Ms. Stritch, long known for her work with Mr. Sondheim, has replaced Angela Lansbury in that role, and, for her adoring fans, she's a treat to watch as she mugs her way through her first Broadway appearance since her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, eight years ago. She is joined by Bernadette Peters, another Sondheim vet, who steps in for Catherine Zeta-Jones as Madame Armfeldt's daughter, the legendary actress Desirée, around whom the show's love triangle revolves.

The point now is the two leads; otherwise, the production is essentially the same as it was in December, enjoyable and lovely and darkly lit. (Why that lighting on a Scandinavian summer night when the sun never sets remains unclear.)

Ms. Stritch's Madame Armfeldt is a deliciously bawdy old broad; she milks the character's one-liners and can get a laugh with a well-placed sidelong glance. But the audience's adoration is also a necessary crutch, because the 84-year-old Ms. Stritch isn't up to the demands of a leading musical role. She talk-sings, rather than sing-sings-which works well enough, as it did in her Sondheim tribute show at the Carlyle earlier this year, and as it did for Rex Harrison throughout his career-and she can't remember her lines.

In "Liaisons," Madame Armfeldt's big number, a nostalgic recollection of the great affairs of her youth, the lyrics suggest the difficulties of an old woman's memory-"Now where was I? Where was I? Oh, yes," she sings at one point-and at the press preview I saw, Ms. Stritch forgot the words. It was, in some ways, a poignant echo, a symbiotic meshing of character and performer, but it was also a tense, awkward moment that took the audience out of the show.

I do not, on the hand, adore Ms. Peters. Her odd little-girl manner often rubs me the wrong way. And Ms. Zeta-Jones, who, despite her dreadful "Send in the Clowns" at the Tony Awards, sang more than adequately when I saw her Night Music performance in December, is a better fit for the character: a knowing, world-weary, sex-symbol celebrity.

But, here, Ms. Peters-glamorous with her mess of red curls sitting atop her head-is a fantastic Desirée, funny with her suitors, tender with her daughter and singing beautifully. Her "Send in the Clowns" is thrilling.

Indeed, aside from Ms. Stritch's frailties, the entire evening is thrilling: two musical-theater legends, in a fine production of a canonical show. And those frailties might make it even more rewarding: Night Music now provides both the pleasure of a great evening of the theater and the relief of seeing Ms. Strich make it successfully to the end.

editorial@observer.com

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Brilliant. Impossible. Eccentric. Temperamental. Fabulous. Iconoclastic. Legendary. The adjectives go on and on when describing Elaine Stritch, but “austere” is not one of them. This is all the more reason why her new cabaret show at the Carlyle is so wonderful. It’s a rare opportunity to see and hear a unique personality with a special brand of musical alchemy being pensive, introspective and mesmerizing.

She calls the show Elaine Stritch Singin’ Sondheim … One Song at a Time, which at first sounds kind of silly. I mean, when you tackle one hour of songs by Stephen Sondheim or anybody else, you do sing them one at a time, don’t you? But from the opening zest of “I Feel Pretty,” I decided what she really means is “one mood at a time.” Every number is different, arranged by the great Jonathan Tunick to reveal a contrast in flavor, feeling and rumination. With her brittle, shoulder-shrug style and often acerbic attitude toward lyrics, she is the perfect interpreter of Mr. Sondheim’s often cynical lens on life. No wonder she’s slim as celery. This is a workout, and what fun it is to accompany her to the gym. Happy, gay, dyspeptic or downright suicidal, she interprets the moods like nobody else. Yes, baby, she has lived and the experience comes in handy.

Mr. Sondheim’s songs were once considered too intricate and rangy for most singers to tackle. Now everybody’s singing them all the time. You can hardly enter a cabaret room anymore without some 15-year-old with a ponytail singing “Send in the Clowns.” Ms. Stritch has no range at all, but emotional complexity has never deterred her. She has about three strong notes left, but she knows how to use them. When she turns “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy into a passionate, neurotic breakdown, you don’t need the rest of the play to understand the frustration of a backstage mother who has always lived in the spillover from her children’s follow spot. She hammers out the notes and the ringsiders go mad with ecstasy. With even the most familiar material, like “Send in the Clowns,” she makes it all sound like you’re hearing it for the first time. I thought I couldn’t bear to hear the lugubrious “Send in the Clowns” one more time, but as it turns out, I had never heard it before. She breaks up every eight bars like an acting exercise at the Actors Studio, never losing track of the content of the song. Maybe, as she infers, Sondheim is like humor—unmanageable. But like Madame Curie finding radium after years of research, Ms. Stritch finds the key to the secret formula that unlocks the subtext of every song—the light touch of whimsy in “Love is in the Air” that makes joy contagious; the lifetime of relationship changes in “The Little Things You Do Together”; the surprisingly slow psychological motivation in “Broadway Baby”; the a cappella reading of the gimlet-eyed lyrics in “Every Day a Little Death,” which find poetry in disillusionment. Boy, it takes guts to pull off a poetry reading on a cabaret stage while everyone around you is still digesting the crème brûlée. But Ms. Stritch is as fearless as she is visionary. You gotta love this kind of Florence Nightingale courage. She never imitates anybody, including herself. Even her signature song from Company, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” is different from any version she’s ever done. “A Parade in Town,” Angela Lansbury’s showstopper from Anyone Can Whistle, turns from a lady mayor’s lament to an obituary for all the people life has passed by. Bringing Sondheim up to date, she brings “You Are the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” (from Road Show) close to ecstatic fulfillment before adding that little extra lemon twist: (“O.K., one of the best things that has ever happened to me”). Subjugating her rugged, full-frontal, no-nonsense persona in favor of a more reflective approach, she leavens the overriding toughness with vulnerability, a slight hint of insecurity and a determination to get it right and get it special—very appealing qualities in a woman of almost 85, if you ask me. Most of today’s singers emerge like raw dough, desperate to be kneaded into some recognizable shape. Ms. Stritch arrives fully baked in her own loaf pan. There is nobody quite like her and never will be. She closes on Jan. 30. My advice is get there fast and learn something.

rreed@observer.com

Bop, bop bop. Bop, bop bop. Around 8:30, Friday night at the Café Carlyle, home of the legendary late lounge singer Bobby Short, the five-piece band was getting the ball rolling for the room’s new star, Steve Tyrell. He waited for the right moment, then eased the mike from its cradle.

“The look of love is in your eyes,” he sang in a gruff Southern accent. Mr. Tyrell had the look of someone who might have been stout before slimming down. He wore a velvet blazer, starched white shirt and a white polka dot silk scarf. His hair, silvery white, stood up on its own. Two backup singers loomed, a bodacious Asian woman and a lanky black guy with a gray ponytail and an earring.

“Ooooh,” sang the lady.

“Woahhh,” sang the man.

“Say a little prayer for you!” sang Mr. Tyrell.

A decidedly New York woman at the bar snapped her fingers. Her wrists were adorned with bracelets made of silver balls. More silver balls hung about her neck, and a ball on each ear lobe.

“I’m gonna send this out to my friends Les and Julie, I think you guys are out there somewhere,” said Mr. Tyrell, and then worked his way through “This Guy’s in Love With You.” Next was “Walk on By.”

“I haven’t heard this in forever,” said the silver-ball lady.

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The room was dominated by men in suits and ties. A shortish fellow with a thick mustache and coarse, swept-back hair that resembled a shoe brush tapped his gimlet glass with a plastic stir stick. The room looked clean, fancy; $150 for a seat.

“I’m going to sing a song I sung in a movie called Father of the Bride, and it changed my life,” said Mr. Tyrell. He said he was going to sing it for Julie Chen, “the most beautiful woman on television. Kim Novak had nothing on you.”

“Hey, would you stop flirting with my wife?” joked CBS president Les Moonves.

Later Mr. Tyrell dropped by the table.

“It’s a Friday night in December,” said Mr. Moonves, “where the economy’s bad and restaurants are half-empty—and this room, which is not an inexpensive room, is still packed. I think it’s terrific for New York, I think it’s terrific for the country, I think it’s terrific for the entertainment business.”

But as Loston Harris, the pianist and singer at the hotel’s Bemelmans Bar, likes to say, the Café is the show but Bemelmans is where it’s happening. Before I could get there, I was struck by a fur hat. Renee Karrat, 32, who works at Ralph Lauren, was in the lobby. She had dropped by the bar after dinner to continue celebrating her brother’s birthday, but it was too packed. They headed off to drink Champagne at a friend’s room at the Hotel at Rivington.

Over at Bemelmans, an elegant old string bean in a tailored blue blazer was huddling with Mr. Harris, speaking in hushed tones. I gathered from Mr. Harris’ eyes that the man might have been speaking gibberish.

Scrunched around a two-top were Chris Singerman, 28, a banker with SwedBank, and a couple of friends. The bank had actually just made a few hires. Mr. Singerman had been talking about spending New Year’s Eve at Bemelmans, “’cause there’s nothing else going on.”

“It’s between this and seeing My Morning Jacket at Madison Square Garden,” said Mr. Singerman, who was swimming in a Carlyle blazer provided at the door. As was his friend Samit Mody, who works in commercial real estate: “You’re either treading water, or you’re not.” They had come on a whim: After a  Christmas party at Bilboquet on East 63rd Street, Cate Candler, 32, an executive at Cole Haan, had suggested they continue the merriment at the Carlyle, a Candler family favorite.

There was hardly any standing room around the bar. A slick-looking fellow and a Botoxed blonde were nuzzling among the camel hair and tweed. Ms. Candler said the holiday spirit appeared to be intact at the Carlyle. But, she cautioned, “people take comfort in going out during the holidays because it feels comfortable.”

Was there an added dash of hope in the air?

“I’m hopeful,” said Mr. Singerman. “I have hope.”

The next night, Saturday, 9:30 p.m., Bemelmans was packed.

Christmas time is here,

Happiness and cheer,

Fun for all that children

Call their favorite time of year.

“If only these walls could talk, man,” said Loston Harris between sets. “People are saying, we’re escaping, that you help us to take our mind off what’s going on. This is a special clientele. I’m not a stockbroker, but I’m assuming these people are losing tens of millions of dollars—that can’t feel good. There are a lot of cheaper ways to unwind. But they choose to come here because they love the music. People need music now more than ever.”

“This is a place people come to forget—so it’s really hard to tell,” said a dignified bald bartender in a regal vest.

Back at the bar, a gent named Michael, who said he works for a debt restitution firm, said the place seemed unscathed by the recession. He lives in Palm Beach, was in town for a Sunday meeting. He said it’s a buyer’s market for those in the credit trade: Four cents on the dollar instead of ten. “Come to think of it, I think it’s more packed in here than I’ve ever seen it.”

The crowd was getting louder. Eyes turned away from the slick dude and Botoxed blonde, who were back from the night before and being gross.

An investment banker named Sinclair said he liked the candles. He was rubbing the hand of his pretty girlfriend Amanda. “We were just talking about the Titanic and how the ship was sinking and everyone kept partying as the ship sank into that bitter cold water,” he said.

“I’m only buying shotgun shells and potable water,” he added. “And food!” Later, they zoomed off on his Ducati.

Another young couple—she in white spotted fur, he in gray tweed overcoat—made a beeline for the door. I gave chase. Had the young man’s credit card been rejected? Was he itching to splurge on Champagne and hotel sheets? They walked through the revolving door into a vacated yellow cab whose door was left ajar by the previous fare who had already swept into the hotel.

A tinkling sound blew up from the south: Oktay Urga, 24, one month off the boat from Istanbul, sweating under a knit cap, said a couple had paid him $30 to chug them up from 42nd Street in his pedicab. 

“This job is not good, sir. It is a lucky job. One day I make 50, the other guy say he make 300. I don’t want this job, but I have to take it.”

He wants to get his master’s in public administration.

“I am Kurdish. It is not good for me there. Every time the teacher looks the exam and sees I am Kurdish, he fail me. They are always watching. They want to kill me.”

Sunday night. On the way uptown my taxi driver asked if I’d heard about the guy throwing his shoes at President Bush. “This is very embarrassing for Bush,” he said. I said that it was more embarrassing for the guy who threw his shoes. As we pulled up at the Carlyle, he said America should feel embarrassed about thinking it was a good idea to go around invading other countries. The awning of the Carlyle was impossibly clean-looking, as if someone had steam-pressed it. A bundled-up elderly couple passed; the woman said to her husband: “I hear even they had a huge sale, and sold everything.”

Inside, Cynthia and Wayne Davis, of Charleston, S.C., were celebrating their 36th anniversary.

“The city is packed! Where’s the recession?,” said Mrs. Davis. She wore a green silk blouse; her wrists and ears and neck glittered with gold and diamonds. She said they come here every year “to fall in love all over again.”

“This is a city of romance and vibrancy and character,” she said. On her fingers she counted off the various department stores she had visited over the weekend, and said the whole time she was asking herself, “Where’s the recession? Now I don’t know if people were buying anything.”

Mr. Davis, who is in “international transportation,” said, “It brings out the best of us. This is the most romantic city in the—”

“He’s the most romantic man in the world. He really—”

“No, but it’s really about the romance and the laughter.”

“Doesn’t he look like Robert Wagner? And don’t I look a little like Shirley MacLaine? She’s my great aunt, you know,” said Mrs. Davis, nodding.

“Yeah, but I love you more,” said Mr. Davis. “I loved you more yesterday, but I think I love you even more today.” One of the gifts he’d purchased for his wife that day was a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“We lit a candle for lost souls,” he said. “Now more than ever is a time to pray for lost souls.”

THE NEXT DAY I spoke with the hotel’s general manager, James McBride, who was in Dix Bay huddling with Rosewood executives about next year’s budget for their resorts in the Caribbean. He said business at the Carlyle was up 8 percent on the year. Last weekend both the $15,000-a-night Empire suite, which occupies both the 28th and 29th floors, and room 1812, where Jackie O. used to live ($5,000 a night), were occupied.

Monday night. Woody Allen on the clarinet at Café Carlyle. The show has been sold out every night this season, just like it has been for the last decade. Tickets are $150; $70 for standing room.

The couple sitting across from me was from Jacksonville, Fla. They visit New York every year. “We finally decided to splurge,” the man said. Earlier that afternoon, he’d bought a sweater, which at 40 percent off was still more money than he would normally have spent on a sweater  For dinner, he and his wife each had the $55 Dover sole.

Woody took the stage. Silence as he quickly peeled off a brown sweater and pieced together his old clarinet, his head down. He softly suggested “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” to the banjo player, who passed the message along to the rest of the band. Once the music got going, it didn’t stop, save for a few brief pauses between songs. Woody’s cheeks inflated to what appeared to be half of his body size. The actress Stockard Channing sat staring and smiling.

After the show I spoke with Woody.

“We’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, 35 years or something, 40 years, and we just enjoy playing,” he said. “We’d be happy to play in our living room for ourselves—at least I would be—but the band likes to play for people, so I play for people. “

Anything to say about the recession’s impact on New York?

“I haven’t noticed it yet,” he said. “I’m sure during the upcoming year, it’ll hit, and I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Mr. Allen, can I just shake your hand?” a woman interjected.

“Sure, but don’t get ink on you.”

I spoke to the great Elaine Stritch, who lives in the hotel in a large, corner, one-room apartment—what would be called a “bed sit”—on the lobby phone.

“Walk up and down Madison Avenue and there are a lot of empty storefronts, places that are for rent, that’s what scares me,” she said when I asked about the recession. But! Sure, some Broadway shows are closing, but that might not be all bad. “We need more shinola and less shit,” she said. “All due respect to the Disney Company, but you know, they could cool it a little.

“I think a lot of people are going to come out of this better off,” she continued. “I think it’ll be good for people to have to go through this and make sacrifices and come out on the other side. And maybe, hopefully, people will start to care a little more about their fellow man than they did before. And they’ll start helping their fellow man and then maybe they can start feeling better about themselves. We’ve got to help each other out, you know, it’s the only way.”

smorgan@observer.com

Surprisingly, she seems comfortable in the close proximity, with no proscenium arch to protect her from the unwashed masses. Of course, she does live upstairs, making this the first job in years for which she hasn’t needed to ask for a car and driver. But the crowd (there is always a crowd) gives her ballast, and provides her frisky brio something to play with. Don’t misunderstand: It’s not that Elaine Stritch has gone soft. She’s still salty as a sardine, dry as gin and rough as a cob. Repeating the word “fucking” half a dozen times in 20 seconds to demonstrate how many ways you can say “fucking” without ever actually fucking isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a convent-bred girl raised on Amy Vanderbilt’s rules of etiquette. But the audience—suits, pearls and no slackers—wolfs it down like Beluga. And even when she’s dancing on a tree limb with a saw in her hand, her seasoned mannerisms and her split-second timing are the stuff that wins at the finish line. The sideways glances that Dame Edna knows so well, the furrowed-brow expressions like biting down on an exotic canapé of pickled rattlesnake—you find yourself laughing even when she just stands there!

Fortunately, she does a great deal more. In a stream of well-rehearsed observations that sound improvised, she muses about everything from self-help books (“Serenity is call-waiting”) to her love affairs with Jack Cassidy, the juvenile lead in a Mame tour, a singer named Tony, and a man ordering a brandy stinger in the reading room of the Savoy Hotel in London. Thank God she leaves Rock Hudson out of this one, but she does tell a funny story about a disastrous blind date with Frank Sinatra. He insulted her. She insulted him. They both survived. In its delightful stream of consciousness, the show is positively Faulknerian. She calls it “Elaine Stritch at Home at the Carlyle.” Like Eloise at home at the Plaza. And not too far away, either. Stritch is 80. Eloise was 6. But they were on the same page.

Oh, yes. She also sings. Renée Fleming isn’t going to lose any sleep about this, but even in her voice of Gravel Gertie sandpaper, Elaine Stritch is such a great interpreter of lyrics that she should be on every young cabaret singer’s see-and-learn list. Accompanied by a six-piece band headed by pianist Rob Bowman, she illustrates why Noël Coward and Cole Porter are her forte, of course, but half-talking her way through the Kurt Weill–Ogden Nash classic “That’s Him” is a graduate course in music education. I’ve never heard Lorenz Hart’s bittersweet lyrics to “He Was Too Good to Me” sung with so much piercing wisdom. And absolutely nobody has found the same truths in Stephen Sondheim’s “Could I Leave You” from Follies, turning it into an aria of moment-to-moment Stanislavsky acting that suggests a cabaret revue at the Actors’ Studio—rueful, cynical and devastating. Interspersing Coward’s catty lyrics to “I Went to a Marvelous Party” with memories of a few drunken parties of her own is undeniable fun, but she knows her way around the serrated edges of a ballad, too.

Hers are the experiences you don’t often find on a cabaret stage. Alcoholism, diabetes, paramedics and meeting the Bushes at the White House can get a bit sticky-wicket, but she self-indulges in it uniquely, marching to the beat of her own tambourine with candor, charm and brittle humor. And why not? She’s crowded a lot of life, love and gossip-column punch lines into 80 years. She can pretty much do and say whatever the hell she wants. Showbiz isn’t always kind to the people who dedicate their lives to it. But with all the wrinkles in her life seamlessly smoothed, her special brand of narcissism is inevitable and easy to forgive. Short of canonization, I can’t imagine what’s left for her to accomplish, but I hope I’m around to watch her do it. Elaine Stritch owes me $14.50. That’s the price of an apple martini at the Carlyle bar, where I was forced to watch her crowded show on a barstool. Just kidding. The drink was worth every penny, and so was she.

Oh, Julianne!

At the movies, some plucky ladies with a lot to give are giving it all they’ve got—and then some. From her rich and versatile scrapbook of women with grit, Julianne Moore deserves a medal for The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Based on the book of the same name by Terry Ryan, about her mother Evelyn, it’s an American patchwork quilt of a movie, interspersed with humor and tears, and with a fine feeling for the nostalgia of the period. But Lord, let us praise Julianne Moore, who lifts it above and beyond the banality of a TV sitcom until it sprouts wings.

Evelyn Ryan was a bright Ohio housewife with a flair for words who gave up her dream of becoming a newspaper reporter when she married her husband Kelly (played with relish and even some pathos by Woody Harrelson) and turned into an overworked, unfulfilled, housebound mound of fertility whose most stimulating challenge in life was scraping enough nickels together to pay the milkman. Kelly was a cheerful, good-for-nothing drunk who loved his wife and kids, but he spent so much money at the liquor store that there was never anything left of his weekly paycheck to buy groceries.

The movie tells the saga of Evelyn’s struggle to feed, clothe and educate her children while miraculously managing to keep a roof over their heads, in a narrative pop-50’s style. “If I can pause for a moment in the story, I’d like to explain my marriage,” Evelyn says to the viewers, and darned if she doesn’t make it clear as a Mason jar. While the soundtrack plays bouncy retro hits like “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers and “Wheel of Fortune” by Kay Starr, Evelyn’s own windfall comes in the form of contests (“I’m glad I used Dial because … ”), jingles, rhymes and slogans. In 10 years, the Ryans won a complete set of Revere Ware, a variety of convertibles and station wagons, a working oil well, two ice buckets, galoshes for the whole family, a supermarket sweepstakes that stacked their fridge with popsicles and caviar, 15 ice crushers, a kennel of dog food, a Brownie camera, an outboard motor, a lifetime supply of bird seed and a pony which they sold to pay the electric bill. Somehow, Evelyn always managed to survive every crisis at the 11th hour of desperation—the film’s tensest scene shows the movers carrying out the furniture when, at the moment of bankruptcy and mortgage foreclosure, the phone rings and Evelyn beats out 250,000 competitors in a Dr. Pepper contest. In the long haul, she sent all of her kids to college, two of the boys became ballplayers with the Detroit Tigers, and the rest turned into nurses, lawyers, businessmen, policemen and teachers. One daughter became a writer and penned The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, the memoir about her mother on which this film is based. This is a nice gesture and an evident work of love, because Evelyn Ryan was a selfless and terminally optimistic woman who gave domestic ingenuity new meaning.

But the author of the original book, as well as first-time writer-director Jane Anderson, who adapted it for the screen, have fallen so in love with this lovable woman’s heroism that they’ve overlooked the sinister violence and mental illness gnawing at her family’s foundation. Even when he trashes the house, deprives the children of the simplest childhood joys and beats up their mother so severely that she ends up in the hospital, Dad is always forgiven as a jerk who didn’t really know any better. And Mr. Harrelson plays him that way. This is a despicable character, and we are led to believe he’s just a real card. The scenes of domestic abuse are matters of no more serious consequence than a tax audit. He even breaks down in tears after he’s through bashing his wife bloody. Some viewers may offer a more aggressively repugnant response. This is a minor caveat.

To be fair, there is much to enjoy. Director Anderson, who helmed the riveting TV movie Normal with Tom Wilkinson as a husband and father demanding a sex change, gets the same kind of unexpected, offbeat reaction to abnormal psychology out of the Ryan family’s dilemmas. Ms. Moore’s radiant central performance makes the movie dance. The period flavors of tacky off-the-rack fashions, vinyl dinette sets, ozone-polluting cars and American home life punctuated by noisy television commercials are carefully brought to life, and at times the jingle singers shamelessly marketing Evelyn Ryan’s musical product placements step right out of the family Philco to chirp away on stovetops and washing machines. This is a thin wafer of a film, but it’s got good intentions and I don’t want to get too testy. There’s still a lot to make you merry, so if you want to relax and have a cloudless escape from routine, pure pleasure is guaranteed.

Fear of Flying?

What Flightplan would be without Jodie Foster, I don’t even want to think about. As an American wife in Germany whose husband is pushed off a rooftop and whose 6-year-old daughter disappears on the night flight from Berlin to New York with Daddy’s coffin in the hold, Ms. Foster quickly and understandably goes ballistic. Worse still, she thinks she’s already spotted the two Arabs in the first row watching her house; they might be kidnappers, but there’s no record of her child on the passenger manifest and she can’t find her boarding pass. With 400 passengers on the E-474 jumbo jet already scared out of their wits, the mystery thickens when the air marshal trying to help her (Peter Sarsgaard) turns out to be part of a much more sinister plot involving hijacking, bomb smuggling and a threat to blow the plane to smithereens.

All of which leaves Mom to break out of her handcuffs, smash her way through the restroom ceiling and crawl through the electrical wiring into every conceivable locked compartment on the aircraft—a job for which she is well-suited, ho ho, since she works as an aircraft engineer who designs planes and knows the architecture from stem to stern better than the pilot. What begins as a credible script with plausible dialogue eventually falls apart somewhere over Newfoundland.

The big problem with Flightplan is that it takes forever to get the red herrings out of the way, then explains so much so fast that you end up saying things like “Huh?” German director Robert Schwentke bulks up the suspense early, but already exploring every scare you can find at 37,000 feet, he runs out of speed fast. With no idea how to get the characters out of all the contrived thrills, he explains everything in the final 10 minutes. Whatever you thought was real in the far-fetched plot ends up stretching credulity to the snapping point. This movie could do irreparable harm to the already beleaguered airplane industry. People who are afraid of flying now will probably never book another flight.

Jodie Foster’s no-nonsense craftsmanship sort of gets you through the turbulence. First you suspect she might be crazy. But by the time she finds out what happened to her child and starts detonating bombs, you begin to realize she’s been spending entirely too much time at the gym. She’s such a valuable commodity that I wish she’d spend her time making better movies. She is also resourceful, but she can’t save Flightplan.

Surprisingly, she seems comfortable in the close proximity, with no proscenium arch to protect her from the unwashed masses. Of course, she does live upstairs, making this the first job in years for which she hasn’t needed to ask for a car and driver. But the crowd (there is always a crowd) gives her ballast, and provides her frisky brio something to play with. Don’t misunderstand: It’s not that Elaine Stritch has gone soft. She’s still salty as a sardine, dry as gin and rough as a cob. Repeating the word “fucking” half a dozen times in 20 seconds to demonstrate how many ways you can say “fucking” without ever actually fucking isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a convent-bred girl raised on Amy Vanderbilt’s rules of etiquette. But the audience—suits, pearls and no slackers—wolfs it down like Beluga. And even when she’s dancing on a tree limb with a saw in her hand, her seasoned mannerisms and her split-second timing are the stuff that wins at the finish line. The sideways glances that Dame Edna knows so well, the furrowed-brow expressions like biting down on an exotic canapé of pickled rattlesnake—you find yourself laughing even when she just stands there!

Fortunately, she does a great deal more. In a stream of well-rehearsed observations that sound improvised, she muses about everything from self-help books (“Serenity is call-waiting”) to her love affairs with Jack Cassidy, the juvenile lead in a Mame tour, a singer named Tony, and a man ordering a brandy stinger in the reading room of the Savoy Hotel in London. Thank God she leaves Rock Hudson out of this one, but she does tell a funny story about a disastrous blind date with Frank Sinatra. He insulted her. She insulted him. They both survived. In its delightful stream of consciousness, the show is positively Faulknerian. She calls it “Elaine Stritch at Home at the Carlyle.” Like Eloise at home at the Plaza. And not too far away, either. Stritch is 80. Eloise was 6. But they were on the same page.

Oh, yes. She also sings. Renée Fleming isn’t going to lose any sleep about this, but even in her voice of Gravel Gertie sandpaper, Elaine Stritch is such a great interpreter of lyrics that she should be on every young cabaret singer’s see-and-learn list. Accompanied by a six-piece band headed by pianist Rob Bowman, she illustrates why Noël Coward and Cole Porter are her forte, of course, but half-talking her way through the Kurt Weill–Ogden Nash classic “That’s Him” is a graduate course in music education. I’ve never heard Lorenz Hart’s bittersweet lyrics to “He Was Too Good to Me” sung with so much piercing wisdom. And absolutely nobody has found the same truths in Stephen Sondheim’s “Could I Leave You” from Follies, turning it into an aria of moment-to-moment Stanislavsky acting that suggests a cabaret revue at the Actors’ Studio—rueful, cynical and devastating. Interspersing Coward’s catty lyrics to “I Went to a Marvelous Party” with memories of a few drunken parties of her own is undeniable fun, but she knows her way around the serrated edges of a ballad, too.

Hers are the experiences you don’t often find on a cabaret stage. Alcoholism, diabetes, paramedics and meeting the Bushes at the White House can get a bit sticky-wicket, but she self-indulges in it uniquely, marching to the beat of her own tambourine with candor, charm and brittle humor. And why not? She’s crowded a lot of life, love and gossip-column punch lines into 80 years. She can pretty much do and say whatever the hell she wants. Showbiz isn’t always kind to the people who dedicate their lives to it. But with all the wrinkles in her life seamlessly smoothed, her special brand of narcissism is inevitable and easy to forgive. Short of canonization, I can’t imagine what’s left for her to accomplish, but I hope I’m around to watch her do it. Elaine Stritch owes me $14.50. That’s the price of an apple martini at the Carlyle bar, where I was forced to watch her crowded show on a barstool. Just kidding. The drink was worth every penny, and so was she.

Oh, Julianne!

At the movies, some plucky ladies with a lot to give are giving it all they’ve got—and then some. From her rich and versatile scrapbook of women with grit, Julianne Moore deserves a medal for The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Based on the book of the same name by Terry Ryan, about her mother Evelyn, it’s an American patchwork quilt of a movie, interspersed with humor and tears, and with a fine feeling for the nostalgia of the period. But Lord, let us praise Julianne Moore, who lifts it above and beyond the banality of a TV sitcom until it sprouts wings.

Evelyn Ryan was a bright Ohio housewife with a flair for words who gave up her dream of becoming a newspaper reporter when she married her husband Kelly (played with relish and even some pathos by Woody Harrelson) and turned into an overworked, unfulfilled, housebound mound of fertility whose most stimulating challenge in life was scraping enough nickels together to pay the milkman. Kelly was a cheerful, good-for-nothing drunk who loved his wife and kids, but he spent so much money at the liquor store that there was never anything left of his weekly paycheck to buy groceries.

The movie tells the saga of Evelyn’s struggle to feed, clothe and educate her children while miraculously managing to keep a roof over their heads, in a narrative pop-50’s style. “If I can pause for a moment in the story, I’d like to explain my marriage,” Evelyn says to the viewers, and darned if she doesn’t make it clear as a Mason jar. While the soundtrack plays bouncy retro hits like “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers and “Wheel of Fortune” by Kay Starr, Evelyn’s own windfall comes in the form of contests (“I’m glad I used Dial because … ”), jingles, rhymes and slogans. In 10 years, the Ryans won a complete set of Revere Ware, a variety of convertibles and station wagons, a working oil well, two ice buckets, galoshes for the whole family, a supermarket sweepstakes that stacked their fridge with popsicles and caviar, 15 ice crushers, a kennel of dog food, a Brownie camera, an outboard motor, a lifetime supply of bird seed and a pony which they sold to pay the electric bill. Somehow, Evelyn always managed to survive every crisis at the 11th hour of desperation—the film’s tensest scene shows the movers carrying out the furniture when, at the moment of bankruptcy and mortgage foreclosure, the phone rings and Evelyn beats out 250,000 competitors in a Dr. Pepper contest. In the long haul, she sent all of her kids to college, two of the boys became ballplayers with the Detroit Tigers, and the rest turned into nurses, lawyers, businessmen, policemen and teachers. One daughter became a writer and penned The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, the memoir about her mother on which this film is based. This is a nice gesture and an evident work of love, because Evelyn Ryan was a selfless and terminally optimistic woman who gave domestic ingenuity new meaning.

But the author of the original book, as well as first-time writer-director Jane Anderson, who adapted it for the screen, have fallen so in love with this lovable woman’s heroism that they’ve overlooked the sinister violence and mental illness gnawing at her family’s foundation. Even when he trashes the house, deprives the children of the simplest childhood joys and beats up their mother so severely that she ends up in the hospital, Dad is always forgiven as a jerk who didn’t really know any better. And Mr. Harrelson plays him that way. This is a despicable character, and we are led to believe he’s just a real card. The scenes of domestic abuse are matters of no more serious consequence than a tax audit. He even breaks down in tears after he’s through bashing his wife bloody. Some viewers may offer a more aggressively repugnant response. This is a minor caveat.

To be fair, there is much to enjoy. Director Anderson, who helmed the riveting TV movie Normal with Tom Wilkinson as a husband and father demanding a sex change, gets the same kind of unexpected, offbeat reaction to abnormal psychology out of the Ryan family’s dilemmas. Ms. Moore’s radiant central performance makes the movie dance. The period flavors of tacky off-the-rack fashions, vinyl dinette sets, ozone-polluting cars and American home life punctuated by noisy television commercials are carefully brought to life, and at times the jingle singers shamelessly marketing Evelyn Ryan’s musical product placements step right out of the family Philco to chirp away on stovetops and washing machines. This is a thin wafer of a film, but it’s got good intentions and I don’t want to get too testy. There’s still a lot to make you merry, so if you want to relax and have a cloudless escape from routine, pure pleasure is guaranteed.

Fear of Flying?

What Flightplan would be without Jodie Foster, I don’t even want to think about. As an American wife in Germany whose husband is pushed off a rooftop and whose 6-year-old daughter disappears on the night flight from Berlin to New York with Daddy’s coffin in the hold, Ms. Foster quickly and understandably goes ballistic. Worse still, she thinks she’s already spotted the two Arabs in the first row watching her house; they might be kidnappers, but there’s no record of her child on the passenger manifest and she can’t find her boarding pass. With 400 passengers on the E-474 jumbo jet already scared out of their wits, the mystery thickens when the air marshal trying to help her (Peter Sarsgaard) turns out to be part of a much more sinister plot involving hijacking, bomb smuggling and a threat to blow the plane to smithereens.

All of which leaves Mom to break out of her handcuffs, smash her way through the restroom ceiling and crawl through the electrical wiring into every conceivable locked compartment on the aircraft—a job for which she is well-suited, ho ho, since she works as an aircraft engineer who designs planes and knows the architecture from stem to stern better than the pilot. What begins as a credible script with plausible dialogue eventually falls apart somewhere over Newfoundland.

The big problem with Flightplan is that it takes forever to get the red herrings out of the way, then explains so much so fast that you end up saying things like “Huh?” German director Robert Schwentke bulks up the suspense early, but already exploring every scare you can find at 37,000 feet, he runs out of speed fast. With no idea how to get the characters out of all the contrived thrills, he explains everything in the final 10 minutes. Whatever you thought was real in the far-fetched plot ends up stretching credulity to the snapping point. This movie could do irreparable harm to the already beleaguered airplane industry. People who are afraid of flying now will probably never book another flight.

Jodie Foster’s no-nonsense craftsmanship sort of gets you through the turbulence. First you suspect she might be crazy. But by the time she finds out what happened to her child and starts detonating bombs, you begin to realize she’s been spending entirely too much time at the gym. She’s such a valuable commodity that I wish she’d spend her time making better movies. She is also resourceful, but she can’t save Flightplan.

As a result, they both worked with Stella Adler. The relationship between teacher and student was not typical.

"That's what they talk about when they talk about having a craft," Ms. Stritch said. "Being able to do it and then go to dinner between shows and come back and do it again. You have to train yourself-great discipline. And Marlon was not disciplined. Nor was his talent disciplined. It was wild and free, and that's what made it so sensational.

"Stella knew how to handle Marlon," Ms. Stritch continued. "She was a wise woman. And he loved her because she was honest with him. Try lying to Marlon, he would be way ahead of you."

But it was on the stage that Brando was most himself, and so it was there that their relationship-and his with Ms. Stritch-developed into something big.

"I knew Marlon long before the movies," said fellow actor Eli Wallach. "We all used to hang out together. Maureen Stapleton had a little … what they call a salon. Where the actors would go on West 52nd Street in Manhattan and gather and talk. Marlon didn't talk very much, but he was watching everyone."

"He only told the truth onstage," Ms. Stritch said, apologizing for taking refuge in someone else's observation of the actor. "I think it's true. I don't mean that he was a liar. But he couldn't talk about himself honestly offstage. He got his emotions out as an actor. And as a human being, he kept them all in. That's my take on it.

"He was so much fun. And I was madly in love with him. I just thought he was the best thing since-I mean, who wouldn't? Even girls were faking faints in dramatic classes so that Marlon would pick them up. What's the similar expression for men-you talk about a femme fatale?"

The Transom didn't know. Casanova? Don Juan? Lothario? Skirt-chaser? Roué? Lady-killer? Playboy?

The trick is, the trait is feminine, and the man himself was a paragon of masculinity. But those categories always threaten to touch at their extremities.

In fact, Brando's famed affinity for comic drag also has an early provenance in Ms. Stritch's memory. In 1944, Stella Adler had her students prepare a cabaret act.

"He lip-synched Judy Garland singing 'The Trolley Song.' And I've never laughed like that since. One of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life-Marlon Brando in drag singing, 'Clang clang clang went the trolley!'" She sang that last part to The Transom. "It was sensational," she said.

"Let me tell you something about Marlon Brando: He was funny. He had humor up the wazoo. And he was laughing at the world a lot of the time. And he was a crafty sonofabitch. He knew just how to get successful quick. He was nobody's fool but his own. That's a pretty good line-why don't you use it?"

Actor Red Buttons met Marlon Brando backstage when he was doing A Streetcar Named Desire. Mr. Buttons had gone to see Karl Malden, who was in the same outfit with him in World War II.

"They were dressing together," he said. "I just met him for two seconds. And of course, I was absolutely flabbergasted by what I saw on the stage."

In 1957 they would work together on the film Sayonara, about American servicemen stationed in Japan during the Korean War who fall in love with and marry Japanese women.

"He was the most gracious, wonderful guy," Mr. Buttons said. "Because he knew it was my first shot out of the box doing anything dramatic-I was in the comedy world-and he was just so wonderful to myself and the two Japanese girls, who were also neophytes. And he was just so gracious and wonderful. I loved the guy all my life."

Filmmaker Albert Maysles remembers filming with his brother the 1965 press junket for the release of Morituri, in which Brando played a German blackmailed by the British to impersonate an SS officer.

In the footage, Brando appears relaxed. He has fun with the interviewers. He speaks with the French press in French, the Germans in German. He tells his French interviewer that all of France, not just Mr. De Gaulle, must decide the state of that country. When asked whether government has a responsibility to African-Americans to improve their lives, instead of answering he bids an attractive, nicely made-up black woman from the street he's standing on to come over. He translates the question from French into English for her, and she answers after asking softly, "Are you Marlon Brando?" A young woman from Boston asks him about Morituri. "How old are you?" Brando asks her. She smiles. She's almost 21. Suddenly, Brando is asking the questions. And it looks like a pickup.

The interviews are collected in a film the Maysles made in 1966 called Meet Marlon Brando. In them, there's some idea that one is getting a sense of Marlon Brando the man. But, of course, the cameras are rolling.

Friends were surprised to hear of Brando's passing.

"As a matter of fact, two weeks ago I talked to him on the phone," Mr. Wallach said. "He said, 'Why are you calling me after 20 years?' I said, 'Do you want me to hang up?' He said, 'No. Let's talk.' And we talked. Today, I talked to Karl Malden for about 20 minutes, a half an hour. Karl and I are very close. But Marlon settled in on Mulholland Drive. I once visited him. There were signs all over the place. It said, 'Beware Nuclear Experiment,' 'Wild, Wild Dogs.' And it was fenced in and everything. But we had a lovely lunch. And we talked. He always pooh-poohed acting. But when you look at it, you think he might have seen the answers in the back of the book on what makes an actor. Because he galvanized you when you watched him. When he rips the tablecloth off and breaks the dishes in Streetcar, you almost jump out of your seat with the immediacy with which it was done. And he played it for quite some time.

"There was no sign when I talked to him two weeks ago that he was ill at all. So, I was very surprised."

Sir Harold Evans had been planning a trip this week to go to Los Angeles to visit his friend Marlon Brando when he found out that the actor had died. Just back in New York from getting his "K" at Buckingham Palace, Mr. Evans remembered how he met Brando. It was just 10 years ago, when he published Brando's autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, which doubled as a sustained self-assessment of Brando's career (and for which he was reportedly paid $5 million in 1994).

"I went out to see him to acquire the book with a lot of publishers going to see him," the former Random House publisher said. "Everybody was interested in Marlon Brando, and everybody tried for years to get his life story by him."

Mr. Evans said he thought Brando was short on money at the time.

"Every publisher in New York, or at least a handful I know of, went to see him in Los Angeles. It was kind of a paradox. He would audition for a part, but we were the ones auditioning for the part of publisher. Which meant being interrogated by him. Which, in retrospect, though not at the time, was an enjoyable and agreeable experience."

He said that on the way back from a "fantastically funny dinner" not far from Brando's house, Jack Nicholson, who lived down Mulholland Drive, suddenly popped out in the moonlight and said, "Hi, Marlon."

"It was an ambush," Mr. Evans recalled.

"We debated everything from anthropomorphism to drilling in Alaska to the native rights of the Sioux Indians," he said. "His range was absolutely vast. I've always been interested in Indians. I lived with the Navajo Indians when I came to America in the 1950's …. Looking back on it, I think the fact that I'd had a lifelong interest in the American Indian sort of struck a chord with him. A real Indian Indian, Sonny Mehta, went out, and I don't know whether that struck a chord with him."

Mr. Evans set him up with Falcon and the Snowman writer Robert Lindsey (who also helped Ronald Reagan with his memoirs).

"He came into New York under an assumed name and stayed somewhere on the West Side," Mr. Evans said. "I was just about to go out to Los Angeles to see him. This Thursday. I really mourn his passing. He was very stout and did order lots of ice cream when I was with him. Love is too strong a word, but I really did enjoy him."

"A person like that," Ms. Stritch said, "you never forget."

-Jake Brooks and Anna Schneider-Mayerson

because I've seen them twice and thought about them often. Their one-person

Broadway shows keep getting extended, but I still advise you to get there fast.

Acid drips from their shapely mouths when these two flamboyant legends go at

their memoirs with an ice pick, and you don't want to miss a word.

In Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends , at the Booth, the

popular harridan from Golden Girls

stomps about in her bare feet and shares her recipe for leg of lamb. Her

friends are everybody in the audience. In Elaine

Stritch at Liberty , at the Neil Simon, the veteran actress and

musical-comedy second banana with Yellow Cab hair and matchstick legs wears

Judy Garland's old rehearsal costumes and shares candid revelations about her

alcoholism. She's "at liberty" at last to be a real star-not a sexy, glamorous

kill-for star, but a "Look at me, I'm still here" star-for its own sake.

Two members of an endangered species better known in impolite

circles as "great old broads," as different as satin pumps and Reeboks, yet

both working toward the same goals: acceptance, approval and love. On a

cost-benefit analysis, they hit their marks and deliver a lot of themselves for

your money. Ms. Stritch delivers quite a bit more than that-two and a half

hours of it, to be exact. You won't go away from the intermissionless Ms. Bea

scratching your head and asking, "Huh?"-although a few people do leave the

exhausting Ms. Stritch asking, "Why?"

For Bea Arthur fans, there is plenty of Maude to go around.

Establishing squatters' rights on a stage that looks like the set from the old

Johnny Carson show, she warbles ribald songs like "What Can You Get a Nudist

for Her Birthday," and the old Sophie Tucker chestnut "You've Got to Be Loved

to Be Healthy," accompanied by the brilliant

composer-pianist Billy Goldenberg. She tells a few jokes that are so old

they're hairy and still manages to bring down the house with her Rolex eyes and

dead-on comic timing, and aims poison darts at Jerome Robbins, Pia Zadora and

Tallulah Bankhead. Getting serious, she tackles Kurt Weill's dark and difficult

"Pirate Jenny" with that voice of molten lava that sounds like a cross between

T.C. Jones and a pit bull, but one wonders if her TV fans have ever heard of The Threepenny Opera . They have

certainly heard of Angela Lansbury, with whom she sang the show-stopping "Bosom

Buddies" number in Mame . The

blue-haired grannies bussed in from Jersey applaud when they hear the name,

then gasp in collective horror, sucking the oxygen out of the orchestra, when

she gratuitously reveals that the beloved star of Murder, She Wrote can also cuss like a drunken stevedore.

Oh, well, Bea is Bea. She's been around long enough to say what's

on her raunchy and delectable mind, and surprisingly, none of it seems shocking

or mean-spirited. That's entertainment.

A close friend of Elaine

Stritch-who remains anonymous for obvious reasons-thinks the difference between

this duo of divas is simple: "Bea sets out to entertain the audience; Elaine

comes out slugging, determined to get

the audience." Well, maybe not so simple. While years of canny experience

commanding prosceniums and manipulating adoring audiences pay off for them

both, Ms. Arthur never gets personal, while Ms. Stritch saves herself the time

and sweat of writing a potentially best-selling autobiography by talking it

instead, warts and all. Bea's show is frothy and fun; Elaine goes for all the

jugulars, including her own. Bea is doing what is essentially a galvanized

cabaret act; Elaine is performing a structured piece of theatrical

psychoanalysis.

Brainy and brittle and looking like her own Al Hirschfeld

caricature, Ms. Stritch has constructed a systematic self-examination fueled by

insecurity and egotism that is sometimes up the wall and over the fence, other

times moving and funny and informed by a mortgaged

heart, and always endlessly introspective and fascinating. A great,

unique, uncontrollable, exasperating and often undervalued perfectionist-with

no Tony, Oscar, Emmy or Grammy to show for it-she has had more chances at

superstardom than just about anyone in the performing arts, and she has missed

the carousel ring each time by inches. Fortunately, she has also become one of

the great raconteurs in an industry with a short memory and an even shorter

attention span, remembering everything that ever happened in her career with a

querulous candor that is as awesome as it is long-winded. (She even remembers

the brand of booze that got her through each disaster.)

Elaine Stritch at Liberty

is a guided tour through her hits and flops; the years she wasted in a drunken

stupor as an observer of her own life ("My dressing room was like Toots

Shor's"); her failed love affairs with the

doomed and famous; her rise

from a starchy Catholic family in Detroit to the bars of Greenwich Village and

the haystacks of summer stock, where she was often upstaged by barn swallows;

her only marriage, to a man who died; and

the resolve to win battles with alcohol and diabetes that finally led

her to rise from the flames like a phoenix. She tells it all, with the

persistence and timing of machine-gun bullets, on a bare and lonely stage, her

only prop a folding chair that she shakes before the audience like a red toreador's

cape in the face of a charging bull. She may be a control freak-one accused by

friends and colleagues of being her own worst enemy-but I lapped up her courage

and panache, as well as the musical numbers she inserts to illustrate those

qualities, like a gallon of Poland Spring in the middle of the Sahara.

What a treat to finally see and hear her do "Civilization," the

song that launched her, and "Why Oh Why Do the Wrong People Travel" and "The

Ladies Who Lunch," her signature songs from Sail

Away and Company that constitute

an unforgettable master class in how to stop Broadway shows dead in their

tracks. There's real intelligence at work here. Who else would think of using

"This Is All Very New to Me," the lovely ballad from Plain and Fancy , to illustrate the first time she got drunk on

whiskey sours? Who else would open Noël Coward's heartbreaking "If Love Were

All" with the verse to "But Not for Me"? She knows the landscape. Hell, she

owns the whole goddamn territory.

So one thing troubles me.

Every story enthralls, but at someone else's expense. One of them, about

getting canned from a summer-stock production of The Women , makes amusing goats out of the beloved Marge Champion

and the legendary Gloria Swanson, but doesn't even begin to tell the whole

truth about the reasons she was fired by a unanimous cast vote. According to at

least two of the cast members, the Stritch version of the story is downright

delusional. She's kind of a genius, but Ms. Stritch has shot herself in the

foot more times than anyone else in show business-and according to her side of

the story, it's always somebody else's fault.

Naïve is not a word that applies when you think of Ms. Stritch.

So her confession that she was emotionally shredded when the crush of her life,

Rock Hudson, didn't return her passion says more about her own stupidity than

it does about his sexuality. Why knock Rock ("We all know how that turned out,

don't we?") for the sake of a cheap laugh? Surely this goes against the grain

of all the rules in the A.A. manifesto.

The one thing you come away asking is why, after all these years,

is she still so unsure of the proper positioning of that distinguished rung on

the theatrical ladder already engraved with her name on it? "My name is Elaine,

and I'm (fill in the blank yourself)." "Hello, Elaine." Time to chill-you got

the job, and we love you.

But, as she once sang in a flop by Walter and Jean Kerr called Goldilocks (she blames them, too),

"Heigh-ho, a-lackaday." If she has flaws, nobody cares. She's so clever and

special that it's no wonder the world forgives her every sin. She's smart and

tough and hip, and this is a rare chance to see her vulnerable, too. All those

bits and pieces we've been getting all these years were great, but this is the

whole package in one sitting. No discounts here. You get the entire Neiman

Marcus catalog.

Bea Arthur and Elaine Stritch. They're like glamour girls

standing on the quarter-deck of the sinking Titanic .

Excelsior! Not a question in my mind that they will survive. Nothing futuristic

here; they're both as retro as a whiff of White Shoulders. And aren't we lucky

they're both still here, landing in our laps at the same time?

Who is the Committee?

The Committee be me. But rest assured, my friends, all is always fairly adjudicated here. And the envelopes, please!

The Ben Brantley Award for the Most Amazing Observations in the History of Theater goes to … my goodness! It's Ben Brantley, chief drama critic of The New York Times ! The three-time winner of the prestigious award named after him is, of course, the inventor of the unique body-part aesthetic that first caught the Committee's attention with his rave review of the performance of Maxwell Caufield's penis–"once again on unabashed display (every inch)"–in the unforgettable gay romp My Night with Reg .

Ben's body-part aesthetic has also admired the "sly, sad" feet of Michael Gambon in David Hare's Skylight , as well as–and most appropriately–Hallie Foote's feet in The Last of the Thorntons . ("Watching her feet move becomes enough to make you cry.") Then again, there was the "curving, flexing and shrugging" of Alan Bates' shoulders in The Unexpected Man , though it was the masterly performance of Eileen Atkins' right leg in the same play that wrong-footed those of us who feel that her left leg has always been the superior actor.

"Shall we start with Eileen Atkins's right leg?" he began his review. "It is, like her left leg, slender and shapely, and it has no doubt served this fine actress well over the years as something to stand on."

Moving right along, the legs that Anna Friel stood on in Frank Wedekind's Lulu –"Ms. Friel is standing on a pair of extremely lethal weapons"–as well as the epiphany of Sir Ian McKellen's performing feet in Dance of Death , "shooting sparks in the dark mouth of mortality," took the astonished eye this season. "Lumbering across the long stage of the Broadhurst," our Ben wrote, "Mr. McKellen brings something frightening and majestic to the act of putting one wayward foot before the other …. "

To business! The Best Actor Award goes to Adrian Lester for his performance earlier this season as Hamlet in Peter Brook's production of the most hackneyed great play in history. The Committee is aware of Mr. McKellen's fine contribution, as well as the admired, twitchy Iago of Liev Schreiber and the raved-over portly prince of Simon Russell Beale in the Royal National Theatre's Hamlet . The scintillating Mr. Lester made clear how much, and how terribly, Hamlet's young life is stolen from him in this wormy, unjust world. His is the performance that surprised us the most, the one we best remember.

The nominees for Best Actress are Helen Mirren (a personal favorite of the Committee) for Dance of Death ; Kate Burton for Hedda Gabler ; Sarah Jessica Parker for Wonder of the World ; newcomer Christina Kirk for the weirdly named [sic] ; and Elaine Stritch for being Elaine Stritch. And the winner is … we have a surprise. The winner is the remarkable Christina Kirk. Ms. Mirren has won a million awards, and Ms. Stritch is about to. Let's embrace the new for once. Ms. Kirk's experience comes via the commitment and struggle of the Off Off Broadway scene. Her fresh talent is refined, assured and lovely. We have the feeling she can do anything. Christina Kirk is our Actress of the Year.

The Best Comedy goes to [sic] , Melissa James Gibson's modern Design for Living , which in its sly, droll way is the wittiest comedy of manners I've seen in many a season. This is the year of [sic] ! Apart from Best Actress Ms. Kirk, its director, Daniel Aukin of Soho Rep, takes our award for Best Director.

The Special Citation for Best Ensemble goes to the entire company of Mary Zimmerman's tender, transforming Metamorphoses .

The Pure of Heart Award goes to Rocco Landesman and all the other shyster producers of The Producers , for raising the top ticket price to $480 while hooking into the Twin Towers Fund. They say the fund will receive a percentage of the new ticket price for "several months." My, how time flies.

The award for Best Foreign Play is between Tom Stoppard's meditation on love, scholarship and A.E. Housman, The Invention of Love ; Théâtre de Complicité's extraordinary experiment, Mnemonic ; the Theatre for a New Audience's bold choice of Edward Bond's little-known seminal 1960's British drama, Saved ; and P.S. 122's import earlier in the year of Howie the Rookie , by the brilliant new Irish dramatist Mark O'Rowe. The award in a close, good fight goes to the original, savage voice and gutter poetry of Howie the Rookie . Mr. O'Rowe breaks with the Holy Trinity of Guinness, goblins and ghoulies and abandons the backwater blarney about the usual Irish werewolves and murderous old crones pissing in porridge pots to give us, at last, the authentic Dublin underclass going down swinging in the crossfire.

The Best Theater Book of the Year Award goes to our First Lady of Theater, Zoe Caldwell, for her touching and wise–and very unpretentious–memoir of her early years, I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress's Journey (W.W. Norton & Company). This born actress turns out to be a born writer. Not only that, she doesn't care for name dropping. Not only that , we love her.

The Worst Musical Ever and Proud of It Award goes to … we have a surprise. It's those wild and crazy Spandex Swedes, ABBA, back where they belong with their smash-hit British musical set in a Greek taverna, Mamma Mia! Come on all you dancing queens, feel the beat from the tambourine! The dire disco musical about coming of age in the shadow of kebabs and single parenthood was recently replaced in our charts by Andrew Lloyd Webber's soon-to-depart By Jeeves . This is what happens when you try to be nice. Hundreds of e-mails were received in protest, pointing out that not even Andrew Lloyd Webber could be worse than ABBA. Upon mature reflection, the Committee solemnly bows to popular demand. Congratulations, Mamma Mia! –still the worst musical ever and proud of it.

The Why Ask for the Moon When We Have the Stars Award goes to Mike Nichols for The Seagull .

The Best Lingerie Award goes to Isaac Mizrahi for The Women . The Best Brazilian Bikini Wax Award goes to the charming Jennifer Tilly in The Women .

The newly instituted Lifetime Achievement Award goes to an actor whom perhaps you might not know. Some 45 years ago, Henry Woolf, a schoolmate of Harold Pinter and his oldest friend, directed Mr. Pinter's first performed play, The Room , at the University of Bristol. Mr. Woolf also played the small but key role of the mysterious landlord. In the celebration of Pinter plays during the Summer Festival, The Room was revived and meticulously directed by Harold Pinter. And there was the unmistakable Henry Woolf–who's five-foot-nothing–reprising the role of the landlord for old time's sake. He had us in stitches of laughter just by sitting in a chair whose very existence seemed to puzzle him. Mr. Woolf has been a yeoman actor since he wrote to Mr. Pinter, then starting out as a repertory actor in provincial England, asking if he should try the acting lark, too. "What do you want to go into this shit house for?" Mr. Pinter replied. But Mr. Woolf did anyway, and he's been delighting audiences ever since.

You might have noticed how the Committee has cleverly avoided naming a Best Play. We must await the opening of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul , the epic he began years ago when he became fascinated by Afghanistan. If there were a Clairvoyancy Award, it would be his.

Mr. Kushner is one of the very few dramatists in America to bring the outside world onstage, the public arena into the private. Our New Year's wish for our theater is that it now move on from comforting escapism to contemporary dramas of ideas and compassion and consequence. Perhaps Homebody/Kabul will show the way.

Happier, peaceful times everyone.

palm of Elaine Stritch's hand from the first words of her glorious one-woman

show at the Public, Elaine Stritch at

Liberty . The lady comes on singing-what else?-"There's No Business Like

Show Business" in a relaxed, jaunty rendition promising sweet and bitter

ironies. Dressed in a white shirt and black tights (to show off her great

gams), her appearance suggests a certain timelessness, like a miscast Peter Pan

or a chic clown from the ages in a ladylike string of pearls. Then she stops

singing the buoyant Irving Berlin showbiz anthem for Mermanesque troupers and

looks out at us, taking life's measure through sardonic eyes. "It's like the

prostitute once said," she begins. "It's not the work, it's the stairs …. "

Ms. Stritch's stairs in the show are represented by her only

prop, a high stool, which she tends to drag around with her on the empty stage

of the Newman Theater at the Public, as if-the lady obliquely suggests-dragging

her ass round the country, town to town, show to show, even with a turkey that

you know will fold. She's 76, for heaven's sake! But forget that. Ms. Stritch

is ageless, a masterly performer of the old school, which is the only school

worth attending. The red-velvet, gold-tasseled curtain enfolding the empty

stage like a comfort blanket is the apt nod to her roots in traditional musical

theater. But Ms. Stritch is her own rasping invention, and if we don't know

that, we don't know anything about theater.

Elaine Stritch at Liberty

might have been subtitled "An Actor's Life," and the many ups and many downs of

the hard, rewarding life of this Midwestern convent girl are extraordinary.

She's right to describe herself in the show as "an existential problem in

tights." She's always been exceptionally smart, of course-maybe too smart for

her own good. She's the only actress I know of who critiqued the lunatic

performance of a fellow actress when she was onstage with her at the time. (It

was during a doomed road-company production of The Women with Gloria Swanson). She's a great storyteller, giving

us the feeling that she-and we-won't be able to resist one more for the road.

"Elaine, I never thought I'd say this," Judy Garland told her one time after a

binge till way past dawn. "But goodnight!"

Ms. Stritch's weakness for the

sauce is no secret, and she isn't shy about it here. She's too intelligent and

honest not to tell us the score. "O.K.," she explains breezily. "As long as

we're spiraling downward …. " She's confessional, but not particularly maudlin.

She kicked the booze 14 years ago, when she nearly died. Commonplace stage

fright and fear of aloneness were the cause. Ms. Stritch reminds us how awesome

terror can become onstage, where the art of public solitude is the highest

peak. She tells us amusingly about performing with a fellow actor after she'd

given up the comforting support of a drink or two before each show. "You mean

you're going out there alone ?" he

said incredulously.

In one of the surprising delights of the evening, the number that

she sings to mark her baptism, at 13 years of age, into the transforming,

intoxicating pleasures of a martini is a love song, "This Is All Very New to

Me," as dopily, potently sentimental as all great love songs:

This is all very new to me

This is all very fine

This is so sunny-like, sort

of funny-like,

Milk-and-honey-like feeling

of mine.

Now, it was said about Ms. Stritch 40 and more years ago that her

vocal chords made a sound as if they were wearing cleats. Her voice isn't

conventional, true. But like Noël Coward-her early champion, who became a

friend-she may not sing the best, but she knows how to. Her line readings here

are impeccable. The lyrics to the song that made her famous-"Zip," Rodgers and

Hart's immortal homage to strippers from Pal

Joey -are freshly minted:

English people don't say

clerk, they say clark.

Zip!

Anybody who says clark, is

a jark!

She's funny about herself, too. Only the young and naïve Ms.

Stritch could have thought that "heterosexual" was another word for "gay." Her

romantic life was late developing. There was the early drama-school infatuation

with Marlon Brando. "I want two things from you, Elaine," Mr. Brando told her

on a date. "Silence and distance." She was gaga over Rock Hudson. ("We all know

what a bum decision that turned out to be.") She lived with her adored husband,

John Bay, for 10 years, "until carcinoma-maximella-metastasize-iosis fucked everything up."

Elaine Stritch at Liberty ,

directed by George C. Wolfe, who understands his star's spirit of anarchy, is

billed, somewhat bizarrely, as "constructed by John Lahr"-Mr. Lahr is the New Yorker 's cultivated drama critic-and

"reconstructed by Elaine Stritch." Who constructed what, or whom, is beside the

point. The point is, this is Ms. Stritch's life, and she almost missed it. I

should say that Act II dips a little and might have been trimmed here and

there. But where? The indomitable Ms. Stritch would still be performing past

midnight, if they'd let her. The unexpected encore of "Something Good" from The Sound of Music , of all treacly

things, just about comes off. Not

with a bang, but a ditty.

Ms. Stritch's real and superior muses are the bittersweet Noël

Coward and Stephen Sondheim. Her version of Coward's "Why Do the Wrong People

Travel?" is wittily the best precisely because she resists imitating the

clipped cadences of Coward. Her desperate "The Ladies Who Lunch" from Company belongs to her, of course. It's

often imagined that Mr. Sondheim's hymn to survival from Follies , "I'm Still Here," belongs to her, too. In fact, she's

never sung it before. Yet it could have been written for her.

"Not long ago, I spoke to Stephen Sondheim about 'I'm Still

Here,'" she tells us during another high moment in the show. "And I told him I

had heard women in their 60's, 50's, 40's

sing 'I'm Still Here.' I'm still here? Still here? I mean, where they have been ?"

Well, that's when I fell in

love with Elaine Stritch. And when she sang the song to enduring in bum times

and good times, it came from a bruised and touching place, a life lived. And at

the last defiant, tumultuous chorus, she did the most astonishing thing. My, oh

my! She started to jump up and down! She was jumping for joy!

Christ knows at least I was

there

And I'm here!

Look who's here!

I'm still here!

We couldn't be gladder.