Osnes and Jordan.

Hang on to your lids, kids. I actually liked the new Broadway musical version of Bonnie and Clyde. Didn’t love it, mind you. But the show, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is polished, touching and tuneful, a worthy showcase for a few professional performers in leading roles who are vastly entertaining and amount to nothing short of major discoveries. In a dreary Broadway season of nothing but deadly letdowns, including an unspeakable sonic blast from the pitch-impaired and tonally challenged Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin as well as the dreariest second-rate production of Follies in 40 years, at least there’s something to enjoy in addition to Hugh Jackman.

The two most beloved machine-gun toting gangsters in American history have been brought to life with warm, sexy precision by the glorious singing voices of Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan. They can act, too. Forget the mixed reviews comparing them unfavorably with the stars of the 1967 Arthur Penn film. I mean, nobody looks like Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. But could they carry a tune? Ms. Osnes never grows into a movie star translation of hard-luck Bonnie. She’s not cute, vivacious, hard as nails or a model for fashion-trendy costumes. But she has an intrinsically musical instrument that projects beyond the footlights to touch the mezzanine. When she wraps her throat around a creamy ballad like “You Love Who You Love” in an attempt to justify her guilty passion for a hot-blooded bank robber like Clyde Barrow, she has the power to move you to tears. She was a terrific second banana to Sutton Foster in the frisky revival of Anything Goes before she created the role of Bonnie Parker in San Diego, and if the show closes prematurely, I sincerely hope to meet up with her again in a cabaret spotlight in one of New York’s swankier supper clubs. As for the boyishly handsome Mr. Jordan, who dazzled as Tony in the recent West Side Story resuscitation, he can stomp the stage to toothpicks on a rousing number like “Raise a Little Hell” or half-rise naked from a bathtub on a bruising love song with equal aplomb worthy of a closer look (no pun intended). Rising close to their marks and holding her own corner of the stage in every scene is Melissa Van Der Schyff, a knockout belter with a name that regrettably comes close to a fatal detour on the road to stardom; most people have forgotten it already. She plays the sympathetic and pivotal role of Blanche Barrow, the wife of Clyde’s brother Buck and a woman who sacrifices her ideals and self-respect for love, which won Estelle Parsons an Oscar. She stops the show as a kind of operatic Dolly Parton, while the audience begs for more.

Harkening back to the Depression years, director Jeff Calhoun wastes no time getting to the violence. The curtain rises on the movie’s final scene—a bullet-riddled Model T containing the blood-splattered bodies of the country’s most cherished romantic outlaws, gunned down on a Louisiana highway in 1934, rolls out onstage for a good look before the first song. Then the fact-crammed book by Ivan Menchell begins to assemble the reasons why two hormone-busting kids from a dusty, life-wasting butt end of Texas rose from unlucky teenagers to the Most Wanted List in sheriff’s offices throughout the Southwest. Clyde was the tortured son of a sharecropper from Telico, Texas (“That man puts the Hell in Hello!”). Bonnie was an eager, easily manipulated, muffin-headed waitress from Rowena who spent her spare change on movie magazines and helped Clyde break out of jail after he promised to get her to Hollywood. His role model is Al Capone, and she worships Clara Bow. Their story unfolds against a backdrop of wooden slats against which you are educated and fascinated by yellowing newspaper articles, mug shots and arresting Police Gazette daguerreotypes of faces and scenes right out of The Grapes of Wrath—projections bordering on folk art, depicting starving children, breadlines, families in tents and President Roosevelt’s guarantee of a New Deal. Slowly, you begin to understand why Bonnie and Clyde broke the law to ensure a better life they could not afford. By the time they realize they’ve crossed over to the dark side, their love duet, “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” has the resigned element of an adrenalin-pumped future that is anything but rosy. What gives the show its grit, urgency and complexity is the frailty, the flaws and the courage of two tragic lovers—good and evil, brave and foolish—defying the odds to capture the imagination of a nation that wanted to believe a pair of hearts could still beat in the middle of dustbowl economics, prejudice and hopelessness.

Jordan and Osnes.

There are irritating intrusions, including signing autographs after a robbery while the police sirens close in, arguing about whose name should go first in the front-page newspaper stories (Bonnie insists on the same “Bonnie and Clyde” she uses for the title of her long, ballad-shape poem that was published after their deaths, insisting, “Sorry, honey, but nothin’ rhymes with Clyde and Bonnie”). Then there is the score, mediocre at worst, but sometimes a great deal better than that. I’ve never been a fan of Don Black’s corny kindergarten lyrics to James Bond theme songs (“Thunderball,” anyone?) and lugubrious Andrew Lloyd Webber scores, or of composer Frank Wildhorn’s cloying music for boring period pieces (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Jekyll and Hyde, The Civil War), but Mr. Wildhorn does his best, most diversified work here. He has never settled on a uniformly identifiable style, which is O.K., I guess, as long as the style you settle on is not lachrymose musical sludge. This time, his music is surprisingly melodic and versatile. For two rebels with a cause outside the law, trapped victims of the Depression, the romantic, deluded protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde invite an eclectic and restless surge of beats and rhythms and styles, moving through the cycles of doom with reckless fury. The two stars do their darnedest to flesh out both the danger and romance that turned them into folk heroes, and Mr. Wildhorn’s eclectic score gives them room to test their contrasting moods: country, Broadway, blues, and Texas two-step music fit for a county fair, with banjos, rodeo fiddles and, am I wrong, or did I hear a harmonica somewhere in the orchestra pit? Jeff Calhoun sews it together on a Depression canvas broad enough to reflect a whole decade. I’m glad he included actual photos of the real Bonnie and Clyde. She was no Faye Dunaway, and he was plain as a plow mule in a tobacco field.

And so we’ve got ourselves here a down-home musical with guns and whiskey and take-home tunes. You could do worse. Is it great? It’s no My Fair Lady. Will it go down in Broadway history as a milestone? Probably not. But I found it tuneful, lively and highly enjoyable. Just ignore the mixed reviews, and have a rompin’, stompin’ good time.

rreed@observer.com

Faye Dunaway (Photo from Patrick McMullan)

Some people just have it all. Celebrity, a loyal fan following, a sweet apartment—you know the drill. After developments in her New York living situation, however, it seems that Faye Dunaway has none of these things. At least according to a lawyer representing her landlord.

Ms. Dunaway agreed earlier this week to vacate her rent stabilized apartment, The Times reports. She had been renting the Upper East Side pad since 1994, most recently paying $1,040 per month for her one-bedroom walk-up. Over the summer, however, her landlord filed suit claiming that as New York was not the actresses primary residence Ms. Dunaway was not entitled to rent stabilized prices.

A lawyer for Ms. Dunaway's landlord, Craig Charie, dished out a major diss after she agreed to move out, claiming that her faded stardust would do little to raise the apartment's value.

Mr. Charie said on Tuesday that she had not left anything there, adding that it was unlikely that brokers would mention to potential renters that Ms. Dunaway had lived in the apartment. He said the age group in the market for such an apartment was unlikely to know who Ms. Dunaway is.

“The moniker of her name won’t make it more remarkable for the audience of who is going to rent it,” Mr. Charie said. “If Britney Spears rented it, it would fly off the market.”

Zing! That was below the belt, Mr. Charie! While perhaps no ScarJo, Ms. Dunaway, to be fair, should probably have coughed up the full price for the place. Royalties from Chinatown not paying like they used to?

eknutsen@observer.com

Ms. Dunaway’s Crawford is one of the most reckless and extreme performances any star has ever dared. Ms. Dunaway goes at the role as if she were exacting revenge for every indignity and slight, every pass made by some Hollywood sleazeball, every ounce of worry expounded over a wrinkle or a bit of sagging flesh, that she or any female star has ever endured. She wants to stand, bloodied and unbowed, on the corpse of the star system—which, of course, is a way of making sure she’s a bigger star than ever. In Mommie Dearest, Ms. Dunaway both tries to slay the demon of stardom and incarnate it. That this terrifying and astonishing performance is regarded as camp says more about the squeamishness of audiences than about the conflicted fearlessness of its star.

You don’t go to a movie like Mommie Dearest out of innocent impulses. Audiences wanted to see the physical and verbal abuse Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina, had detailed in her memoir, published in 1978, the year after Crawford died. But the book’s brand of tabloid kicks is simply the flipside of fan-mag puffery. The movie supplied those moments—the infamous nighttime rampage over the “wire hangers” in Christina’s closet; Crawford’s obsession with cleanliness and order. But Ms. Dunaway gave audiences something they didn’t want: a sense of how they helped create the monster before them.

When Ms. Dunaway’s Joan, her face contorted in rage and smeared in greasy cold cream, leers out at us brandishing the wire hanger she’s about to beat Christina with, it’s a Bizarro World recasting of the preceding scene: Joan greeting the fans and reporters outside her house after she wins the Oscar for Mildred Pierce. She tells the crowd that they and they alone are responsible for giving her this honor. But if the adoring fans put that Oscar in Crawford’s hand, they are complicit in putting the wire hanger there as well. Not that the movie blames anyone but Joan for her explosions. But it understands her rage as coming from her fear of losing the public’s adoration.

You don’t have to know anything about Crawford’s early scrabbling life as a waitress and shopgirl (and the movie doesn’t tell you about it) to empathize with the particularly American hunger in Ms. Dunaway’s performance. It’s the hunger for acclaim and security, the gratitude for achieving it, the fear it will go away and the resentment at whatever threatens it. That’s what those wire hangers represent to Joan: a return to the dreariness she clawed her way out of. Everything Joan does to herself—the skin scoured in scalding water; the face held in bracing bandages while she sleeps, then submerged into ice upon waking; the punishing exercise regimen; the rigid discipline in everything from studying a script to autographing photos; the fawning supplication to photographers and celebrity scribes; a life in which every moment is lived as “Joan Crawford”—all of these are Joan’s sacrifices to the gods of stardom. And like anyone who believes in the gods, she lives in fear of their wrath. When she’s summoned to the office of Louis B. Mayer (Howard Da Silva), who dismisses her from her MGM contract after years with the studio, you understand what she has to be afraid of.

As the child Christina, Mara Hobel gives a very creepy performance; she’s less a child than an automaton playing Joan’s idealized notion of a child. Ms. Hobel’s two big confrontation scenes with Ms. Dunaway go right to the heart of the worst parent-child eruptions you’ve ever been party to, the kind where each side knows exactly what buttons to push to wound the other. (The older Christina, played by Diana Scarwid, has become more subtle and accomplished at striking back.)

Those scenes are a specialty of Robert Getchell, the screenwriter whose best work (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Sweet Dreams) understands the barbed emotional slapstick that takes place between parents and children, husbands and wives. Getchell wrote the original screenplay, and everyone I know who has read it has, to a person, called it one of the best film scripts they know. But the script was reportedly rejected by the original star, Anne Bancroft, and then not reinstated when she left the project. It was then worked on by Tracy Hotchner, and finally cobbled together by the director, Frank Perry, and the producer, Frank Yablans. Maybe that’s why huge swatches of the story seem to have been cut in the last half. Perry’s direction is, at best, serviceable: He brings it no imagination or sensibility to dovetail with its star. The upside is that nothing distracts from Ms. Dunaway—though now she may wish it did.

After Mommie Dearest opened to mocking reviews in the summer of 1981, Paramount quickly began selling it as camp, which is how they’re selling this new “Hollywood Royalty Edition” DVD. As a promotional gag, I was sent a pair of marbou-trimmed rubber kitchen gloves and a bottle of cleanser with “Mommie Dearest” on the label. (To their honor, both John Waters and John Epperson, the drag performer known as Lipsynka, don’t condescend to the movie in their bonus commentary).

Treating the movie as a campy, queeny bitchfest is easier than submitting to the power of Ms. Dunaway’s performance, which, in terms of what we expect from our movie glamour queens, is the emotional equivalent of watching her commit seppuku. As a widely circulated tape of a phone message she left for a Vanity Fair reporter makes clear, Ms. Dunaway loathes the film and resents the ridicule it brought her. That Ms. Dunaway did her finest work in a film about a woman who turned herself into a monster out of fear of rejection, only to wind up ashamed of a performance that should have brought her honor, says as much about that fear as anything in Mommie Dearest.

Ms. Dunaway’s Crawford is one of the most reckless and extreme performances any star has ever dared. Ms. Dunaway goes at the role as if she were exacting revenge for every indignity and slight, every pass made by some Hollywood sleazeball, every ounce of worry expounded over a wrinkle or a bit of sagging flesh, that she or any female star has ever endured. She wants to stand, bloodied and unbowed, on the corpse of the star system—which, of course, is a way of making sure she’s a bigger star than ever. In Mommie Dearest, Ms. Dunaway both tries to slay the demon of stardom and incarnate it. That this terrifying and astonishing performance is regarded as camp says more about the squeamishness of audiences than about the conflicted fearlessness of its star.

You don’t go to a movie like Mommie Dearest out of innocent impulses. Audiences wanted to see the physical and verbal abuse Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina, had detailed in her memoir, published in 1978, the year after Crawford died. But the book’s brand of tabloid kicks is simply the flipside of fan-mag puffery. The movie supplied those moments—the infamous nighttime rampage over the “wire hangers” in Christina’s closet; Crawford’s obsession with cleanliness and order. But Ms. Dunaway gave audiences something they didn’t want: a sense of how they helped create the monster before them.

When Ms. Dunaway’s Joan, her face contorted in rage and smeared in greasy cold cream, leers out at us brandishing the wire hanger she’s about to beat Christina with, it’s a Bizarro World recasting of the preceding scene: Joan greeting the fans and reporters outside her house after she wins the Oscar for Mildred Pierce. She tells the crowd that they and they alone are responsible for giving her this honor. But if the adoring fans put that Oscar in Crawford’s hand, they are complicit in putting the wire hanger there as well. Not that the movie blames anyone but Joan for her explosions. But it understands her rage as coming from her fear of losing the public’s adoration.

You don’t have to know anything about Crawford’s early scrabbling life as a waitress and shopgirl (and the movie doesn’t tell you about it) to empathize with the particularly American hunger in Ms. Dunaway’s performance. It’s the hunger for acclaim and security, the gratitude for achieving it, the fear it will go away and the resentment at whatever threatens it. That’s what those wire hangers represent to Joan: a return to the dreariness she clawed her way out of. Everything Joan does to herself—the skin scoured in scalding water; the face held in bracing bandages while she sleeps, then submerged into ice upon waking; the punishing exercise regimen; the rigid discipline in everything from studying a script to autographing photos; the fawning supplication to photographers and celebrity scribes; a life in which every moment is lived as “Joan Crawford”—all of these are Joan’s sacrifices to the gods of stardom. And like anyone who believes in the gods, she lives in fear of their wrath. When she’s summoned to the office of Louis B. Mayer (Howard Da Silva), who dismisses her from her MGM contract after years with the studio, you understand what she has to be afraid of.

As the child Christina, Mara Hobel gives a very creepy performance; she’s less a child than an automaton playing Joan’s idealized notion of a child. Ms. Hobel’s two big confrontation scenes with Ms. Dunaway go right to the heart of the worst parent-child eruptions you’ve ever been party to, the kind where each side knows exactly what buttons to push to wound the other. (The older Christina, played by Diana Scarwid, has become more subtle and accomplished at striking back.)

Those scenes are a specialty of Robert Getchell, the screenwriter whose best work ( Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Sweet Dreams) understands the barbed emotional slapstick that takes place between parents and children, husbands and wives. Getchell wrote the original screenplay, and everyone I know who has read it has, to a person, called it one of the best film scripts they know. But the script was reportedly rejected by the original star, Anne Bancroft, and then not reinstated when she left the project. It was then worked on by Tracy Hotchner, and finally cobbled together by the director, Frank Perry, and the producer, Frank Yablans. Maybe that’s why huge swatches of the story seem to have been cut in the last half. Perry’s direction is, at best, serviceable: He brings it no imagination or sensibility to dovetail with its star. The upside is that nothing distracts from Ms. Dunaway—though now she may wish it did.

After Mommie Dearest opened to mocking reviews in the summer of 1981, Paramount quickly began selling it as camp, which is how they’re selling this new “Hollywood Royalty Edition” DVD. As a promotional gag, I was sent a pair of marbou-trimmed rubber kitchen gloves and a bottle of cleanser with “Mommie Dearest” on the label. (To their honor, both John Waters and John Epperson, the drag performer known as Lipsynka, don’t condescend to the movie in their bonus commentary).

Treating the movie as a campy, queeny bitchfest is easier than submitting to the power of Ms. Dunaway’s performance, which, in terms of what we expect from our movie glamour queens, is the emotional equivalent of watching her commit seppuku. As a widely circulated tape of a phone message she left for a Vanity Fair reporter makes clear, Ms. Dunaway loathes the film and resents the ridicule it brought her. That Ms. Dunaway did her finest work in a film about a woman who turned herself into a monster out of fear of rejection, only to wind up ashamed of a performance that should have brought her honor, says as much about that fear as anything in Mommie Dearest.

Beige! is also the name of a vicious new word game sweeping Manhattan. This game, invented by me and my Jonny, was created after a viewing of The Boys in the Band –remember the 1970 William Friedkin movie of Matt Crowley's 1968 hit play? (Rent it if you don't. Some say this depiction of szhooshy Manhattan gay life in the late 60's is far scarier than The Exorcist , which Friedkin went on to direct, though I myself find it quite refreshing.)

Beige!, the game, was born out of a snippet of dialogue that occurs as this movie reaches its drunken and plangent dénouement. Michael, whose nifty apartment provides the backdrop for this drawing-room tragedy, insults mincing party guest Emory (Cliff Gorman, a brilliant actor whose career was, in the eyes of the unenlightened, tainted by his overly convincing performance). Harold, the self-described "32-year-old, ugly, pockmarked Jew fairy" whose birthday party provides the raison d'être for the bulk of the shrysteria (shrill hysteria), lashes back protectively on Emory's behalf–and "beiges" the hostile Michael. Observe:

Emory: "Oh God, I'm drunk."

Michael: "A falling-down-drunk nellie queen."

Harold: "Well, that's the pot calling the kettle beige!"

Harold's seamless substitution of "beige" for "black" speaks to the magnitude and penetration of beige, the color, in the late 60's. But forget about that for the moment and focus on the brilliant way that Harold trumped Michael's opinionated aggression. Think about how useful Beige!, the game, could be to you as you go about your daily life. Beige!-ing (not to be confused with Beijing) is the ultimate weapon with which over-opinionated New Yorkers can neutralize each other's hyper-critical salvos. Example:

First New Yorker: " Chocolat ! What a wonderful movie!"

Second New Yorker: "Really? I found it sub-par and strangely uncompelling."

First New Yorker: "Well, that's the pot calling the kettle beige!"

Exit, wincing, Second New Yorker.

Seasoned Beige!-ers are now abbreviating when they go in for the kill. Example:

First New Yorker: "Are you planning to watch the Oscars?"

Second New Yorker: "That smug, self-indulgent, tedious montage of mediocrity?"

First New Yorker: "Beige!"

Be warned: playing Beige! may well teach salutary lessons to regular folk–but with more competitive friends and acquaintances, it merely ups the ante. A curvaceous female friend recently Beiged! a hypercritical foodie after he, perusing the menu, dubbed the chef's offerings "unacceptably lardy." The smarting gourmand then lashed back, misogynistically counter-Beige!-ing my friend in front of the waiter after she innocently ordered a spicy tuna roll. I'll let you figure it out.

Beige is a sleepy staple in the world of maquillage , but this season she's taking center stage. Witness the libidinous and explosive Steven Meisel ads for Dolce & Gabbana starring Leonardo DiCaprio's bit of crumpet, Gisele Bundchen. Despite her garish rhinestone-cowgirl-Madonna drag, the Brazilian beauty looks both chic and sensual. It's that beige makeup: eyes, lips, skin, nails. Even her hair has been dyed beige.

Apropos of the sexy chicness of beige, MAC has just launched an extensive new line called Skin Flicks. Start with Fleshpot sheer lipstick or the slightly darker Fondle ($13.50 each); then drench your lips with C-Thru pale nude beige "lipglass" ($11.50) and glaze your talons with Barest nail polish ($8). Skin Flicks eye shadow (Brulé, Camel, Cork and Mystery, $30 for a special limited-edition compact that includes all four colors) completes your 70's-inspired beige-athon. MAC creative director James Gager warns, "Beige is not for the meek. We call it 'the shock of the nude.'" It's available at Henri Bendel and MAC stores, or at www.maccosmetics.com.

The beige frock of the season is an asymmetrically hemmed gladiator jersey dress by Callaghan ($490 at Barneys Co-op and Bergdorf Goodman). If it's sold out by the time you call, then head over to the Kors (Michael's second line) boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue. You will find a nifty Ann Heche-ish (she's the beige icon of the 21st-century) perforated suede skirt for $455. Mr. Kors, so long regarded by us international fashion sophisticates as the King of Beige, loathes the word. I spoke to reluctant beige-riarch Michael right after his fall 2001 show (Miss Heche was head to toe in beige in the front row ... holding hands with a man!) and got an earful. "Camel or putty, now those are colors," said his highness. "Beige is a club."

Beige is indeed a club. As testimony to the power of beige, the concept, Beige the boîte de nuit has been packing them in (from Monica Lewinsky to Sophia Loren) for five years every Tuesday night at the Bowery Bar (40 East Fourth Street at the Bowery). Nobody is more surprised that the name caught on than M.C. Erich Conrad. "At the time, I thought I would give it a bland, mediocre name–in case it failed," he said. It was an instant hit, but not everybody tuned into the irony of the name. "We were pre-lounge. People didn't get the concept," said Mr. Conrad. "They showed up wearing beige."

My recommendation: Go little and often. It's worth going every week in case you hit one of Eric's unscheduled Nude Nights. As Eric says, "Flesh is the real beige."

Beige-ing your home can be dicey. It takes a maestro like beige-iast Jeffrey Bilhuber (330 East 59th Street, 308-4888) to stop it from looking like a sad attempt at subtle sophistication. Mr. Bilhuber, who freely channels the beige Halston-esque, ultra-suede chic of the 70's and did Givenchy's legendary beige New York apartment in the late 80's, believes fervently in the eternal sizzle of this hue. "It's unwavering," said Mr. Bilhuber. "Beige is the universal language."

If you can't afford Mr. Bilhuber (which is a drag, since you will miss out on some incredible interpersonal badinage), then buy one yard of beige ultra-suede ($40) from B&J Fabrics (263 West 40th Street, 354-8150). Choose from the following beige approximations: country cream, sand, camel, coffee cream and chamois. Next, borrow a staple gun from a window-dressing acquaintance and re-cover two of those fake Louis whatever chairs in your living room.

Invite friends over to admire your resourcefulness. If your amateur upholstery receives any caustic commentary–e.g., "Lumpy yet quaint," "Poignantly saggy," etc.–seize the opportunity to Beige! the offending guest. When the uncomprehending laughter has subsided–i.e., almost immediately–you will have the perfect opportunity, using your stellar example, to recruit and convert a whole new battalion of Beige!-ers.

Let the games begin.

The Thomas Crown Affair is a cool, slick, sexy and highly enjoyable caper movie that takes your mind off the heat while providing some pretty torrid temperatures of its own. Remakes are always a bad idea, but have you seen the dated 1968 original, directed by Norman Jewison, with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway? I mean, have you seen it lately? I'm sorry to say that despite McQueen's hustler glam, nothing about it holds up. A silly plot, in which he plays a Boston millionaire who robs a bank out of boredom, is further mired in corny symbolism (building sexual tension by licking their fingers and suggestively stroking the rooks and kings in a heavy-breathing game of chess), pretentious camera work (a kiss that caused a big stir at the time now seems lingeringly laughable), and glossy imagery fragmented into annoying, and seemingly interminable, split-screen nonsense. Obviously the whole thing needed a complete overhaul for this refurbishment 30 years later, and that's exactly what two-fisted action director John ( Die Hard ) McTiernan has done.

Debonair Pierce Brosnan is not as dangerous, rebellious or edgy as Steve McQueen, but Rene Russo can act circles around Faye Dunaway, and rolling around naked together they generate a lot more sexual passion than any scene between the Cruise-Kidman team in the geriatric Eyes Wide Shut . It's a rare example of a re-tread that is a solid improvement over the first assembly-line model. A lot is riding on these tires.

Re-tailored for Brosnan's suave GQ cover-boy beauty, the title character is no longer a bank robber, but a risk-taking, lady-killing tycoon who masterminds the elaborate theft of a $100-million Monet from a major museum in broad daylight with virtually the entire staff of security guards in attendance. Ms. Russo plays the curvaceous bounty hunter hired by the museum's insurance underwriter to catch the thief for a hefty percentage of the value recovered. To this end, she will stop at nothing.

When breaking and entering doesn't work, she resorts to outsmarting him in bed, a career ploy she has no trouble using and is obviously experienced at. Being a slut is a small price to pay for a lifestyle of limitless wealth and luxury that includes chauffeured limos, diamond thank-you gifts on the breakfast tray and a romantic weekend interlude in a secluded villa overlooking the sea in Martinique. What happens, of course, is that the cat-and-mouse seduction turns serious; while they're matching wits and nerves they inadvertently fall in love, and for a film that is basically a genre piece, The Thomas Crown Affair gains strength from an unexpected focus on the intimacy of the love story. He's so cynical from his business dealings that he doesn't trust anybody; she's so much smarter than the predictable wimps she's devoured for hors d'oeuvres in the past that she's given up trying to find a man who is her equal. The sex is hot, but it's only a matter of time before one of them lowers their guard and betrays the other.

He ends up willing to risk everything for her; she ends up trying to ruin him, then save him. Nothing works out exactly as planned. Clearly, they have finally met their match in each other, and we lean forward, afraid to exhale, waiting to see how and if they can change. The resolution is only possible with the replacement of the Monet to the scene of the crime under security surveillance that is even more gruelingly suspenseful than the opening heist, and there's a spectacular finale in a museum filled with suspects all wearing identical bowler hats that is almost as entertainingly amusing as it is intense.

Purists may wince at director McTiernan's affectionate use of the original film's hit song, "Windmills of Your Mind" by Michel Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and some may grouse that the plot is identical to the recent Sean Connery flick, Entrapment . Don't let minor caveats deter you. This is a steamy, clever, fascinating and gorgeously designed romp that delivers a very good time indeed. The two museum sequences are expertly lensed, the dialogue snaps with clever repartee, lusty undertones, and veiled innuendo and the two stars have never been more appealing.

Rene Russo should be one of the biggest stars in the business. She is randy, elegant, tough, gentle, funny and smart, while Mr. Brosnan's groomed coolness extends his James Bond persona to deeper levels of nuance than he's typically allowed in the formula scripts he's usually stuck with. Both of them look terrific, in and out of their trendy designer clothes. (They also perform an erotic tango that will fog your lenses and make your eyebrows sweat.) Some interesting people decorate the scenery in small parts (Denis Leary, Fritz Weaver, Ben Gazzara, and Faye Dunaway, star of the original film, as Mr. Brosnan's hard-boiled shrink) and the whole thing has been so skillfully directed that it all seems perfectly plausible.

The Thomas Crown Affair is this summer's most refreshing surprise–a Sixties movie for a Nineties sensibility. Think Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman with computers.

Not Safe to Go to the Theater

In Deep Blue Sea , Jaws meets Alien in an underwater research lab where a lady Frankenstein has been performing some nasty, mean-spirited experiments on sharks, enlarging their brains to produce more protein to find a cure for Alzheimer's. Now the world's oldest living predators are thinking ! Tired of having their brains probed with needles and lasers, they're fed up (no pun

intended)and who could blame them? So they go loopy and Cuisinart the whole lab and everyone in it. One by one, the cast is turned into prime porterhouse, with action-thriller director Renny ( Die Hard 2 , Cliffhanger ) Harlin heaping on the gore while ravenous, man-eating sharks grind arms, legs and torsos into bloody blue-plate specials. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature. Sharks with genius IQs can turn on you and even make bad movies.

While the inhabitants of the floating lab scurry for safety, a massive hurricane strikes the sea above, flooding the lab and freeing the sharks from their prison cells. Meanwhile, the acting looks like a lunch break on the set of Waterworld , with a lot of people trashing their reputations trying to escape. Saffron Burrows, an actress of appalling ineptitude and one pouty expression, plays the lady scientist with no help from Mr. Harlin (breathe a sigh of relief, Geena Davis, this could have been you !). Blond hunk Thomas Jane (most recently seen locking tongues with Vincent D'Onofrio as the gay hustler in The Velocity of Gary ) plays the brawny shark wrangler with a prison record who tries to save the survivors amid explosions, storms and plummeting fireballs. Also on hand are Samuel L. Jackson, who sniffs around the shark tank in golf attire and white sunglasses, never taking one minute of anything seriously, and hip-hop artist L.L. Cool J, as a Bible-quoting cook with a pet parrot, who has described his role in interviews as "Robert Duvall's The Apostle meets Chef Boyardee." They are awful.

But this is not a movie about acting or dialogue or plot or character development. It's a big, loud, scream-a-minute shark-picnic rip-off of Jaws , beefed up with special effects and shameless pandering to Steven Spielberg's classic. Director Harlin doesn't even bother to legitimize his hack work with any originality of his own; the opening sequence shows a sailboat of necking teenagers getting chewed and chomped while blood flows like cheap muscatel. For all the carnage, the film is surprisingly shallow and slow between shark attacks, and for all the money spent on technology, the computer-generated carnivores with teeth like railroad spikes look like mechanical props at Disney World. But if cheap thrills are all you crave, don't bother to bring coffee. There's plenty of adrenaline pumping in this chamber of horrors to satisfy B-movie freaks who were bored with Wild, Wild West and Lake Placid . See it with someone you don't mind grabbing.

It Is Naked Boys, More and Less

Question: How many naked boys does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: At least the entire cast of Naked Boys Singing! , the surprise hit revue that is packing them in down at the Actors' Playhouse in Greenwich Village.

The title is self-explanatory. Eight buffed and butt-naked guys, with camera-ready bods and perky personalities to match, sing and dance their way through 16 musical numbers dedicated to stripping you of your inhibitions in a glorious celebration of the altogether. I'll be darned if they don't succeed. After the initial shock wears off, you get so accustomed to the nudity that it no longer gets in the way of the entertainment. The effect is strangely liberating. It's only 90 minutes long, and by the time it's over, you'll feel overdressed in a tank top.

Thirteen collaborators (including Bette Midler's chief writer Bruce Vilanch) are responsible for the songs and skits, ranging from ribald to poignant, all neatly directed by Robert Schrock and choreographed by Jeffry Denman, although I am still trying to figure out why Carl D. White is credited with "costume design." You go in wondering how many numbers they can dream up in which nudity is appropriate and marvel at their ingenuity. In addition to the steam bath number, the nude calendar-modeling number and the pornography number, there's an entire aria consisting of the different synonyms for male genitalia. In a song called "Robert Mitchum," a sad sack, sympathetically out of his element among the bodybuilders at the gym, sweetly wishes he had lived in the days before collagen and hormones when a droopy-faced icon like Mitchum could be a sex symbol. The innocence is ingratiating, even when eight naked men singing "I Beat My Meat" turn out to be butchers.

Some of their talents are bigger than their plumbing and the result is more (and in one or two cases, less) than you might hope for. The material is clever, but I doubt if many people will show up to discover new songwriters. But you get used to the nudity the way your eyes get used to the dark in a power failure, and after a few numbers it's no different from watching a chorus line of hairy Ziegfeld Girls. The women in the audience did not look like Chippendale's veterans, but they applauded louder than anyone. I tell you, these naked guys do, pardon the pun, make a point. I saw Naked Boys Singing on a night so hot you could fry an egg on your kneecap, and they were the coolest people in the theater.