If you started going to the Metropolitan Opera in the '80s or '90s, chances are that Mr. Zeffirelli's work was the first thing you saw. After all, he directed the classic introductory operas: La Bohème, Tosca, La Traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, Turandot, Don Giovanni, Carmen.

And he did them huge, hyper-detailed, jam-packed with extras, strewn with live animals: just the way you imagined opera would be. At their best, Mr. Zeffirelli's productions created new worlds.

But a show can't be revived for decades without getting a little stale, and even by the director's heyday, "Zeffirelli" was already a derogatory word, a euphemism for a stodgy, hopelessly conservative Met that valued bland opulence over drama. Nothing has more established the aesthetic of the company under its current general manager, Peter Gelb, than replacing Zeffirelli productions with more modern (if not always more effective) ones, like the radically spare Willy Decker production that recently replaced Mr. Zeffirelli's decadent 1998 Traviata.

From his 1964 debut directing Verdi's Falstaff to his 1998 Traviata and beyond, Mr. Zeffirelli was central to the way the Met was perceived by the public--first as involvingly detailed, then as increasingly sclerotic. Many of Mr. Gelb's reforms, both onstage and off, could be classed as the de-Zeffirellification of the Met.

But if Mr. Zeffirelli's work grew increasingly self-indulgent and he is now best known as a tetchy old man who makes snide comments to the press about the decline of opera production, it's worth remembering that he is a great artist and was once an auteur with as strong and thoughtful a vision as that of Mr. Decker or Peter Sellars.

Right on time to jog these memories, a coffee-table book devoted to the director has been published. Franco Zeffirelli: Complete Works is to ordinary books what Franco Zeffirelli productions are to ordinary productions. It's massively unwieldy, deliriously garish. It's also gorgeous and fascinating.

The book's frontispiece is the end of Mr. Zeffirelli's Met production of  Don Giovanni, in which the characters, framed by a set of classically receding prosceniums, face an upstage backdrop of clouds seen after a storm. It is spare, muted, lovely, the anti-"Zeffirelli." But turning the page, you're confronted with the Zeffirelli-est: his 2006 La Scala Aida, its colors saturated and lurid, the gigantic set dwarfing the singer.

The book keeps throwing you between these two extremes and opens up entire decades of his career that have been largely forgotten. His sheer productivity and variety are dizzying: He made 10 productions in 1964, ranging from a lovingly detailed, freshly rethought Renaissance Falstaff to a cool, geometric version of Arthur Miller's After the Fall.

Mr. Zeffirelli was born in Florence in 1923. His mother died when he was 6, and he was raised partly by a group of elderly English expatriate women. In 1945, he entered the vibrant postwar Florentine arts scene, wanting to become a stage designer, and he soon met and started working with the up-and-coming director Luchino Visconti. The two shared, as Giovanni Gavazzeni writes in an essay, the goal of "a historical reconstruction that was inspired by a poetical vision," a stagecraft both realistic and stylized.

In 1953, Mr. Zeffirelli did the design for a La Scala production of Rossini's L'italiana in Algeri, and was asked back to direct that composer's La Cenerentola the following year. The production was the epitome of Mr. Zeffirelli's syntheses of past and present, combining 18th-century costumes with a pale, cleanly lit palette. A series of successes followed in Milan, Palermo and Genoa, but it was in 1958 in Dallas that he had his breakthrough, with a production of La Traviata starring Maria Callas.

With a few exceptions, audiences adored him, even if the critics grew skeptical. Sybil B. Harrington, the queen of the Met's board in the '80s, also loved him, and funded production after pricey production.

After John Dexter introduced a more contemporary theatrical aesthetic to the Met in the late '70s, Mr. Zeffirelli began seeming stiff. By the '90s, his preparatory drawings were still glorious, but the results had become simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished, the director more interested in the sets than the characters that inhabited them.

It may be that Mr. Zeffirelli began to concentrate more on the décor than the action because, unable to supervise every revival personally, he wanted to create a structure that could survive any cast, any night--and, more poignantly, survive the director himself.

But even as we make fun, it's hard for us who saw his work in our youth to stop instinctively feeling that that is opera and embrace an aesthetic more challenging and true. A time will come when no one is introduced to opera through Mr. Zeffirelli's seductive but limited vision, and that's probably a good thing. But it might take a while: Peter Gelb recently said he had no plans to replace Mr. Zeffirelli's Bohème and Turandot. "So you can rest easy," he said in his dryly comic way, and the audience applauded.

                        editorial@observer.com

Fifty years from now, the next Edith Wharton, if she could have seen the crowd that gathered to see Ms. Mattila on the evening of Sept. 21, 2009, could easily begin her great novel of New York exactly the way the last one did. So little has changed.

And now she’s had her first opening night with the company, performing Tosca, that part of parts, for the first time outside her native Finland. The new production, by Luc Bondy, replaces one of the supersize Franco Zeffirelli stalwarts that keep Peter Gelb up at night with anxiety and that he is, little by little, getting rid of. (Richard Eyre’s Carmen will supplant Mr. Zeffirelli’s in a New Year’s Eve premiere this year. Two down; many, many choristers and goats to go.)

The Zeffirelli Tosca was one of the better liked of the Master of Excess’ Met offerings. The hulking but attractive sets were closely modeled on the real Roman locations described in the libretto. The use of the Met’s hydraulics system, which allowed the entire third-act set to distractingly lower halfway through, was eventually dropped, and in recent years the result was big but lovable, and actually somewhat illuminating. The opera and the Sardou play on which it’s based are both set in a very specific time and place, and the drama of the piece is directly tied to the situation in Italy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. This is not to say that there aren’t other, and even better, ways to do Tosca than Mr. Zeffirelli’s. But once the production was streamlined a bit, it was clear that there were certainly worse ways.

When the curtain opened on Act I on Monday night, it seemed as though Mr. Bondy’s production, surprisingly for those in the audience expecting something zany, would be as traditional, in its way, as the one it was replacing. Indeed, while the old production’s elaborately Baroque Sant’Andrea della Valle was replaced with a much starker Romanesque interior—as if everything had been stripped from Mr.

Zeffirelli’s walls—the new set’s massive scale felt familiar.

But the realism at the beginning turned out to be misleading. “Our Tosca is set in the time of Napoleon,” Mr. Bondy says definitively in the Met’s season book, and this was plausible until the arrival of Scarpia and his henchmen, who were dressed like ominous Victorian types out of a Dickens novel, though Scarpia’s coat was made of a distinctly fascist black leather. Things got even more complicated in Act II, with Scarpia’s room in the Palazzo Farnese done up with mid-century (20th century, that is) modernist furniture and vintage maps of Italy hung on the walls as if to remind the singers and audience where the action is actually taking place. Then for Act III it was back to stark stone, a gorgeous re-imagining of the roof of the Castel Sant’Angelo as a precipice overlooking the sea.

And here, another Wharton quote comes to mind: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

Only instead of translating languages, it’s resetting the history that seems to be the new obsession.

It’s possible that with all the cross-temporal stylization around Scarpia and the act he dominates (the second), Mr. Bondy is making a point about how his evil—the torture and police deceptions and craven backroom deals, found mostly in Act II—transcends time and place. As he says in the season book, “Cruelty is not specific to a certain time or era.” Indeed, comparing older versions of the set designs to the end result shows that the Act II set was changed to make it less abstractly timeless and more explicitly modern, as if to place as close to our own time as possible the scene in which the torture of Cavaradossi takes place. All this is well and good, but it strands the two protagonists, Tosca and Cavaradossi, in comparative irrelevance; if Scarpia’s part of the story is the part that’s interesting and topical, there’s less reason to care about the part that’s merely traditional.

Making Scarpia and his surroundings stand out also creates an odd imbalance in an opera so focused on its diva. Puccini provided in Tosca a character—an opera singer herself—who embodies the medium: Her intense emotions are constantly kept in check by a corrective sense of restraint. It’s the effort to restrain her emotions, and not the emotions themselves, that makes the tension almost unbearable.

Both the music and libretto indicate that Tosca’s fury and jealousy are always checked almost immediately after they flare up. In Ms. Mattila’s and Mr. Bondy’s conception, though, these emotions are worn far too much on her sleeve. This was Tosca on the warpath from her first entrance, tearing sheets off benches, throwing chairs, stabbing paintings, noisily collapsing to the ground at the end of her big Act II aria.

There was little sense of her religiosity, her modesty—the things that make her great act of violence so shocking and devastating. Tellingly, after killing Scarpia, this Tosca didn’t arrange candles and place a crucifix on the body; she lay down on a couch and slowly fanned herself, as if the murder were all in a day’s work. Ms. Mattila was physically fearless throughout, as always, but for once that wasn’t what she needed to be.

And she sounded uneasier in the part than she looked. She did some lovely soft singing, but especially in the last two acts, her voice spread under pressure at the top of her range, and the end of “Vissi d’arte” was rough going. But she was certainly spared the boos that were accorded the production team during their bows, which were spurred perhaps by loyalty to Mr. Zeffirelli, or perhaps by the simulated blow job given to Scarpia in the second act. Mr. Bondy seemed pleased by the catcalls; though much of the production ended up being rather conventional, the boos proved that he had done something “controversial,” “provocative.”

Yet controversy and provocation—indeed, everything on stage—take a backseat on opening night, which is really one of life’s great pleasures. An immaculately dressed young man seated in a box, hair swept back and gold scarf tight around his neck, perched on his chair and eagerly scanned the other boxes. He gesticulated and pointed and whispered to his friends about the people he had identified. He looked just like Wharton’s Larry Lefferts, “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York.”

Meanwhile, on Times Square, thousands of people (from the looks of it) gathered to watch the show on the NASDAQ jumbotron, in folding chairs that have been put out in the street to improve the cultural condition of the city. That’s democracy—or at least, noblesse oblige.

zwoolfe@observer.com

Callas Forever is Franco Zeffirelli's long-awaited tribute to his friend and idol that focuses on a fictionalized account of the legendary diva's final tragic year as a lonely, terrified and reclusive has-been in Paris. No matter how you view it, and the film has not been generally embraced by European critics, you will go away devastated and raving about the great French actress Fanny Ardant as Callas. It's a titanic performance that redefines the term "tour de force."

The year is 1977, when, at 53-a still-vital age for most women-Madame Callas knew her best years were long behind her. Her triumphs were preserved on vinyl, but she hadn't sung professionally for two decades, except for a disastrous concert tour of Japan that finished off her career for good. Her well-publicized master classes in New York were over; her critically rebuked movie career in Pasolini's Medea had been shelved in the dusty archives of Italian cinema; her friends had given up trying to reach her on the phone. According to Mr. Zeffirelli, with an intelligent but perfunctory script by respected playwright Martin Sherman, the author of Bent , Callas was a washed-up, chain-smoking, pill-addicted wreck who roamed the halls of her spacious Paris atelier all night, listening to her old recordings of Norma and Traviata , sobbing over silver-framed photos of Onassis, in mourning for her lost voice, her vanquished career, her dead lovers, and wallowing in self-pity. Salvation arrives uninvited when a gay impresario named Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons, as a younger version of Zeffirelli himself, who is now 81) invades the diva's brocaded cocoon and persuades her it is time for the once-glorious voice she hides from the world to reach a new generation that was too young to see her in her prime. Arrogant and aggressive (and cognizant of the money that can still be made on the Callas name), he proposes a series of films in which she will recreate her great roles, aided by new technologies that can match her lip-synching to a soundtrack of her most famous recordings. "Am I selling my soul to Satan?" she asks. "This is 1977," replies a loyal journalist friend and protector (Joan Plowright)-"Satan is redundant." And so they find a way to make Callas live forever, like a vampire.

The role she selects is Carmen, which she recorded but never played onstage, and a major chunk of the movie is devoted to slavishly filming a spectacular production of the Bizet opera, during which Callas soars back to life, fueled by the adoration of the cast and crew, and feverishly elevated by the purity and power of her old recordings. All of which provides Fanny Ardant with the gift-wrapped acting vehicle of a lifetime. The flexing of the neck muscles, the stretching of the vocal cords, the flashing of the eyes all have to be coordinated with invasive close-ups that magnify every dilation of the nostrils. The raw nerves, the hard work, the demands she makes on the crew, ignoring and breaking every union rule, the vivacious warmth and contrasting tantrums-Ms. Ardant plays all of the moods and changes soulfully, lit from within, lavishly gowned by Chanel. The result is a personal triumph of great magnitude for the fictional Callas as well as the flesh-and-blood of the gorgeous Ms. Ardant.

Then the script takes a left turn that diminishes the joy of what precedes it. Callas' passion for music and faith in herself are restored by the finished Carmen . But instead of lip-synching more filmed operas, she agrees only to a fresh production of Tosca on the firm condition that it is filmed "live," using her own voice at 53. The financial backers walk out, the contract is canceled, and in addition Callas persuades Larry to destroy the Carmen film, too. "What I had was never an illusion," she says with steel-eyed logic. "If it was nothing else, it was honest. Even on a bad night-on a really awful night, when you wanted to close your ears and hide your eyes-it was honest. Now you want me to end my career by announcing Maria Callas was, after all, a fraud? You want my legacy to be the opposite of everything I ever stood for?"

This sudden burst of suicidal integrity is noble, but not entirely convincing. Still, it conveys Zeffirelli's adoring and lasting impression of the woman and the artist, and a happy Hollywood ending would be ridiculous. In life, Callas died in September 1977, shortly after the fictional movie ends. Call it corny, but the final shot of Fanny Ardant walking alone through the Bois de Boulogne is unforgettable.

Callas Forever digs its share of potholes. The film's unyielding concentration on the conflicts of a tortured diva's emotional instability robs Jeremy Irons of every opportunity to come alive. His personal relationship with a handsome painter (Jay Rodan) is benign to the point of turning into a vanishing act. Likewise, the unrequited love of Callas' dashing leading man in the film-within-a-film (Gabriel Garko) comes to nothing more than a kiss on the hand. How long can one sustain interest in a star whose self-obsession obscures everything around her? The renowned Zeffirelli proclivities for sets, costumes and décor are pleasantly opulent eye candy on an operatic scale, but the color and movement in the Carmen movie are as superficial as they are lush.

Still, there is much to enjoy here, especially the magic and beauty of Fanny Ardant (who so shockingly resembles the real Callas that it is hard to believe you are watching an impersonation). Icy, elegant and erupting like Vesuvius one minute, then lost and vulnerable the next, she provides a piercing insight into the sad and wasted private life of the Greek woman born Maria Kalogeropoulou, worshipped by the world but a stranger to herself. In one of her most poignant and reflective scenes, she confides: "I hated Maria Kalogeropoulou. I wanted to be Maria Callas instead. For a time, I was . Perhaps I should have asked to be a woman instead." Finally, there is the music you never want to end: the soundtrack of Callas arias by Bizet, Puccini, Bellini and Verdi that were, in themselves, self-fulfilling prophecies. Callas Forever is a title better defined by the recordings she left behind than by the yellowed-scrapbook clippings of a cinematic valentine.

Blues Brother

Having already praised the world premiere of Ray , the comprehensive movie biography of soul king Ray Charles, at this year's Toronto Film Festival, I will only reiterate that Jamie Foxx's all-encompassing performance in the title role more than justifies the early Oscar gossip it has generated. I also liked the careful and expansive direction by Taylor Hackford that compiles a lifetime of facts without ever losing its grip on a narrative with a strong beginning, middle and end. Mr. Hackford is a firm believer in telling a story, and it is to his credit that the rich procession of swinging Ray Charles hits never distracts from the film's riveting storyline. Blinded at 7, abused and ridiculed for years on the road, ripped off by blacks and whites alike, battling black church communities that labeled his gospel beat "sacrilegious," struggling desperately with years of heroin addiction, withdrawal and rehab, narrowly avoiding prison time for smuggling drugs into the U.S. from Canada, he was sued, fined and barred for life in the state of Georgia for refusing to play segregated Jim Crow honky-tonks. But the man who could have ended up weaving baskets if it hadn't been for his talent died with a Beverly Hills mansion, a recording studio bigger than most people's retirement homes and platinum records that still bust the pop charts to this day. He was a king, but in Mr. Hackford's brilliantly researched biopic, the crown has a few thorns. Between the junk, the music, the lies, the wife and two kids, the women and a pregnant backup singer in the Raylettes, his life was a mess, and Ray gets it all down-warts and all. The huge cast is memorable, but Jamie Foxx is living proof that the speed of the leader is the speed of the gang. The unique way he lip-synchs makes him look like the real deal. Like Maria Callas, there was only one Ray Charles, and any attempt to present their lives with anything other than their original recordings would be folly. Mr. Foxx eats this movie with Tabasco, and Ray really rocks.

The Fair Lady Sings

Every Saturday night in November, Barbara Brussell, the wittiest of girl singers, is interpreting the songs of Alan Jay Lerner, the most urbane and literate of lyricists, with the dreamy support of Tedd Firth, one of New York's most sensitive pianists. This treasure of good fortune is happening at Danny's Skylight Room on West 46th Street, in the middle of Restaurant Row. You'd be a fool to miss it.

I'd like to share with you a Reader's Digest condensed version of what she does that is so special, but this relative newcomer to the first ranks of cabaret royalty wears so many hats that I know when I'm licked. Behind that sunny, blond California Doris Day veneer hides the violent mayhem of Betty Hutton. That's why investing so much energy and sincerity into the colossal repertoire of the equally eclectic Alan Jay Lerner really pays off. He wrote as many different kinds of songs as she has moods, voices and mannerisms. The harvest from such a daunting assembly of styles is bountiful.

Playing around with tempos, buttering love songs with a crusty sob in the throat, sucking the sap out of comedy material like nectar from a honeycomb, Ms. Brussell can fulfill every fantasy with a snap of her fingers. Tackling songs previously claimed by Louis Jourdan, Fred Astaire, Robert Goulet and Maurice Chevalier, she stamps them with a branding iron of her own authentic invention. And she's such a fine actress that she can shine a flashlight on the subtext of a Lerner lyric in fresh ways that make you feel like you're hearing it for the first time. Classics from an 18-year collaboration with Frederic Loewe that produced theatrical history are inevitable, but believe it when I tell you they never heard an "Almost Like Being in Love" like this in Brigadoon . The way she approximates the talk-sing style of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady or makes "If Ever I Would Leave You" from Camelot tremble and shimmer with passion, makes me wonder why so many women always stick to the obvious Julie Andrews songs in both shows. The men's songs were much better.

Exploring Lerner's partnerships with other songwriters, she unmasks luscious gems by Burton Lane, Charles Strouse and Kurt Weill. From the hilarious "Economics" from an early failure called Love Life to Jane Powell's evergreen "Too Late Now" from the MGM musical Royal Wedding , Ms. Brussell gives every tune a unique spin, distilling the essence of life's changing seasons. She is real, she is tender, she is wacky. And the well-researched biographical material that links the musical themes is cogent, pithy and informational, reminding us that Mr. Lerner had one eye and was just over five feet high, yet still managed to write some of the greatest love songs of all time and marry eight wives. I've never heard the conversational chatter in a cabaret act inserted so zanily into patter that I can only describe it as Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness fused with bump-and-grind show-business sequins.

The highlight of the show is the hauntingly beautiful Lerner-Strouse ballad "There's Always One You Can't Forget" from the one-night misfortune Dance a Little Closer . It reminds me once again that great songs often come from flop musicals. Ms. Brussell and her tastefully chosen, sometimes obscure but always memorable songs make me wonder out loud: Where have they been all my life?

Mr. Jones' directory, which he launched two weeks ago with the help of his Web-designer sister, lists 1,247 agents and editors in the United States, Canada and Britain, along with their e-mail addresses. The names are published "in order of relative significance" by company and then by individual. On the site, Mr. Jones invites anyone who "feels he or she or his or her company is more important or less important" to let him know, though he "may or may not change it."

Mr. Jones' agent list has ICM on top, with Ms. Urban at No. 1, Esther Newberg at No. 2, Sloan Harris at No. 3. William Morris clocks in as the second-ranked agency, with Suzanne Gluck in the No. 11 seat. Curtis Brown, Sterling Lord Literistic and Janklow & Nesbit Associates round out the top five agencies. At the very bottom of the list is Dietmar Scherf of Scherf Inc. in Las Vegas. Mr. Jones' own agent, Laura Strachan, with whom he signed in January 2002, is nestled comfortably in the top half of the list, despite having an Annapolis, Md., mailing address.

On the list of editors and publishers, Joerg Pfuhl, former executive Phyllis Grann, Ann Godoff and Sonny Mehta top the list at Random House. Penguin Putnam is the next house, followed mysteriously by DAW Books, and then Simon & Schuster. Dorrie O'Brien at Write Way Publishing in Aurora, Colo., is the last publisher listed.

In addition to the rankings, Mr. Jones has published any letters he's received from these publishing-industry denizens as he tried to sell his as-yet-unpublished novel, Astral Weekend , formerly titled Oprah Wimsfree and the Mayonnaise Man . In some cases, he has also published his snarky responses to their responses.

"I think everyone [in the industry] is sort of talking about it amongst themselves," said Claudia Cross, an agent at Sterling Lord, whose correspondence with Mr. Jones from her time at William Morris is posted. "They're saying, 'Don't respond; don't encourage him.'"

ICM agent Mitch Douglas apparently set off Mr. Jones when he declined to represent one of the author's submissions because, according to the agent's letter, "The choppy sentences and fragments drive me nuts."

"Call me Ishmael. Jesus wept. Mistah Kurtz-he dead," reads Mr. Jones' posted response to Mr. Douglas. "I have no doubt that incalculable numbers of people have been and continue to be locked away in institutions for the incurably insane as a result of having been subjected to choppy sentences and fragments …. Don't worry about responding. I thrive on snippy notes and silent rejection. G."

By phone, Mr. Jones told The Transom that he began the Web site to identify the media power structures that were keeping him from getting his own work published. "Those power structures are, like, systemic," he said. "I'm sticking all this stuff up there to give a little bit of an inside look at the gobbed-up-ness of it all."

The correspondence on the site is not dated, but according to Mr. Jones, has been collected over the two years he spent trying to sell his two works-in-progress to a wide cross section of agents and editors. In a letter to Janklow & Nesbit partner Lynn Nesbit six months ago, Mr. Jones wrote: "I got recommended to you by Gordon Lish in 1963. You … wanted to see new stuff when I had some. It's been awhile," he continued, but now he had something to show her.

According to a plot summary posted on Everyonewhosanyone.com, Astral Weekend is about an Illinois math teacher and "The Mayonnaise Man," who later reveals himself to be Abraham Lincoln. "[They] have dinner, talk, have sex, conceive a child, fall in love, go to the Woodfield Mall outside Chicago and are joined by Abraham's mother, Oprah Winfrey." Ms. Winfrey's character is smuggled into a nuclear-power plant and killed by F.B.I. agents before the plot is revealed to have been "an elaborate fantasy."

Mr. Jones' other book, Ginny Good , (formerly titled Dead Ginny ), is a memoir about the (apparently substantial) amount of time he spent in Haight-Ashbury during the 60's with a woman he claims was the original hippie.

HarperCollins Publishers editor Daniel Menaker passed on Astral Weekend with a long note remarking on the "absolutely wonderful" stuff throughout the manuscript. Mr. Menaker's concern was the "episodicness which forces the book to rely on its generally riffflike [ sic ] nature."

Mr. Jones' didn't take it well: "Dear Dan: I got your note. The only parts I understood were the parts about how wonderful it was. You lost me when you had to resort to combining jazz ostinatos with subatomic particle theory in order to explain why you're not going to publish the son of a bitch. Gary Fisketjon dissed my ass too, but with considerably less effusiveness."

Other recipients of Mr. Jones' inquiries have been considerably less enthusiastic. Simon & Schuster editor Mitchell Ivers wrote: "My two cents: get an agent." Then, "Who are you? You must be a virus. I'm deleting your first email. Identify yourself or to hell with your spam."

For those interested in the complete picture, Mr. Ivers' e-mail and the entire correspondence is published on Everyonewhoanyone.com.

Also not amused is Andrew Zack, who runs the Zack Company Inc. Mr. Jones said by phone that Mr. Zack was the only person to effectively prevent him from using his information, and called Mr. Zack "a twerpy little agent who believes he has some kind of rights to his own address and phone number."

Mr. Zack responded, "I think Mr. Jones' quotes speak for themselves," adding that "Mr. Jones never requested permission to include me in his Web site. When I discovered that he had, I requested that he remove information that he had published, including e-mail correspondence and my direct e-mail address, which he only did after numerous complaints …. I do not believe Mr. Jones is providing a service to authors or anyone else in the publishing industry, and there are much better resources out there in the marketplace."

Mr. Jones just doesn't get why his stuff hasn't found a home while other books sit on best-seller racks in Barnes & Noble. "I've read a lot of books that totally barfed me through the roof in terms of any kind of craft or art or sensibility or truth," he said.

-Rebecca Traister

Sprewell's Rim Job

The $250,000 fine that Latrell Sprewell has been ordered to pay the Knicks may be the largest in the team's history, but even with his suspension, he shouldn't break a sweat coming up with the dough. You see, Mr. Sprewell's wheel rims are hot, hot, hot.

Around the time of his last suspension-that would be the 1997-98 season, when he reportedly lost $6.4 million in salary for choking Golden State Warrior coach P.J. Carlesimo-Mr. Sprewell opened Sprewell Racing, a high-performance auto-accessories store in San Gabriel, Calif., that "displays over a million dollars in showroom inventory," according to its Web site.

And one of those products, Davin Wheels-tire rims tricked up with a rotating attachment that continues spinning after the car comes to a stop-have been coveted by the hip-hop and private-school crowds ever since Mr. Sprewell appeared on MTV's Cribs driving an E-class Mercedes Benz outfitted with the snazzy accessories.

But these are no Razor scooters. A set of the rims-which are known more commonly as "Sprewells" or "Spinners" -sells for as much as $20,000.

"They just really freak people out," said John Jarasa, managing editor of Dub , a magazine that focuses on auto parts. "The effect that it gives off is incredible. The people beside you are ready to just go through the intersection-they think you're still rolling!"

Mr. Sprewell-who owns 10 luxury cars, including a Lamborghini Diablo-did not invent the Davins, but was the first celebrity to publicize them via his Mercedes and, later, his company.

But the list of Sprewells owners is eminently boldfaceable. It includes rappers Coolio, Big Tymers, Wyclef Jean, Lil' Wayne and Phat Joe, who have featured the rims in their car-centric music videos.

The rims are just as popular among sports stars and Hollywood actors and actresses, and they also appeared in the movie The Fast and the Furious .

"Shaq had a set of them on his S-class Mercedes. Plus, kids love them," said Mr. Jarasa.

Yep. In New York City private schools, the rims are all the rage. "Everyone wants them," said a senior from Riverdale. "But even if I could afford them, I'd only have them for like 10 seconds. They'd get stolen if you left your car out on the street. You couldn't even go get an ice cream or anything."

While most kids with rim fixations settle for a more reasonably priced imitation, called Spin-Tek, that sell for $2,000 a set, Sprewells are still jumping off the racks. "The demand here is high, so we get top dollar," said a Sprewell Racing salesperson.

-Alexandra Wolfe

The Real Soprano

Franco Zeffirelli sounded confused.

The Transom had heard that Mr. Zeffirelli, the director of The Taming of the Shrew and Endless Love , was coming to New York to serve as the grand marshal of the Columbus Day parade. And so we called him up in Italy to see if he had seen the recent episode of HBO's The Sopranos that had grappled with the thorny issue of whether Columbus was a cultural hero or a villain.

But say the word "soprano" to Mr. Zeffirelli-who has produced hundreds of operas, including La Bohème at La Scala and Turandot at the Met-and he sees Frederica von Stade, not James Gandolfini.

"What has Columbus got to do with these sopranos?" Mr. Zeffirelli wanted to know . "Is there something about singers?"

The confusion was cleared up, and Mr. Zeffirelli explained that he wasn't familiar with David Chase's series. "No, we haven't seen it," Mr. Zeffirelli said. "Actually, we have been fed up of being painted as the ethnic group of Mafia. For years, we're banqueting on the Sicilian Mafia."

Mr. Zeffirelli was more interested in talking about another soprano: his late friend Maria Callas, the "high priestess" of opera, as he called her. On Thursday, Oct. 10, the director will attend a $250-a-ticket benefit screening of his latest film, Callas Forever , at the Ziegfeld Theater. Proceeds from the event, which is being hosted by the Columbus Citizens Foundation, will go to the Zeffirelli Scholarship Fund for the Arts.

Though Callas, who died in 1977, lived a tabloid-worthy life (replete with a tortured love affair with Aristotle Onassis-"a terrible personality, because he destroyed everything around him," Mr. Zeffirelli said), the director "didn't want to do a V.I.P. scandal movie." Instead, he explained, "I really wanted to tell the people who love music how difficult it is for a genius to be a genius. What it costs … to achieve that absolute perfection. And how difficult it is to keep that perfection."

Forever Callas , which has yet to find an American distributor, is a hypothetical look at the last four months of the opera singer's life. A rock-band promoter-Jeremy Irons-convinces the past-her-prime singer, played by Fanny Ardant, to make a series of videos that re-create her most memorable opera performances using past recordings of her voice.

"It works very well, but not for Maria Callas, who says, 'This is a fraud,'" Mr. Zeffirelli said. But, he added, in reality, the diva's devotion to such impeccable standards came with a hefty price. "If you live for perfection, when perfection disappears, you have nothing else to do but die," he said. "She went at the age of 54, very young. She didn't accept the decline, the Sunset Boulevard -she did not accept it.

Despite his advanced age, Mr. Zeffirelli isn't ready for his walk down the Cinecitta equivalent of that boulevard anytime soon. Though he said his sense of balance has been seriously impaired by antibiotics he took two years ago to combat a surgery-related infection, Mr. Zeffirelli managed to complete the movie and work on four opera projects. And before he retires, Mr. Zeffirelli said, he'd like to direct a film that "has been with me all my life … the famous visit that Francis of Assisi made to Jerusalem that stopped the Crusades and established a contact to the Muslim world.

"The waters are not still around me," Mr. Zeffirelli said. "It's tumultuous. Storms and storms."

-Frank DiGiacomo

Tough Tosches

Nick Tosches, the writer known for his unflinching yet redemptive biographies of renegade subjects Jerry Lee Lewis, Sonny Liston and Dean Martin, stood up for another controversial figure at a reading of his new novel, In the Hand of Dante , at the Housing Works bookstore in Soho on Oct. 4

"I want to dedicate this evening to the poet laureate of New Jersey," the 53-year-old Mr. Tosches told the crowd defiantly. He was referring to his friend and fellow Newark native, Amiri Baraka, who is currently under heavy fire for the perceived anti-Semitism of his 9/11 poem, "Somebody Blew Up America."

Prior to the reading, punk priestess Patti Smith had performed an acoustic version of "Jumping Jack Flash" in his honor, and Mr. Tosches looked the part. He wore a gray pinstripe suit, two-tone shoes and a splendidly gaudy, gold-chain-patterned, black-collared silk shirt. He slipped on a pair of wire-frame reading glasses.

Mr. Tosches first read a chapter focusing on the 14th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, who heads a cast of characters that includes a modern-day panty-wearing hit man and one Nick Tosches, a writer, murderer and-in his own half-amused, half-disgusted phrase-"an AOL Time Warner product." Mr. Tosches' publisher, Little, Brown & Company, is part of that mob.

Then the author paused to survey the audience, which included silver-haired director Jim Jarmusch. "How rough do we want to get here?" he asked, taking a sip of red wine. He started in on one of the book's contemporary sections, in which the destruction of the World Trade Center ("those big ugly twin towers") is both a plot point and the launching pad for a merciless denunciation of monotheism. "Fuck the Semite triad," Mr. Tosches read. "Fuck all the sons of Shem."

The subject of 9/11 was still on the audience's mind during the Q&A session that followed. A man at the back of the room asked Mr. Tosches how he could support Mr. Baraka, given the latter's apparent adherence to the theory that 4,000 Israeli workers were tipped off about the attack and told to stay away from the World Trade Center that day. Mr. Tosches countered that it was a poet's duty to provoke. "I've seen doilies that look more scary than most of the poems I read," he said. "I'm talking about the cheap paper kind of doilies," he added. He compared Mr. Baraka favorably to Maya Angelou, who he said was "not even a good calypso singer, never mind a poet."

-Dirk Standen

Lobster Bloomberg

On Oct. 7, Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood behind an inverted inflatable lobster with microphones protruding from its tail and quoted Marcel Proust.

"Only through art can we get outside ourselves," he said, though with little more than his head and his red tie visible above the red crustacean, Mr. Bloomberg seemed to be merging molecularly with the lobster.

Hizzoner had come to celebrate the seventh installment of the National Arts Awards, a gala dinner held by the Americans for the Arts organization at Cipriani 42nd Street to honor the likes of philanthropist David Rockefeller, artist Cindy Sherman, embattled arts patron Alberto Vilar and actress Natalie Portman. The cavernous insides of Cipriani had been filled with gold-painted chairs, pink tablecloths and two creations by artist Jeff Koons-a trademark naïf backdrop depicting a manic playground and the lobster, which served as the podium for the night.

Mr. Koons told The Transom that his lobster was an homage to Salvador Dalí's lobster telephone, since he had visited the Spanish master in New York when he was 15 and had been inspired to believe that "someday, he could maybe make art, too."

"I really wanted to have something fun," the artist said, a grin on his boyish face. "So that when people would get their awards, it would be a little more memorable."

Mr. Koons sat at the table of honor, where the evening's iron-willed co-chair, Veronica Hearst, presided, flanked by media mogul Barry Diller and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Other guests nearby included philanthropists Ronald Lauder, Agnes Gund and Kitty Carlisle Hart, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Whitney Museum of American Art director Maxwell Anderson, former Talk editor Tina Brown, and patrons-in-the-making Emilia Fanjul and Serena Boardman.

During cocktails, a jazz orchestra played while Ms. Portman exchanged phone numbers with Sopranos daughter Jamie-Lynn Sigler. Former Lincoln Center chair Beverly Sills made her entrance in a dramatic black dress and joked with photographers that they could only use pictures in which she looked 18. And Mr. Diller, chatting with Mr. Sulzberger, said that he'd come because it was "easier" to "say no to Saddam Hussein" than to Ms. Hearst.

Later, Mr. Diller said he was joking. "I adore Veronica Hearst," he said.

The only moment of unintended comedy came during the awards ceremony, when avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson took the stage to introduce Mr. Vilar, who has recently made headlines for defaulting on substantial pledges-some millions of dollars-to the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Maazel/Vilar Conductors' Competition and the Washington Opera. A short film featuring Mr. Vilar played before he took the stage to accept his award.

"I like to say, 'You don't have to be a millionaire to write a check,'" Mr. Vilar said in the film, prompting snickers in the audience.

- Elisabeth Franck

The Transom Also Hears …

… Lizzie Watch II: Despite her imminent incarceration in the Suffolk County Jail, Lizzie Grubman was still keeping up with the latest trends, heading toward Intermix at 10:01 p.m. on Oct. 7. She was dressed in a form-fitting denim skirt and a long-sleeved blouse with a burgundy print.

-A.W.

… That Peter Kiernan II, the chief executive of the financial-consulting company Kiernan Ventures, outbid actor Michael Douglas for a table for 10 at Rao's at a live auction at the Marriott Marquis on Sept. 25 to benefit the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Mr. Kiernan, who's on the board of Mr. Reeve's foundation, paid $13,000 for the dinner package.

-F.D.

Who then can step up to make Run Lola Run a box-office hit even by art-house standards? Well, there are the lovers of film for its own sake, and people who pay attention to the virtually unanimous raves from the critics. How many of these discerning moviegoers there are, after the tepid box-office response to Alexander Payne's universally praised Election , I cannot say. Now there was a case of a generationally well-balanced satire of high school teacher-student miscommunication falling between the cracks of generationally segregated audiences.

Still, Run Lola Run was reportedly a big popular hit in Germany, and one hopes that one's gloomy commercial prognosis for the film in its current American release turns out to be unjustified. Even so, Run Lola Run restores one's faith in the infinite renewability of the medium, and not simply through technological gimmicks, but, rather, through a psycho-socio-esthetic evolution of the one art form above all others that has enjoyed the undiminished capacity to change with the times without ever becoming dehumanized.

Lola is far from being a kickboxing feminist, but she doesn't take any guff from her elders, either. For Mr. Tykwer, Ms. Potente's Lola represents the rebellious new post-Helmut Kohl German generation unwilling to follow in the footsteps of its parents. I know we've heard the same song for the past three or four decades, but what is interesting about Lola and Manni is what was interesting in the Natalie Wood and James Dean characters in Nicholas Ray's 1955 Rebel Without a Cause . Both pairs of lovers find their own private world without losing their love-sharing humanity, and in their different ways, and in different times, both movies are ultimately life-affirming, though Run Lola Run is clearly more lighthearted and more uncompromising in its rejection of parental figures.

My readers of all ages are urged to run to the box-office run. After all, who can resist a woman named Lola after Marlene Dietrich's Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) and Martine Carol's Lola Montès in Max Ophuls' 1955 Lola Montès ? Despite her punk regalia, Ms. Potente is equal to the erotic and emotional generosity generated by her namesake predecessors.

These Are the People in Your Neighborhood

Mark Pellington's Arlington Road , based on a screenplay by Ehren Kruger, bears more than a passing resemblance to two similar exercises in homicidal paranoia produced and directed by the late Alan J. Pakula (1928-1998), The Parallax View (1974) and Consenting Adults (1992). The Parallax View , if you recall, served as a delayed reaction to the Kennedy assassinations in the early and late 60's, and tended to support the various conspiracy theories still circulating in the land. Consenting Adults thrust an unsuspecting couple into seductive proximity to a seemingly lecherous twosome next door, leading to a wife-swapping plot that culminated in a premeditated murder. Despite their first-rate casts, neither movie was completely successful, but neither aroused in me the hatred I felt when I witnessed Arlington Road at a recent critics' screening. Even though I recognized the downbeat ending from Parallax View with the same disheartening triumph of what Hillary Clinton too accurately described as a right-wing conspiracy, I somehow felt that I was being fiendishly manipulated and tortured by the heartless plot twists in Arlington Road . Mr. Kruger's original screenplay, recipient of the Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1996, is nothing if not devious as it develops the emotionally overloaded character of Jeff Bridges' Michael Faraday, a recently widowed college professor and single parent of a troubled boy. We learn shortly that Faraday is still grieving over the recent death of his F.B.I. agent wife in a disastrous Waco-like raid on the mountain retreat of a nonfelonious gun collector. Faraday never tires of ranting to his students about the faulty intelligence-gathering and lack of accountability of Federal law enforcement authorities.

The picture actually begins with hallucinatory images of an adolescent boy (not Faraday's) bleeding from some sort of firecracker accident. Faraday is driving along Arlington Road when he sees the boy staggering in the street. After taking him to the hospital, Faraday eventually meets the boy's concerned parents, Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins) and Cheryl Lang (Joan Cusack). Though they live across the street from Faraday, he has never met them. Suddenly, we have the Consenting Adults situation without the sexual experimentation. In fact, Faraday can barely get it on with his attractive girlfriend Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davis), his former teaching assistant, who began sleeping with Faraday not too long after his wife's untimely death. Brooke feels insecure in the relationship, both because the boy resents her replacing his mother, and because Faraday himself seems permanently mired in the injustice of his wife's death. Let's face it. Faraday is a complete mess. And though we don't suspect it at the outset, he is being slowly but systematically ensnared in a spidery intrigue orchestrated by his outwardly friendly neighbors.

Right on schedule for this kind of ominous thriller, Faraday begins to suspect that his next-door neighbor is a domestic terrorist. Even after one incriminating fact after another about Lang's mysterious past comes to light, Faraday is unable to persuade the authorities that something sinister is afoot. And no wonder. Faraday has not only been crying wolf too long and too often. He seems constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Warren Beatty's doomed conspiracy-hunter in The Parallax View was a much cooler cat than the frenzied Faraday, and Pakula was much more detached from the human drama for the sake of the larger political and architectural picture than Mr. Pellington, who makes us agonize over Faraday's desperately sweaty struggle to make sense of the chaos and evil engulfing him.

At the point when I realized beyond the shadow of a doubt that all the good guys were to be destroyed by the infinitely ingenious bad guys, I felt a dull thud in the pit of my stomach. Not only was evil triumphant, but its agents were diabolically clever enough to shift the blame to a crucified innocent.

The trick of the film is to confound our expectations by making Faraday not only hysterical, but also very humanly maladroit and quixotic, as well as heroically public-spirited. As an icon, Mr. Bridges has always been a guaranteed survivor against the greatest odds, and Mr. Robbins an eccentric champion of the liberal counterculture. Besides, Mr. Bridges, Mr. Robbins, Ms. Davis and Ms. Cusack are four of the most charming and talented personalities in pictures. If their characterizations had been more inept and less charismatic, I might have hated Arlington Road less. Hate is a word I almost never use, and an attitude I have great difficulty expressing. But there it is. I have to report what I see and feel at all costs. I may be completely alone on this one as far as my community of esteemed colleagues is concerned. So don't take my word for it. See for yourself. At least I can rest easily knowing that I warned you.

The Dench Phenomenon

Franco Zeffirelli's Tea With Mussolini , from the screenplay by John Mortimer and Mr. Zeffirelli, based on The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli , has been lingering a while, and is barely worth a look if only for a glimpse at no fewer than five divas of stage and screen from England and America. The "hottest" of these celebrated grandes dames at the moment is the celebrated Oscar-winning and Tony-winning Judi Dench, who is playing to packed houses on Broadway in Amy's View , after wowing American movie audiences with her acid portrayals of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth over the past two years.

In England, she has been regularly winning stage and screen acting awards for the past 34 years. Indeed, I first saw her on screen in 1965 in Four in the Morning , and was much impressed with her, but I must say she has struck me since as a very marginal character actress on the screen. So it is, strangely, in Tea With Mussolini , in which Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith have the meatiest parts among the Brits, and Cher and Lily Tomlin represent the Yanks with gusto and panache, while Ms. Dench flutters around as a pathetic esthete with no talent of her own.

I am told that Ms. Dench recently appeared on The Charlie Rose Show and complained that Mr. Zeffirelli cut out two of her biggest and best scenes, but that she forgave him. Be that what it may, don't go to Tea With Mussolini expecting to see Dame Judi steal the show. She doesn't. Not that there is that much show to steal. Mr. Zeffirelli's vision of late 30's and 40's Fascist Italy is not much more densely detailed than Roberto Benigni's in Life Is Beautiful , and manages much less of an emotional payoff. Yet where else these days can you see five entertaining women of a certain age acting up a storm?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bring Back Boris Karloff

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

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

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

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

Do Re Mi , One Last Time

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

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

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

Clarification

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