bloomer and mean it now graces the 42-cent-stamp-size headline space at the cozy Café Carlyle with a new nightclub act so terrific it has already been extended to Feb. 11. After the horrifying way Aretha Franklin mauled “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at President Obama’s inauguration, you appreciate the sound of a real voice even more. Unfortunately, most people don’t know one when they hear one. This is all the more reason to hasten to the Café Carlyle on one of these cold winter nights and learn something.

Here is a blond baby doll Dorothy Parker might have dreamed up in a short story—a cotton-headed showgirl with a voice as golden as her hair who can sail onstage to the frantic tempo of “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” and play a muted trumpet solo with her mouth, then segue to the seldom-heard verse of Rodgers and Hart’s “I’ve Got Five Dollars” that provides an antidote to Bernie Madoff (“Mr. Shylock was stingy/ I was miserly too … Oh dear it’s queer/ What love can do …”) Delving into the bottom drawer of her lush lower register (something she should ditch the high-altitude calisthenics and do more often), she turns “Miss Johnson Phoned Again Today,” a jazz classic Jeri Southern used to sing, into pure heartbreak. On jazz, ballads or arias, she grabs the mood and meter of a song and holds on to it like a fluffy shitsu with a bone.

In rare moments of calm, Ms. Ebersole serves well-timed personal diary entries from her life at home with her husband, three kids, three dogs, three cats, one goldfish and her mother in a house in Maplewood, N.J., where she cooks six breakfasts every morning before she flags the 7:45 bus to New York for rehearsals on the forthcoming Broadway revival of Blithe Spirit, co-starring Angela Lansbury, who feverishly joined the applause on opening night. There’s no time for the mind to wander. Ms. Ebersole floods the room with music and fills the spaces with laughter. From her strong, tremulous soprano on “Bill” to her own comic spin on “Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love,” Billy Rose’s ode to Fanny Brice, she turns each song into an enticing narrative, acting out the subtexts. Her audience is so hip that if she forgets a lyric, they pitch right in. They also roar at every funny line when she shares a woeful tale of losing a goldfish at Christmas. It’s name was Money, and “watching Money go down the drain” got a big laugh. Apocryphal, probably, but a great reminder of the economic abyss we’re in, and a perfect lead-in to “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” which next to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” is the best empty-pockets lament of all time. She opened on inauguration night, which made Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More,” written 150 years ago, sound contemporary as a Wall Street bailout.

Directed by Scott Wittman and accompanied by John Oddo, who was Rosemary Clooney’s pianist-arranger for many years, Ms. Ebersole has a versatility and musical range so broad that she can belt with the strength of a Broadway diva projecting to the mezzanine, or smoothly negotiate the lyrics of a tender ballad like she’s ironing out the wrinkles in pure velvet. Unlike the usual finger-popping gold diggers who race their way through “42nd Street,” she turns it conversational, painting the portrait of a tired showgirl taking you on a tour of the gaudy, bawdy Times Square that used to be. Wrapping it up with a salute to the late Eartha Kitt, the Carlyle’s resident femme fatale, she’s as playfully seductive on “Monotonous” as Eartha Mae herself.

If I have one grouse, it’s the annoying (but only occasional) moon trip she takes to prove she could play the Metropolitan Opera if she so desired. Audiences will always yell and stomp if you aim for a B above high C, but the 1911 Victor Herbert coloratura soprano sendup “I Want to be a Prima Donna” is the worst thing in the act, and a waste of valuable time. Especially when everyone wanted to hear “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” Ms. Ebersole’s 11 p.m. showstopper from Grey Gardens. (One fan even called it out as a request, which was icily ignored.) Ms. Ebersole is so much better when she sings in her warm lower register without showoff pyrotechnics that fail to properly show off her real strengths in the first place. But why quibble when the rest of the act is so masterfully above reproach? With Christine Ebersole, your investment pays off.

rreed@observer.com

It’s a neat gimmick that Ms. Ebersole also plays Edith Bouvier Beale (the impossible, smothering mother of Edie) in the problematic Act I, set in 1941. But I’m afraid that, with its pastiche period score by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, the overripe, name-dropping melodrama played out at the Grey Gardens mansion in East Hampton reminds us uncomfortably of the kind of old-fashioned minor Broadway musical satirized in The Drowsy Chaperone:

She is the girl

Who has everything

Talent and beauty sublime!

The crowds and the clamor

Aroused by her glamour

Will fade like the echo of a chime.

She’s the girl who has every thing ...

But time.

Actually, time is the one thing Big and Little Edie do have. (They both died in their 80’s.) But the giddy Act I score is mostly a familiar blend of Noël Coward and Cole Porter (later, it’s Irving Berlin, gospel choirs and bittersweet Sondheim). The Noël/Cole tribute is intended to convey worldly sophistication, like Big Edie’s suave pianist and pet homosexual, George Gould Strong (Bob Stillman)—himself a too-familiar type. Enter handsome, young Joseph Kennedy Jr. (brother of Jack), with his eyes on the White House and the “It” girl, Little Edie. “Somewhere in Athens,” the pet pianist gushes to Joe, “there’s a pedestal missing its statue …. ”

Doug Wright, who wrote the book for Grey Gardens (he’s also the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife, a monologue about an East Berlin transvestite), is on automatic pilot throughout the first act. He overplays the Kennedy card. The future Jackie Kennedy Onassis—cousin of Little Edie—is on display as a cute child in jodhpurs, along with younger sister Lee. “Lovely to meet you, Mr. Kennedy,” Jackie says to Joe as she curtsies.

To which Joe responds all too knowingly, “This kid’s got poise to spare, hasn’t she?”

She certainly has. When Little Edie’s pre-engagement party to Joe is sabotaged by wicked “mother, darling,” a catfight follows between Big Edie and her resentful daughter. “I’m afraid the future of the Bouvier name now rests with you,” Grandpa Bouvier, a crusty old major, says to Jackie and Lee before they’re ushered from the room. “Make me proud, ladies. Make me proud.”

Hence the major’s rousing advice to one and all in song, “Marry Well.” (“With your eye on the ball / And your feet on the fairway / Hit it high, little girls—marry well!”)

Act I promises to ignite, but never quite catches. Crucially, there are only tenuous hints of a connection with the far more complete and accomplished Act II. We learn that privileged “mother, darling” is “that most pitiable of creatures—an actress without a stage.” The narcissistic mother—like the clingy daughter—wanted to be a star. But there’s no disturbing indication of what’s fatally wrong, only a frothy soap opera with “warning clouds.” It’s impossible to believe that the Little Edie played by Erin Davie in the first act is any relation to the irresistibly eccentric, worrying, middle-aged Edie played by Christine Ebersole in the second.

We are in a different show the moment the curtain goes up 32 years later on a squalid Grey Gardens overrun by cats and raccoons, with the bedridden, awful octogenarian mother cared for by the doting, resentful, still-ambitious daughter. This second act is closely based on the 1975 Maysles brothers’ documentary, Grey Gardens. Cult followers can recite the lines of the vamping ladies onscreen like fans watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

A great line from the musical, however—or any musical—belongs to dramatist Doug Wright. He gives it to mother: Big Edie announces wearily during one of her daughter’s rebellious turns, “It’s very difficult to bring up a child 56 years of age.”

We are at a horror show. There’s a whiff of Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte in the fetid air, a campy pleasure in the near-grotesque freak show. The Beales make voyeurs of us all. Grey Gardens cultists find both the elderly nagging mother and her trapped, resentful daughter adorable nonconformists, bohemian outcasts and determined survivors of a hypocritical world.

But they don’t strike me as heroic. The two of them were surely damaged people who avoided all sense of reality in pathetic mutual reliance and a haze of exaggerated nostalgia. (The glamorous Little Edie went neurotically bald in her youth. Hence the exotic turbans and nutty outfits she created for herself that turned her belatedly into a fashion icon.) It was her dominating mother who manipulated and ruined her “child-like” life. In the closing scene of the film, there’s a terrible, ghostly instant when Little Edie has danced for us and suddenly goes dead behind the eyes.

The eyes of Ms. Ebersole’s still-beautiful Edie are always alive—wistful with yearning perhaps, but never far gone. It’s the one difference in her uncanny impersonation of the real-life Edie on film. (They even look identical.) In another coup of inspired casting, Mary Louise Wilson is the perfect reincarnation of the mother. But the evening belongs to a triumphant Christine Ebersole.

I’ll whisper this: In Act l, she’s less convincing as her own mother! Miss Ebersole in starchy finery isn’t quite to the manor born. She’s too innately warm a performer to play the Brahmin. But from the moment she strolls onstage as the startling, funny, endearingly nutty Edie—and nails the wittiest song in the show, “The Revolutionary Costume for Today”—she’s home.

Superlative Sam

I’d like to pay tribute to the recent, all-too-brief visit to New York of the finest production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot I’ve seen in my life. For four performances, the Skirball Center at New York University was blessed with leading interpreters of Beckett from the Gate Theater in Dublin; directing them was Walter Asmus, who assisted Beckett on his own seminal production of Godot for the Schiller Theater in Berlin.

It’s a reasonable idea to see Waiting for Godot every decade or so, to remind ourselves that we’re still half-alive. This was quite an opportunity. The Irish understand Beckett, the Irishman, in their bones. Here was an internationally acclaimed production of Godot that I found miraculously right in every conceivable way—and yet some criticized its masterly cast for milking laughs.

They must be joking. It wasn’t the great actors—Barry McGovern’s Vladimir, Johnny Murphy’s Estragon, Stephen Brennan’s Lucky and Alan Stanford’s Pozzo—who were milking Beckett’s formative tragicomedy. It was the audience.

It’s a New York phenomenon: In every audience there are always some who are eager to inform the rest of us that they’re in on the joke. It’s an unfortunate expression of our natural enthusiasm—like the automatic standing ovation, where the audience is really applauding itself.

A decade ago, the Gate Theater brought its Samuel Beckett festival to New York and, reviewing it for The Times, the usually tolerant Vincent Canby appealed to audiences to … behave. He was irritated by the easy, knowing laughter that greeted even the darkest comedies in the festival.

Are there any sadder words than the innocent child’s “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow”? Are there any more tragic figures in modern times than we who were born astride the grave?

Beckett’s humor is bitumen black. As the line in Endgame goes, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.” Though humor and talk are the defense mechanisms of suffering humanity, and though this apparently austere playwright cherished the banana skins of Irish vaudeville, Samuel Beckett is mordant—not heady, when the light gleams an instant and then is gone.

Duck Soup

It’s almost inconceivable that the unfortunate new musical Mimi le Duck was even produced. Currently at the New World Stages and intended, I guess, as a whimsical comic fable, it seems to have a thing about quite big penises and bicycling around Paris on a very small stage.

Mimi le Duck tells the story of a Mormon housewife from Ketchum, Idaho, who abandons her Beckettian husband, and her successful career as a painter of ducks for QVC, in order to experience a wild and crazy life of tempting romance, Gypsy pickpockets and torch singers in mythical Gay Paree.

It ain’t An American in Paris, it’s true. But it does have the surprising appearance of 79-year-old Eartha Kitt as a Parisienne chanteuse and boardinghouse owner. As only she can, Ms. Kitt hijacks the first act with two solo songs—one typically suggestive and purring, the other not. The rest is hard to credit, and I fled at the intermission. Mimi le Duck ran out of le luck.

At last! One of our leading nonprofit theaters has taken the lead and brought the prohibitively high ticket prices dramatically down. They’ve made theater exactly what it should be: accessible to all, welcoming and inclusive. For the first two months of any play during the Wilson season, all tickets at the Signature Theatre cost just $15. (It’s a similar bold initiative to the immensely successful $10 ticket for the fall dance season at City Center). Who will follow them? Signature’s opening, acclaimed revival of Seven Guitars, has been packed. Highly recommended, then: the forthcoming August Wilson classic of the 1960’s African-American experience, Two Trains Running.

There are two Broadway transfers I’m looking forward to—firstly, the Duncan Sheik rock adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s drama of adolescent sexuality and rebellion, Spring Awakening. It was a thrilling achievement when I saw it last season at the Atlantic—the best rock musical I’ve seen since Rent (and far superior to it). For one thing, the young cast actually looks young. I only pray that its gifted director, Michael Mayer, hasn’t felt obliged to spiff up his fine production for Broadway. Its un-showbizzy imaginative simplicity—naïveté, almost—was among its surprising delights.

I found the Playwrights Horizon hit musical Grey Gardens, directed by Michael Grief, a tale of two acts when I first saw it. Doug Wright’s script about Jacqueline Kennedy’s nuttily reclusive cousins—with a debt to the Maysles brothers’ cult documentary—had a shaky first act and a near-perfect second. But the Broadway transfer—new and improved (or not)—still has Christine Ebersole’s sensational, definitive performance as “Little” Edie Beale, and though it’s very early days for the Tonys, Ms. Ebersole is sure to be among the front-runners.

I can’t say I’m eagerly awaiting the London import of Mary Poppins. But you might be. We also have another Stephen Sondheim revival—another revival of Company. Perhaps the highly regarded British Sondheimean John Doyle (who directed the recent Sweeney Todd) and Company’s star, Raul Esparza, will breathe new life into the story of the possibly gay bachelor Bobby and the ladies who lunch, and lunch, and lunch.

When it comes to golden oldies, however, I haven’t seen Michael Bennett’s landmark A Chorus Line since its premiere in 1975, and the show struck me then as the all-American backstage musical. Time for another visit! My quiet prayer for the revival, however, is that no one’s been tempted to modernize it in any way. Ideally, A Chorus Line is a period piece whose message is timeless. Directed by Bennett’s longtime co-choreographer, Bob Avian, the pivotal role of Cassie is played by Charlotte d’Ambroise. If ever a Broadway gypsy deserved her moment in the sun, it’s Ms. d’Ambroise.

The British playwrights are back with us again, of course, for apparently we have no serious ones of our own. Tom Stoppard, David Hare and a particular favorite of mine, Simon Gray, will be colonizing Broadway this season. The turbulent Mr. Gray might be one of the last unafraid, politically incorrect playwrights left on earth, along with his old friend Harold Pinter. I found his best-selling memoir, The Smoking Diaries—described admiringly by Barry Humphries as “a tender tirade”—an enjoyable, touching summer read. I’m looking forward to the revival of his 1972 Butley, starring Nathan Lane as a not-so-tender bisexual professor. Mr. Lane has big boots to fill, though. The role was memorably originated by Alan Bates.

Tom Stoppard serious—as opposed to Tom seriously witty—can be a little too earnestly bookish for some. The Coast of Utopia, his nine-hour trilogy about the forebears of the Russian Revolution, is a vast undertaking and a labor of love by Lincoln Center. Directed by Jack O’Brien with a big, prestigious cast (Billy Crudup, Ethan Hawke, Brían O’Byrne, Amy Irving, Martha Plimpton), the sheer ambition and scope of the epic project are thrilling. For myself, three Stoppard plays are better than one, or two.

In a first for a British playwright, David Hare’s political drama concerning Brits and Americans, The Vertical Hour, has its world premiere on Broadway. While his recent plays have appeared to be on the cutting edge, however, they can prove worryingly soft at the center. There’s no advance word on The Vertical Hour—save that it stars the smashing Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, and has a top director, Sam Mendes.

As is well known, Ibsen wrote only one play, Hedda Gabler. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is following last season’s Hedda from Australia with another production of Hedda, this time from Germany. I’m no mathematician, but by my calculations, that makes the 200th Hedda Gabler within the last 18 months in the New York area alone. But there’s good news from Brooklyn: They’ve recently discovered another Ibsen play, The Wild Duck. The production comes to us from the National Theatre of Norway, Oslo, and I’ll be there.

George Bernard Shaw hasn’t been produced nearly enough in New York, so it’s also welcome news that the Roundabout Theatre Company is reviving his masterwork, Heartbreak House. The Roundabout’s staging of the classics can be too virtuously middlebrow, reducing all to a dogged form of Masterpiece Theatre. But Heartbreak’s director is the well-regarded Robin Lefevre; the cast—led by Philip Bosco and Swoosie Kurtz—is excellent; and the great play itself is Shaw’s fantastic metaphor for national collapse, what he called “this soul’s prison we call England.”

Welcome, welcome at last to town in October: My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the Royal Court Theatre play that the New York Theatre Workshop, in its muddle and fear, cravenly “postponed” last season. Corrie, a young activist American, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while she campaigned for peace in the Gaza Strip. This most humane play, performed by Megan Dodds, has been created by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner from Corrie’s writing and notes.

For a seasonal fix of high camp, my choice is John (Lypsinka) Epperson’s adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, retitled My Deah. Finally, one of my favorite experimental U.S. troupes is the wonderfully absurdist Les Frères Corbusier. They surprise, infuriate, delight (and deconstruct). Watch out for their new piece, Hell House, which reimagines the Halloween hell of evangelical Christians. Also, their signature piece, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, is to be revived at the Fourth Street Theater just in time for Yuletide, by which time I’ll have reported on all the above productions and more.

For those who don't know, the documentary records the squalid, unhinged, hilarious and sometimes sad life of a mother and daughter abandoned together in a mansion in Easthampton. Eight or so numbers from the show (including a number that was cut) were performed by the cast in the round ultra-mod theater in the Gugg's basement. Christine Ebersole plays Big Edie in Act I, which takes place in the 40's, and Little Edie in Act II, which is set in the 70's, the same era in which the documentary Grey Gardens was shot by the Maysles brothers (et al).

Act I is sort of nice musical theatre; a girl is going to be married, her mother is a bit overbearing, she struggles with the contemporary role of a woman, and so on. Dancing! Patter! Etc.! And Sara Gettelfinger is pretty great as a young Little Edie.

But then, after the passing of 30-some years and an intermission, Ms. Ebersole reappears as the older Little Edie; the style of the music changes (revealing the traditional music of the first act to be an idiom within an idiom, or something like that), the house has fallen to bits, and the cats and raccoons have taken over the mansion.

And when Ms. Ebersole appeared on stage in the revolutionary costume of film fame, the audience--about 50% of whom had seen the original documentary--gasped. She produced what is possibly the single eeriest and most precise embodiment of a non-fictional character one could ever hope to see. It's unbelievable. She sang two numbers from Act II and brought the house down.

All of this blah blah prologue is formulated entirely to make a record of our prediction. Christine Ebersole will win an Obie and an Outer Critics Circle and a Tony (after the inevitable move to Broadway) and a Who Knows What for her performance. Hell, maybe a Nobel Prize.

This ends our report from theatre-land; we promise we won't go back for a while. Anyway, Grey Gardens opens in February at Playwrights Horizons.
--Choire Sicha

Taken from the Scriptures, the movie begins in the forest of Gethsem-ane after the Last Supper, where Jesus is muttering the stuff about danger and betrayal that ended up in Isaiah. Cut to old two-faced Judas, catching a curve ball of 30 pieces of silver. The Roman soldiers arrive and take Jesus away-but as played by Jim Caviezel, the only American in the cast, Jesus doesn't seem stoic at all. He seems to have a terminal case of heartburn from carrying the burden of absolute sin for all mankind. It's about to get worse. In seconds, the slaughter commences as the disciples are set upon with swords and fire. What follows is two hours of relentless tortures as Jesus is beaten, clubbed, whipped, shredded, peeled and dragged through the streets of Jerusalem in chains. According to Mel Gibson, the Jews did it. But more about that later. Between atrocities, we see Peter deny his Lord three times, just the way Jesus predicted it, followed by guilt and suicide. Flashbacks to more peaceful times show Jesus in his carpentry shop in Nazareth, the devotion of Mary the Holy Mother and the conversion of loyal Mary Magdalene, who followed her savior all the way up the mountain to his death and resurrection on Easter Sunday. In this script, by Mr. Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald, nobody really wanted to kill Christ except the council Jews who ran the temples of worship among the Pharisees and resented spiritual leaders working freelance. King Herod and Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, kept passing him back and forth, fearing a religious and political revolution. Finally, Pilate gave in to the Jews to avoid a civil war, and the rest-depending on what professor you had in college-is either history or anthropology. (I had a lecturer who insisted the Bible was "the Hebrews' answer to Greek mythology" and made it a trick question on the final exam.) Whatever you believe, there is no way you will remain unfazed by the graphic nonstop violence of Christ's execution, which Mr. Gibson lays before you like the contents of a particularly horrifying autopsy. The movie catalogs endless details of insanity and inhumane cruelty, while Jesus says: "Love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you." According to Mr. Gibson, the Jews could have stopped it, but they were blind to all reason, even turning down Pilate's offer to execute the thief Barabbas instead. They even break Christ's arms in their sockets so the spikes on the cross will go in flat. And just when you think it's over and the three men on the mount are coughing up their last blood clots, director Gibson brings on the crows to peck their eyes out.

Obviously, the intent is to make you live through every sordid, painful minute of what Christ endured before God delivered His only son to Heaven, but at the screening I attended, most of the faces were buried up to the elbows. The only way you can survive this movie is to pretend Jesus is not a human at all and just regard him as a symbol of things more divinely inspired. "This isn't really happening," I kept telling the girl next to me whose head was buried in my sleeve. "This is just a movie." Mr. Gibson blatantly insists in interviews that it was Jews who crucified Jesus, not Norwegians. But that is his truth. There are just as many contradictory versions of the truth in the various gospels as there are religions to preach them. And while we're at it, it seems to me that with events that took place 2,000 years ago, before Western Union, we're buying a lot of secondhand guesswork already.

Never mind. The integrity is all visible on the screen. The sad thing is that with Jerusalem played by Italy, cinematography patterned after canvases by Caravaggio and the Jews speaking ancient Aramaic, Mr. Gibson has gone to a lot of sweat and expense to make a movie that doesn't say much of anything new. Been there, done that, and you know how it all comes out already.

Presidential Exile

It's a pretty bad week when you find yourself torn between the Crucifixion and a thing called Welcome to Mooseport . When this mediocre mush begins, a wrinkled old man is jogging butt-naked down Main Street in Hollywood's idea of a quaint village in Maine called Mooseport. Nobody cares. Nobody even notices. They're all asleep anyway. Small wonder. The citizens of Mooseport all seem to be unfulfilled billionaire television personalities from family series who want to be movie stars, all too painfully aware that this benign little trifle isn't going to do the trick. In fact, it's a snooze on every level.

The outsider (and only interesting person in Mooseport) is Gene Hackman, in the laziest role of his life, as the only President of the U.S. who was ever divorced in office. Mooseport is to this political windbag what Plains was to Carter and Crawford is to Dubya. And so the recently deposed President Monroe Cole heads for his summer house in Mooseport to write his memoirs, raise money for his Presidential library, and mull over lucrative offers for car commercials, honorary doctorates and a farewell world tour of overpaid personal appearances-but mostly to play golf and pick up girls. Besides, he's got no place else to go. He lost his Baltimore mansion to the former First Lady from hell (Christine Baranski, from Cybill , Happy Family and other sitcoms). Now Mooseport is his home, but she wants that, too. She's described as worse (and harder to handle) than terrorists and dictators, and this movie is so dull you can't wait for her to arrive. A female Saddam Hussein is just what Mooseport needs, sez the audience, much of which is beginning to snore.

But first, we get the arrival of local hardware store owner Handy Harrison (Ray Romano, from Everybody Loves Raymond ), who comes to fix the toilet while Handy's dog, Plumber (these are the jokes, pal), is humping the President's white Westmoreland terrier in the nasturtiums. In a sudden panic when the movie threatens to bore itself to death, writer Tom Schulman moves into high gear as the plumber and the ex-President find themselves running for mayor of Mooseport in a race that becomes, for some curious reason, front-page headlines and the focus of every international news program on television. To thicken a plot thin as clam broth, they both fall in love with the same girl, the frustrated village veterinarian (Maura Tierney, from ER ). Mooseport is invaded by the media, by the conniving First Lady, and by various political analysts and advisers, including the President's bumbling P.R. director (Fred Savage, from The Wonder Years ) and cutthroat campaign manager (Rip Torn, from The Larry Sanders Show ). Regis and Kelly even show up to make fun of the former Prez on their TV show. May the best man-er, biggest star-win.

This much blatant self-promotion sometimes adds up to more of a movie than this tired, sorry little takeoff on Mayberry R.F.D. But nothing of any consequence ever awakens the slumbering populace of Welcome to Mooseport . There's no edge, no suspense and no tension in either the lives of the Mooseport regulars behind the Cape Cod shingles or in the mayoral campaign. It's not even a dirty race. In the town debate, both candidates vow to vote for each other! There's a country dance that gives the cast a chance to wear gingham, and a running gag about a moose on the loose named Bruce. To director Daniel Petrie's credit, the movie doesn't stoop to Farrelly Brothers vulgarity, scatology or idiot jokes. But that doesn't save it from the level of a CBS Sunday Night Movie, either. Under the circumstances, Mr. Hackman is clearly escaping from reality, using the movie like Bush Sr. uses Kennebunkport every Fourth of July weekend. Bound and gagged, he could still steal the movie from his Little League cohorts from TV. Mr. Romano's nice-guy doofus image is no match for Mr. Hackman's subtle, tongue-in-cheek craft and experience-not to mention his ability to say the simplest line 10 different ways. While agonizing over whether to return for a ninth season on his own fading, transfusion-needy TV sitcom, Mr. Romano's big-screen debut doesn't register at all in 35-millimeter. He's so bland that the whole movie is like an Everybody Loves Raymond marathon. And don't even ask what Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden is doing in L. L. Bean country, wasting her time in the thankless role of the President's loyal secretary and right-arm assistant, whose secret love for her boss goes unrequited even after she follows him from the Oval Office in D.C. to a front porch swing in Mooseport. She must have signed on for all the free lobster.

Mid-Winter Heat

Musically, the enchanting Christine Ebersole is stoking the embers at Feinstein's at the Regency until the temperature reaches something akin to a midwinter heat wave. From now through March 6, it's a neat place to keep warm. For this engagement, the acclaimed singer-comedienne who grabbed the Tony Award for her starring role in the Broadway revival of 42nd Street has joined merry forces with a new partner in crime-the swinging jazz pianist Billy Stritch. Together, they expand the parameters of what one usually expects from an attempt to transpose the world of musical comedy to the world of cabaret. Did I say "transpose"? Hell, they turn it inside out.

Humorous and musically challenging, the current act is called In Your Dreams for no other reason than that the people at Feinstein's seem to think an act has got to be called something. But you'll catch on fast to the fact that the title is just a gimmick to frame a showcase around Ms. Ebersole's range and versatility, with Mr. Stritch providing hip vocal harmonies and supportive piano chords that allow her to move gracefully through an indefinitely large number of moods and styles. (The sure timing of bassist Steve Doyle rounds out the trio.) She's an actress front and center, polished enough to act out the subtexts of rhythmic centerpieces like the Cy Coleman–Dorothy Fields "Baby, Dream Your Dream," and a singer with power enough to know her way around the high points of a showstopper like "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top." For homespun hilarity, she pokes fun at her limply naïve, nonaggressive Unitarian background ("You know how to get rid of a Unitarian? Burn a question mark on his lawn") and the odd rituals of growing up in Winnetka, Ill., naming a few celebs who shared her hometown roots and escaped, but curiously failing to mention Winnetka's most famous export, a Swedish overachiever named Ann-Margret.

But time and again, it's the singing that captivates. The duets with Mr. Stritch, whom she met when they both appeared in 42nd Street , are insouciant and full of lively musical ideas ("You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" has special oomph), and exploring a pleasing middle register she never uses onstage, she reveals an appealing (and surprising) jazz tempo on the flatted fifths and breakneck rhythms of a "Fine and Dandy" that really cooks. Ms. Ebersole has as many voices as other girls have shoes, and before this act is over, she uses them all. The knockout is "To Keep My Love Alive," the homicidal aria by Rodgers and Hart with which she brought every sold-out audience to a standing ovation during the "Encores!" revival of A Connecticut Yankee . This tricky piece is a confessional, sung by a delightful serial killer from Camelot as she offs an army of husbands and lovers with an infinite variety of imaginative murder weapons. The song has a verse for every victim, and Ms. Ebersole sings them all from the same script folder she used in the "Encores!" production. (In keeping with a treasured theatrical concept, you know, but-smart girl that she is-also wise insurance against lyrics that backfire.) Passion, frolic, flair and lots of music by everyone from Irving Berlin to Antonio Carlos Jobim-you get it all at the Regency. By the end of this engaging hour with Christine Ebersole, you'll agree with her charming signature finale: "It's a Pity to Say Goodnight."