Last night, at what is widely hyped as the best night in New York fashion, the attendees of the annual gala benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute did not disappoint. Patterns, we saw a few: a lot of black, a lot of neon, a lot of feathers, and a lot of sheer. And Beyonce's dress? We still don't know what to think. See our picks for best and most bewildering are in this slideshow, and read our rundown from the red carpet here.

Golden Globe-winner Madonna, singer of "American Life." (Getty Images)

The most likely, of last night's awards, to an awards-show junkie in 2002 imagining the hazy future:

1. Meryl Streep. Sure! Bet the speech was great.

2. Christopher Plummer. Glad he's still around!

3. Martin Scorsese. He deserves some recognition!

4. George Clooney. Did he win for playing Cary Grant?

Middling likelihood--not impossible to imagine, but sort of weird:

5. Michelle Williams. It's nice that the girl from Dawson's Creek figured it out. But if Michelle Williams has a Golden Globe, Katie Holmes must have two Oscars, right?

6. Claire Danes. It's nice, and unexpected, that the girl from My So-Called Life figured it out. So, is Jordan Catalano a movie star?

7. Jessica Lange. She's not a recluse in 2012? She says lines, on camera, and not just to the mirror in her creepy haunted mansion? Oh, she played an old witchy lady living in a mansion full of ghosts--that makes much more sense. Moving her up to spot #3.

Very weird:

7. Kelsey Grammer. Frasier is still on? They convinced the cast to keep coming back? Wow, NBC must be the number-one network!

8. Matt LeBlanc. Friends is still on? See above.

9. No one accepted their award riding a hoverboard. Truly tests credulity of what 2012 will be like.

10. Madonna. Did "original song from a movie" stop being a thing that really exists, with integrity, at all? What a terrifying future!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The show, which will premiere October 2, is a psychological thriller focusing on CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Danes) who investigates the disappearance and ultimate recovery of a Marine missing in Iraq.

After all, the themes of years past--“Superheroes” in 2008 and “The Model as Muse” in 2009--resulted in numerous disasters, including lamé turbons (Kate Moss), strange lighting strike patterns (Lake Bell), thigh high boots (Madonna) and inappropriate cleavage and leggage (Blake Lively). Judging from this year’s looks, the famous ladies have wised up and classed it up. Truthfully, the disasters were far fewer than we’ve seen in the past.

Stay tuned for a full red carpet report from Chloe Malle, but for now enjoy a slideshow of our favorite looks from last night. 

Crowded into the cinematic sardine can of year-end releases, Me and Orson Welles is a modest but gigantically charming jewel that deserves rapt attention. Witty, wise, warm and unfailingly entertaining, it’s one of the year’s happiest surprises. And who knew Zac Efron could act?

In this lovable period valentine to the arts, the teen heartthrob displays a depth and charm that nobody over the age of 14 would ever have suspected; it’s above and beyond anything he’s shown before, in pukey, overhyped junk like High School Musical. Although he looks more like a college student than a callow high-schooler, Mr. Efron plays a stage-struck 17-year-old named Richard Samuels, who accidentally lucks into a job with Orson Welles’ legendary 1937 Mercury Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, pared down to 90 minutes and performed in modern dress on a bare Broadway stage with everyone wearing the fascist uniforms of Nazi Germany. It’s a year until Welles’ “Invasion from Mars,” which terrified an entire nation of radio listeners, and several years before Citizen Kane, but his mad, eccentric genius in the making was already obvious. What fun to watch theater history through the eyes of an innocent teenage bystander. At first he thinks he’s just another anonymous spear carrier in the crowd scenes, but since Welles was famous for improvising everything on the spot, Richard ends up in the small role of Lucius, playing a ukulele and singing a lullaby to Brutus (played by Welles himself) before the final battle. Craving the star-director’s approval, he gets a close-up of his rampaging backstage ego, as Welles shoves his pregnant wife Virginia into the background while seducing every actress involved in the production. The challenges of working for Orson Welles (Christian McKay, in an inspired performance) grow too intense for a nice young man to overcome, especially when he’s cutting school to attend rehearsals, and then there’s the additional strain of falling in love with Sonja Jones (beautifully played by Claire Danes), the creative lunatic’s bright, ambitious Girl Friday whose can-do personality endears her to everyone, including the critics. (Brooks Atkinson sends her roses.) After Richard loses his virginity to the delectable Sonja, the eventual clash between talented bit player and his demented mentor becomes inevitable. Richard is so gullible that he actually thinks he’s getting $25 a week and a chance to join Actors’ Equity, until Sonja explains: “You’re not getting anything—except the opportunity to be sprayed by Orson’s spit.”

The film moves from Broadway to the backstage action at the CBS radio show where Orson’s mellifluous voice paid the bills; at one point he races through the snow in an ambulance to beat the traffic. The impressionable Richard, meanwhile, is plunged into a firsthand exposure to the theater by a madman with a monstrous ego. Along the way, we meet the actual players in the Mercury troupe—including Joseph Cotten, Martin Gabel, George Coulouris, and producer John Houseman. Names are dropped relentlessly: Tallulah, Gielgud, Richard Rodgers, Jed Harris, David O. Selznick. Based on Robert Kaplow’s meticulously researched novel about the wayward Julius Caesar production, it leaves no stone unturned—including the hilarious dress-rehearsal matinee in which everything goes wrong; the flooding of the theater hours before the opening-night curtain; and the astonishing reviews, which, to everyone’s astonishment, pronounced the show a titanic smash hit! In a deceptively simple script, skillfully written by Holly Gent Palmo, several themes emerge, but the most durable is the reiteration that in the theater, magic happens when it’s least expected.

As Richard grows from starry-eyed fan to calloused veteran with eyes wide open, he gets a crash course in the joy, cruelty and heartbreak of Broadway. With its story of a naïve, impressionable and idealistic young man who learns too much too soon from a cynical, eccentric master, the movie shares obvious similarities with My Favorite Year. But the look of New York on the eve of World War II and the actual recordings of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and the many others who made the period come alive musically lend an air of thrilling authenticity I didn’t think possible from oddball filmmaker Richard Linklater. Hopefully, it will attract a more sophisticated audience for this unpredictable director than the small, narrow gang of followers who like his slacker comedies and druggie cartoons. What he has done with Zac Efron is nothing short of dazzling, but the real revelation is Christian McKay, who captures in hair-raising detail the self-centered, egotistical mannerisms, contradictory vocal inflections and flamboyant behavior of the phenomenon known as Orson Welles.

rreed@observer.com

The organizer’s president, designer Diane von Furstenberg, stood near the entrance in a white knee-length dress, snapping photos of arrivals, which included Ashley Olsen, Blake Lively, Claire Danes, Justin Timberlake and Anna Wintour in sunglasses, with a small digital camera. “Tonight is a family affair,” she said. “We all get together and we vote for our peers and we raise money for the CFDA. It’s just a very nice affair. It’s very exciting that we are in Lincoln Center, and it’s all new.”

Even though sales are down, Ms. von Furstenberg professed optimism. “There will always be spirit of fashion; otherwise, there is no fashion,” she said. “The economy is a little hard, but then again, on the other side, we have Obama.”

Designer Marc Jacobs strolled in with fiancé Lorenzo Martone, and offered a few words on the recent radical changes in his personal style. “I like taking the time to take care of myself, which I never did before,” Mr. Jacobs said, Mr. Martone keeping a firm hand on his back. “There was a time in my life when I was super-trendy and I loved really crazy clothes; then I kind of didn’t care at all because I was working so hard and so many hours; and now I’m kind of finding the balance between working hard and also working on myself.”

What does Mr. Jacobs see for the future of fashion?

“I’m never very good about at thinking about the future,” he said. “I’m usually O.K. thinking about the present.”

Senior vice president of IMG Fashion Fern Mallis was wearing an orange dress, sweater and matching bag. “The designers are very much like ambassadors in New York,” she said, “players who help define what our city is about. Fashion is one of the marquee industries here. There is so much talent in this city. There are so many people!”

What are her predictions for fall Fashion Week?

“I expect to see what we always expect to see, which is people working their asses off,” Ms. Mallis said. “To understand who their customers are and design things that will make people absolutely, desperately want to buy something, because nobody in this room and nobody that we all work for needs one new piece of clothing. We are not in the business of selling underwear. It’s about fashion, it’s the thing that will make your life different, change you, make you feel great at a party, and will make something happen for you. It’s the magic that we’re all selling.”

Model Heidi Klum, wearing silver, walked in with designer Michael Kors, who laughed and said how his escort always likes to shorten all of her dresses.

“Glamour and feeling better about yourself when you put on the right garment—it never changes,” Mr. Kors said of these tough time. “Doesn’t matter if you’re in a boom economy or a bust economy—actually, in a recession, more than ever, you want to feel good about yourself. So maybe it’s just people are getting smarter about how they shop, maybe you are not buying things that are disposable anymore. But I think fashion is like a great meal or a great movie. What a great joy it brings.“

Everyone of a certain theatergoing age is too familiar with Lerner and Loewe’s lovely, hummable score from My Fair Lady. It’s second nature to us now, like breathing out and breathing in. We can scarcely imagine Professor Higgins not singing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” Eliza Doolittle without “I Could Have Danced All Night” or her dad, Alfred P. Doolittle, the dustman, without his showstopping “I’m Getting Married in the Morning.” The 1956 musical version of Shaw’s rarely produced Pygmalion is so indelibly stamped on the imagination that you would be forgiven if you went to see the play and wondered, “Where’s the Ascot scene?”

The Roundabout Theater Company’s new production is the first major revival of Shaw’s great social comedy for more than 30 years, and for me the litmus test of any Pygmalion is how badly it makes us miss the musical. Alas, in this case the answer is too much.

Yet its British director, David Grindley, has honorably tried to remain true to the play, and the play—a masterly comic dissection not just of the British class system, but of capitalism as well—ought to be more than enough.

As Shaw commented, typically, after Pygmalion’s acclaimed premiere in 1913: “There must be something radically wrong with the play if it pleases everybody, but at the moment I cannot find what it is.”

THREE LEGENDS ARE involved here: Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea; Shaw’s adaptation of it, which reversed Ovid’s happy ending; and the Lerner and Loewe musical, which reversed Shaw’s ending and had his Pygmalion, the irascible, middle-aged phonetician, and his Galatea, the young cockney flower girl who wants to be a lady, fall in love.

The musical is arguably among the best adaptations ever made of a great play, though in my view it didn’t “improve” it. In the compromised essentials, My Fair Lady has nothing to do with Shaw, and everything to do with Broadway.

Until his death in 1950, Shaw stubbornly refused all offers to turn Pygmalion into a musical. He knew in his bones that making a musical of this most British of plays would sentimentalize it, and he was right. Lerner and Loewe shrewdly gave the public what it really wanted by turning Pygmalion into a delightful Cinderella fairy tale, the kind equipped with what Shaw called “happy endings to misfit all stories.”

Yet the public in Shaw’s day had demanded a happy ending, too. (So did his leading actors.) The disgusted dramatist found such easy, popular sentiment “unbearable” and even rewrote the play’s original, ambiguous end to make it crystal clear that his unchangeable, eternally confirmed bachelor Henry Higgins isn’t in love with poor Eliza, and isn’t about to be in love with anyone under 45.

In the witty windbaggery of Shaw’s essay on the play, he went on to insist pedantically that Henry and Eliza, like more or less everyone else, simply aren’t suited to each other. He reiterates that she marries the kindly upper-class dope, Freddy Eynsford Hill.

Gawd! What a fate.

Eliza didn’t have a chance with Higgins. The best he can do is invite her to live with him and Colonel Pickering for the fun of it. “My idea of a lovable woman is someone as like you as possible,” he tells his mother alarmingly. “I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: Some habits lie too deep to be changed.”

The notion that these “habits” are the outcome of closeted homosexuality is somewhat simpleminded. Shaw’s plays aren’t about sex, but sexual politics, and Higgins, the spoiled mommy’s boy, is an Edwardian gentleman who simply prefers the clubby companionship of men. It doesn’t mean that he and a dear old bugger like Pickering are lovers. It means, as Higgins puts it decorously, that “women upset everything.”

For all his arrogant prejudice and presumption, Henry Higgins is no snob. He treats everyone rudely. An unlikely proponent of egalitarianism, he’s a proto-feminist in his own eccentric, insultingly lordly fashion. He ultimately wants Eliza to have the same freedom and independence he enjoys, and opposes the institution of marriage because he sees it as a compromising business deal. He’s Shaw’s mischievous symbol of freedom, just as his marvelously witty portrait of Eliza’s roguish dad—one of “the undeserving poor”—satirizes middle-class morality and represents the free spirit of conniving, opportunistic capitalism.

“Have you no morals, man?” Pickering asks him disapprovingly.

“Can’t afford them, governor,” comes his cheerful response.

Pygmalion contains more bite and intelligence than a mere romantic comedy set in an age, much like our own, of social-climbing “upstarts” who “give themselves away every time they open their mouths.”

I believe that Shaw wrote one of literature’s greatest romances by accident. Never trust what an artist says about his work, as the old saying goes—only what he does. Shaw’s strict opposition to sentimentalizing his dueling protagonists was sincere, but no man with a cold heart could have charmed the world by creating Eliza Doolittle.

BEWARE BRITS BEARING wits. David Grindley’s new production encourages Shawian laughter, yet it possesses little humor. Mr. Grindley has gone for Pygmalion’s darker message as if in steely opposition to the romance of the musical. But he belongs to the British school of directors that remains seriously faithful to Shaw in the way married couples display matching wedding rings. You note the good intentions, and recoil.

His Pygmalion barely suggests even the possibility of a romance between Eliza and Higgins. It lacks what Sam Goldwyn called “warmth and charmth.” Higgins must have the charmth, and Eliza the warmth.

Apart from a guest spot in The Vagina Monologues, Claire Danes, the film and TV actress, has scarcely appeared onstage before this, her Broadway debut, as Eliza. She does well (and her marquee name has sold an awful lot of tickets). But I’m afraid her performance is without a center. Ms. Danes has her moments, but as yet, she’s gamely impersonating Eliza in the same programmed way that Eliza impersonates a duchess. (The production has its own Higgins, the dialect coach Majella Hurley.)

Jefferson Mays—a Tony Award winner for his German transvestite in My Own Wife—has been encouraged to take Shaw’s description of Professor Higgins as “rather like an impetuous baby” far too literally. It’s true that Higgins, the puer aeternus, has two nannies (his housekeeper and his mother), but Mr. Mays mistakenly plays him as a big petulant baby throughout. He looks like a surprised pixie with a cute kiss curl in his hair. He always seems to be eating. (When it’s not chocolate, he’s munching an apple.) He’s hyperactive; he fidgets; he squirms; he bullies; he sulks; he all but sucks his thumb. His baby Higgins does everything a charmless child insists on doing. There’s fatally no affection in him.

“He remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments,” Shaw notes in the text about Higgins. Mr. Mays’ version is dislikable. Squabbling with the rebellious Eliza in the final act, he literally takes a swing at her and goes for her throat.

Shaw’s stage direction for this apparently murderous moment says only that he “turns on her so threateningly.” And it implicitly represents the emotional turning point of the play: Eliza has wounded Higgins, and pierced his heart.

I’ve sometimes criticized Broadway revivals for failing to take great plays seriously enough, but this time it’s different. Mr. Grindley’s overearnest production has failed to take Pygmalion lightly enough. It’s a high comedy, after all—the wittiest romance that G.B. Shaw never wrote.