Kilgore.

The dog days of summer get an extra spark with the arrival of Portland, Oregon-based singer Rebecca Kilgore at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency. Last year she celebrated the musical side of Marilyn Monroe. Now she calls her new show “The Jazzy Side of Judy Garland.” The lady has high ideals and lofty goals.

I didn’t know Judy had a jazzy side, but Ms. Kilgore proves it. Refurbishing the classics with new tempos and beats is a good enough excuse for a cabaret act, I suppose, but it’s an ambitious stretch for an hour of summer music. To expand the concept for an hour, her research extends beyond the boundaries of Judy’s epic movie career to include some of her recordings and television appearances as well. For the most part, you can shout “Excelsior!” Die-hard Garland fans will be delighted to hear an homage to her MGM mentor Roger Edens that includes “The Joint is Really Jumpin’ Down at Carnegie Hall,” the showstopper she performed with pianist Jose Iturbi in Thousands Cheer, “Dear Mr. Gable” (introduced at Clark Gable’s 36^th birthday party) and “Until You’ve Played the Palace,” which Edens wrote for her legendary one-woman comeback at the Palace Theatre in 1951. Other signature familiarities from the movies include a wistful “The Boy Next Door” and a subdued arrangement of “The Trolley Song,” two Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane favorites from Meet Me in St. Louis, as well as Irving Berlin’s “Better Luck Next Time” from Easter Parade. Despite her warmth and musical agility, Ms. Kilgore lacks the passion and range to do justice to “The Man That Got Away,” which she should discard immediately. Even allowing for the fact that songs should not be restricted to only one interpretation, if you ignore the bitterness and wrenching drama of that seminal musical outcry, you miss not only what Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin had in mind when they wrote it, but the essence of Garland’s power to hold the hearts of millions in the palm of her hand with a single composition. Another caveat: with so much impressive research, how could Ms. Kilgore overlook (or even fail to mention) the great Kay Thompson, who taught Judy everything she knew about phrasing, timing and taste? Kay was the jazziest influence in Garland’s career. If anyone personified “the jazzy side of Judy Garland,” the title of this show and the reason behind it, it was Kay Thompson.

Still, there is much to applaud here, namely Rebecca Kilgore herself. As a jazz stylist, she’s not the same kind of dazzling, imaginative or creative technician as Sue Raney (who is opening her first New York nightclub appearance in 35 years at Feinstein’s on Nov. 4), but she’s refreshingly without a trace of the pretentious silliness of a Nellie McKay. Her sound is smooth and mellow. She can captivate you with her gentle and emotional interpretation of a lovely Harry Warren ballad like the seldom-heard “Friendly Star” (from Summer Stock, Judy’s final film at Metro), then turn right around and swing “The Jitterbug” (unwisely cut from The Wizard of Oz) with a girlish bobby-sox vigor that is surprisingly cool. There’s a large smile on her face and in her voice. She has a straight-no chaser approach that is magnetic, without a lot of forced intensity but with an ample generosity of spirit that is catching. Except for a few terse intros to the material, the patter is minimal, and she mercifully leaves out “Over the Rainbow,” which nobody has ever sung properly except Judy Garland herself. Somehow that’s the greatest tribute of all.

rreed@observer.com

Bennett.

End of the Rainbow, a tragic reflection with music of the last sad, declining days of the legendary Judy Garland, arrives on Broadway after breaking records in London’s West End and winning a bushel of awards for its star, a supersonically gifted dynamo named Tracie Bennett. At first glance, prancing her way into a suite at the Ritz to begin rehearsals for a five weeks of concerts at the fabled Talk of the Town, she does not sound, speak, sing or look anything like the greatest entertainer of the 20^th century. I have seen drag queens do better Judys, mimicking every stage of her turbulent career. But then, despite the overbite and the hoarse voice without a shine in it, she begins to grow on you, like moss. Slowly, the nuances take you by surprise. Like Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn, she begins to stake squatter’s rights on the role, not just imitating Judy, but channeling her. The book and direction of this show, by Peter Quilter and Terry Johnson, respectively, are as solid, filling and substantial as cracker crust. But by the time Tracie Bennett works her magic, captivates your imagination and captivates your soul, you know you are in the presence of someone electrifying.  

End of the Rainbow (an apt title if ever there was one) takes place seven years after Garland stopped the world in a historic comeback at Carnegie Hall, in those dark, destructive final days three months before her death in 1969 at the age of 47. The stars and the power brokers and the rich and famous people of the world (“I’ve met them all,” she says sardonically, “or rather they’ve all met me!”) have all disappeared. Here she is, at the bottom of her rope, dead broke and unable to pay for room service, her only companions a gay piano player named Anthony (Michael Cumptsy) and Mickey Deans, her new manager, fifth and final husband, and future enabler and drug pusher. With one skinny leg draped over the sofa, the high waistline Edith Head said was impossible to fit, and that innate sense of humor she never lost in good times or bum times, she reminisces about the Munchkins, the two husbands she could remember (Vincente Minnelli and Sid Luft), the pills they forced down her throat at MGM (“I could have flown over the Yellow Brick Road”) and everything from the cigarettes that stunted Mickey Rooney’s growth to the charm of Elizabeth Taylor (“She was so charming you just wanted to run her down with a car!”). Roaring with laughter and raunchy as a sailor, everything sounds like it came right out of Judy’s own mouth, and for all I know, it probably did.

Then the songs: on “Just in Time,” she has the same quiver in her lower register. On “For Me and My Gal,” the same vibrato on the high notes. On “The Man That Got Away,” the same identical sob in the pauses. Sometimes she gazes down on the crowds in the street below, surrounding the Ritz where she is facing eviction, and threatens to jump. But it’s her desperation to be adored that keeps her going. “I could throw up in their laps and I’d still be glamorous,” she says of her fans, giving the lie to what’s to come. Cussing and smoking and pacing nervously, she gets the body language down to a science. It doesn’t matter that Ms. Bennett’s timbre and intonation don’t always duplicate Garland’s at her greatest. She is, after, portraying Judy at her worst, at the end of her rainbow at last. Above all minor reservations, she is Garland. Outstretched hand, pointed arm, legs prancing like a Thoroughbred at Hialeah, she is the whole f—king show.

Tom Pelphrey is a believable Mickey Deans, although his thankless job is mainly to act as a prison warden for the neurotic, addicted Judy. As the Scottish piano player who loves her unconditionally, Mr. Cumptsy is both sarcastic and sympathetic, and the scene where he offers to marry Judy, take her off to Brighton and take care of her even though he knows he can never satisfy her in bed, is genuinely touching. But Tracie Bennett is the one you watch. Popping Ritalin, craving Champagne, begging for prescription drugs, walking off the stage of the Talk of the Town screaming “I’m all sung out,” her gestures, mannerisms and body language are heartbreaking, leavened only by that wicked humor. When she mistakenly swallows pills that were prescribed for a sick cocker spaniel, she says, “I don’t need a doctor. Call a vet. If I start to pee on a lamppost, then call a doctor.”

After a while, the rant overwhelms the story, which is slight and one-dimensional at best. But the show gets more powerful the lower she sinks. As a woman in blind panic, Tracie Bennett is galvanizing. It’s tragic watching her have a slow meltdown onstage. What a discovery! Every move is probably carefully mapped out, but it looks like director Terry Johnson wisely just moved out of the way and let her run her own show. The End of the Rainbow wears itself to a frazzle, but regardless of what happens to the show itself, time spent in the presence of Tracie Bennett’s undeniable talent is crushing, victorious and unforgettable.

rreed@observer.com

Jackman.

Hugh Jackman!

Yes!

Camera ready and slinging his rippled torso, with his undulating thighs drawing gasps and sighs from sold-out audiences nightly and white-picket-fence teeth catching the sparks from the footlights like diamonds, he hits the stage throbbing, and two hours later you leave with your knees shaking. You don’t know what hit you. But you know you’ve been to the theater.

There is nothing Hugh Jackman can’t do onstage—and in the one-man show called (what else?) Hugh Jackman—Back on Broadway at the Broadhurst, he pretty much does it all­—frontward, backward and upside down. Except for early legends like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Marilyn Miller, I’ve been present for most of the show business summits and I am here to tell you I have never seen anybody, male or female, who had it all in one package like this boy from Oz. He’s made so many stupid Wolverine movies I’m surprised people with taste, intelligence and savvy remember what he’s capable of with a tube of greasepaint and a follow spot. Movies make money to fill the bank account, but Broadway makes magic to feed the soul. This is one movie star who is just a Broadway Baby at heart. In this sexy, funny, heart-rending, toe-tapping, foot-stomping, one-man extravaganza, he proves it, and sends his audience over the moon, screaming for more.

The screaming starts before he even appears, brightly booming Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh What a Beautiful Morning!” offstage, and oh how I pity anyone who missed his Curly in the National Theatre production of Oklahoma! in London. Entering in neatly pressed clothes that cling to him like the hands of thousands of women (and men) who dream of such things, he’s the hip-hoppy, fresh-shaven all-American, kangaroo-sparring, jumping, leaping, flirting and breaking the Broadway sound barrier. He grinds his hips toward the people in the first row, accompanied by the appropriate drum rolls, and the high-price orchestra seats go berserk. He mentions the mezzanine and the mezzanine screams. Between songs, he shows still photos and film clips that demonstrate (while poking fun at) the three ingredients of his success—diet, training and genetics—then brings the house down with a shot of himself as an Aussie teenager in gym shorts with skinny legs and knobby knees. Proving, once and for all, what the bench press has done to make him a star.

The patter is candid, self-deprecating and charming, but when he swings into action as a song-and-dance man, you know this is no 8x10 glossy manufactured by the overzealous press department of a Hollywood film studio. In a clever pastiche of the Fred Astaire number “I Won’t Dance,” he sails through every rhythmic beat from “Begin the Beguine” to “Shake Your Booty.” Throwing himself on one knee, he recaptures Al Jolson, bringing the crowd to its feet on a rousing “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” followed by a tribute to the city that has given him an open-arms second career, belting out Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York” with mood-changing Technicolor footage of the Manhattan skyline acting as a bracingly effective emotional backdrop. The charisma and versatility take him from riffing about his one-night triumph in Carousel at Carnegie Hall to oy-vay eye rolling over his work as a fearless vampire hunter in the embarrassing Van Helsing. He has a sense of humor that captivates and enthralls, even about his bad movies. Then he can turn around on a dime and end act one with a passionately delivered, magnificently modulated and perfectly pitched “Soliloquy” that stops the show. And that just takes you up to intermission.

When the star-studded opening night crowd staggered back to their seats, the neatly creased black pants and pale blue shirt were gone and out pranced a honey-dripping, erotically charged party boy in skintight gold lamé, plucking memories of Peter Allen and The Boy From Oz out of the air like falling sequins singing “I Am Not the Boy Next Door.” No, he’s not. Leaping to the top of the grand piano to wail “Between the Moon and New York City,” then leading six gorgeous chorus girls through Warren Carlyle’s intricate Fosse-inspired choreography on “I Go to Rio,” he fills the stage with so much nonstop movement and music you don’t know what to look at or listen to first. It just hits you at the same time, like Fourth of July fireworks. Credit for the sets goes to that ace scenic designer John Lee Beatty, but honestly, except for a curtain of gold ribbons that descends from the ceiling on the Peter Allen medley, there is no set. Hugh Jackman is the set, and there’s no need to gild the lily.

Still, there is more. Illustrating his curious adolescence in Australia as a rough and tumble athlete who loved show tunes, coming home bloody and battered from rugby practice to watch Guys and Dolls on the telly, he stages a stupendous salute to the glorious age of movie musicals. Throwing the dice to a soaring climax on “Luck Be a Lady,” he reminds us that a revival with Hugh Jackman as Sky Masterson would be dream casting. When he taps like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, then high steps through the elegant paces of Fred Astaire on “Stepping Out With My Baby” from Easter Parade, I wager you can hear the ovations over the traffic jams in Times Square. Turning serious about the mystery and spirituality of his country toward the end, he turns the stage over to a captivating group of aborigines who accompany the star on their own instruments while the screen behind them turns into a montage of Australian geography and wildlife and Mr. Jackman sings a haunting “Over the Rainbow.” The effect produces goose bumps, touches the soul and leads to another standing ovation. Whipped into a lather, the audience had to be coaxed to sit down one more time, as Mr. Jackman knocked them out of their socks again on a bouncy Bobby Darin-styled “Mack the Knife.” And there’s another role I’d like to see him tackle.

I’m not mad about one-man shows, but Hugh Jackman is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of happening. He doesn’t lease the stage. He owns it, like Judy Garland, and uses every square inch of the space. Soon he’ll return to the claws and beards of werewolves, vampires and boxing robots on a Hollywood soundstage. For the next 10 weeks, in Back on Broadway, he’s playing the greatest contemporary entertainer in show business—himself. I’ve never seen anyone like him, and you’ll be both foolish and a great deal poorer in life to miss him. Bring your own razzle to the Broadhurst. Hugh Jackman provides the dazzle. Between his electrifying talent, and the legions of fans who send their love back at the stage in appreciation, he creates an interplay, a rapturous splendor, of the disciplined energy that is art.

rreed@observer.com

Gareth Pugh (Getty Images)

Wednesday, July 20

Pugh Foundation

The Met’s Alexander McQueen wingding is due to close soon (Who’d have guessed that the summer’s biggest blockbuster would feature weird shape-shifting metallic entities, but not be the Transformers sequel?!), and we need a new British avante-garde type to turn the female shape into manic pointiness. Gareth Pugh it is! The experimental Brit—he’s Anna-approved!—has long struggled for commercial success, but things might be turning around: he’s collaborating with makeup purveyor MAC on a color collection (that’s where the real money is). McQueen muse and beer baroness Daphne Guinness is declaring new loyalties by dropping by tonight’s MAC party to celebrate the collaboration, along with Mr. Pugh, Lydia Hearst (hope Mr. Pugh’s makeup comes in yellow, like great-grandad’s journalism!) and the first lady of what-does-she-do-again-who-cares-she-looks-fab, Genevieve Jones. It all goes down at the New Museum—so there’s some of the art-world frisson of the Met’s Costume Institute Ball, in celebration of a product you’ll be able buy at Duane Reade!

7:30pm, New Museum’s Sky Room, 235 Bowery, private event.

Thursday, July 21

Curating the Curators

The bearded writer/curator Adam Kleinman—he scribbles on art for art rag Texte zur Kunst, the clever devil!—drops by the Swiss Institute to deliver a
lecture on overused aesthetic tropes used to rationalize away realization of dark truths. So deep. And Mr. Kleinman expects attendees to bring something to the table. The ad copy for the event mentions “an Italian philosopher,” intentionally not naming him. (We give up. Machiavelli?) It’s called “Search and Destroy” and will, we’re told, take on curators and art writers—Mr. Kleinman’s own kind!

Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway #3, 7pm, reserve seats by emailing RSVP@swissinstitute.net

Friday, July 22

Bully for You

If there’s one set of people who’d know about bullying, it’s those capital-R, capital-H, extra-scare-quotes “Real Housewives.” Routinely bullying one another at whatever hoity restaurant will allow cameras in at off-peak hours, they’ve elbowed their way into the public consciousness with vanity singles, vanity magazine covers and vanity charity events. (Somehow we watch their antics week after week while our DVDs of Downton Abbey go sadly unwatched.) Tonight, the show’s archetypal brassy redhead, Jill Zarin, hosts a dinner in support of the Anti-Defamation League’s anti-bullying initiative. “Guests include Jennifer Zarin,” the tip sheet informs us… so it’ll be a family affair! Go if you’re out east and maybe want a bit of camera time. (Trust us, these charity gigs always make it on the air.)

Georgica, 108 Wainscott Stone Road (Wainscott), private event

Saturday, July 23

Living Social

If you’re still out east, and you’re still transfixed by reality-TV ladies, Devorah Rose’s Social Life magazine hosts a party in honor of itself (and Kimora Lee Simmons’ appearance on its cover). Ms. Rose is that fast-climbing weed whose rise was recently chronicled in the pages of the Times Style section as well as in the CW channel opus High Society. Oh, she knows how to throw a drink and a hissy fit, but tonight’s all about her society magazine. Ms. Simmons’s former husband, Russell Simmons, isn’t scheduled to attend as yet, which is unusual, because this is a party and cameras will be there.  But her current beau, the actor Djimon Hounsou, will be there (what an upgrade!) Meanwhile, perma-perky TV blonde Ali Wentworth and Law & Orderer Mariska Hargitay co-host a family fair in support of the Children’s Museum of the East End, so that the museum may have money to run educational programs year-round. (Wait, but there are no people there after Labor Day, right? Just tumbleweeds and boarded-up mansions.) Ask Ms. Hargitay how she feels about her eighth consecutive Emmy nomination! Ask Ms. Wentworth, uh, why the first Google auto-fill suggestion for her name is “Ali Wentworth puffy eyes”?

Social Life party, Social Life Estate, by invitation only; Children’s Museum of the East End party, 376 Bridgehampton / Sag Harbor Turnpike (Bridgehampton), 10:30am to 1:30pm, visit cmee.org for tickets and information.

Sunday, July 24

Club Wed

Does the air smell sweeter today? Are Tiffany-blue ribbons littering the gutters and strains of “Here Comes the Bride” drowning out your brunch conversation? While we’re shuffling out of bed in the direction our first bloody Mary of the morning-noon-early afternoon hours, gay couples will be applying for their marriage licenses—same-sex marriage goes into effect today statewide. The city clerk’s offices will be open on this Sunday, in an unusual step that either will ensure that you, gentle affianced reader, can wed just as soon as possible—as long as you’re one of the 764 couples that win the lottery established by Mayor Bloomberg to protect the beleaguered city clerks from repetitive-stress disorder. If you lose the lottery, you may be spared the awkward conversation you thought you could save for Monday, the usually-reserved-for-straights “where is this going” talk—eek! If you haven’t had that conversation yet, Mr. or Ms. Long-Term Relationship, you’d better, before you’re dragged to the city clerk’s office on a sunny Sunday. Maybe you’d be happier meeting us for brunch after all!

Clerk’s offices in all five boroughs will be open to issue marriage licenses to lottery winners; register at nyc.gov or by calling 311 between 12pm on July 19 and 12pm on July 21.

Monday, July 25

Zach Stage

The theater, such a welcome landing pad for down-on-their-luck stars. Broadway’s always been a regular boulevard of second chances. Hiya, Brooke—how’s Morticia treating you? Christie! How’s the weather in Chicago? Zach Braff, the wunderkind behind our precocious niece’s favorite DVD, Garden State, did these thespians one better, writing the play All New People for Second Stage Theatre. (It’s Off-Broadway—all the better for this artsy fellow!) The work is about New Jersey (of course) during a desolate winter of the soul (ditto). Tonight’s opening and cast party will settle for all time all of our pressing questions about Mr. Braff’s old TV series, Scrubs—and help us figure out if, like plays, the personae of serious actors can have second acts!

All New People opening night, Second Stage Theatre, 305 West 43rd Street, curtain at 7pm with cast party to follow, invitation only.

Tuesday, July 26

Rockin’ Robbins

Once upon a time, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were the standard-bearers for liberal moviegoers who liked their popcorn with a side of advocacy. Their ribbons! Their speechifying! Their his-and-hers Oscars! Their usually-pretty-decent-and-always-extremely-tasteful movies! That era is over—Ms. Sarandon, having switched careers from actress to some sort of sexy-grandma Ping-Pong investor, is frolicking around town with a pair of skinny jeans and a paddle, and Mr. Robbins is now, it would seem, a rock star. His band, Tim Robbins and the Rogues Gallery Band, a soi-disant “rousing gypsy Americana” group, perform at Le Poisson Rouge tonight. (Russell Crowe’s Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts will be, in spirit, opening.) We may never get back the golden age of Sarandon/Robbins (it really was a Clinton Administration kind of love affair), but we’ll go a few stops on the 6 to hit Susan Sarandon’s Ping-Pong club after the concert.

Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, doors open at 6, show begins at 7, visit lepoissonrouge.com for tickets and information.

Wednesday, July 27

Call of Judy

We came back from the Hamptons after a weekend chockablock with TV stars—and find that the only thing worth doing in Manhattan of late is sitting in front of our TV! Nevertheless, we’re forcing ourselves out of the house to sit in front of a bigger screen, with even better air conditioning, to the summer-long Judy Garland retrospective at the Paley Center; today’s screening of Judy highlights includes an episode of The Sammy Davis, Jr., Show and The Ed Sullivan Show as well as Ms. Garland’s own variety show. Out of those three, we’ve heard of one! But a museum of TV feels a bit more virtuous, as a place to spend hours watching old talk shows, than a living room. If you’re a member of the, well, specific target audience, go ahead and bring your husband (that is, if you went through with it)!

Paley Center, 25 West 52nd Street, 12:30pm, visit paleycenter.org for more information.

“You can’t totally stereotype it,” Ms. Vieira began, as if to soften the point she was about to make. “But there are some men that have a lot of sensitivity and, in turn, there are some women that really have … well, they have balls!”

The 55-year-old anchorwoman would go on to personally demonstrate, pausing during her speech about how technology has changed the business to tell a little anecdote concerning satirist Stephen Colbert, who recently visited the Today show.

“I asked him if he Twittered and he said, no, he Twatted!” she informed the crowd of women in Chanel suits, munching on Asian chicken salad. (For every giggle in the room, there seemed to be a crinkled nose.)

After Ms. Vieira’s speech, young scholarship recipients came up to the stage to declare their professional determination, saying things like “I am the next Amy Astley,” referring to the Teen Vogue editor, and “I am the next Anderson Cooper.”

This seemed to inspire a few of the day’s presenters. “I am the next Wolf Blitzer!” announced NBC’s Brian Williams, who was presenting an award to CNN anchor Campbell Brown. He then admired the actress Jessica Lange, who was seated onstage, waiting to present an award to her publicist, 42West’s Leslee Dart, and offered up fratastic props. “You totally killed it in Grey Gardens, by the way,” Mr. Williams said.

Deutsch Inc.’s chairman, Donny Deutsch, who was presenting an award to the CEO of the company, Linda Sawyer, followed suit. “I am the next Judy Garland!”

Earlier, Mr. Deutsch explained why, in his opinion, female ad execs were actually “superior” to their male colleagues.

“I think women are more collaborative,” he said. “I think they spend less time on the emotional nonsense like whose office is bigger and instead it’s all about, ‘Let’s get the job done and let’s get it done well.’”

Daily Candy’s Dany Levy invited author Kurt Andersen, her former boss at New York magazine, to present her award.

“I’m not trying to be p.c., but I just don’t have a clear gender-differentiation in terms of writers and editors,” Mr. Andersen told the Daily Transom. “I personally like hanging around with women more than I tend to men, but …”

Here, Ms. Levy began to nod along before finally interrupting. “Me, too!” she said. “But I do like men a lot.”

Ms. Dart perhaps attracted the most attention during the luncheon due to her celebrity presenters, Ms. Lange and actor Tom Hanks.

When asked what makes Ms. Dart a good publicist, Ms. Lange said, “It’s a combination of things, of course. It’s her extraordinary tenacity, her amazing loyalty, intelligence and grace.”

Later, when the Grey Gardens star was presenting her publicist with the award, she said that she lacked the right words to describe Ms. Dart, and so she was going to borrow a phrase that the actor John Goodman once used to describe Ms. Lange herself: “She has the balls of a burglar!” (Again with the balls!)

With that, Ms. Lange introduced Mr. Hanks, who seemed to bring the entire room of nearly menopausal women into a giddy swirl. “Hi, Leslee, darling! How are you?” Mr. Hanks said before launching into comedic bit about what it’s like to have Ms. Dart as one’s publicist: “She tells you how stupid you have been, if you should get your eyes done and if you should lose some weight.”

Ms. Dart agreed that women were a superior species.

“When you do what I do, you have to be a shrink, a stylist, a best friend, a strategist—all while doing 10 million things all at the same time,” she said. “And that’s something women do much better than men because women work and women have families, so they have become amazing multitaskers.” (Ms. Dart also pointed out that a lot of men in publicity are gay men, so it really all depends!)

By the time Ms. Vieira returned to the stage to close the ceremony, she seemed glad she wasn’t the only one who mentioned those spherical wonders of masculinity that day and exclaimed, “I, too, want the balls of a burglar!”

Her mantra—“There’s noplace like home!”—is apparently not shared by the literary superstar whose 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was banned in his native India and resulted in a fatwa against him.

“Rubbish!” he called Glinda’s prescription for Dorothy.

The excursion into popular culture—in fact, it’s a favorite pastime of Mr. Rushdie to plumb the philosophical depths of Munchkinland—was occasioned at one of those “conversations” presently being sponsored by The New Yorker as a part of its annual festival.

His foil this evening was also an old friend, the Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk, who has written extensively on his hometown of Istanbul and was brought to trial for “insulting Turkishness” after making a casual reference to the Armenian genocide in a Swiss newspaper interview.

“Both of them have complicated relationships with their homes,” said Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker and moderator of the evening’s event, by way of explaining the self-explanatory pairing.

The roughly 300 guests who sipped red wine in the glow of pale blue lighting—a mixture of swank intellectuals, grad-school groupies and Turkish and Indian glitterati—strove to look at home at the swanky High Line ballroom on 16th street off Tenth Avenue, even though the sold-out show had driven many of them to pay five or six times the face value of the ticket over the Internet.

The two kindred spirits mused for roughly an hour on the topic of “Home,” but their mutual sympathy did not prevent them from contriving some conflict—whether or not it was strictly for the benefit of Ms. Treisman’s guests— when Mr. Rushdie referred to people who never left their hometowns (or homelands) as “kind of sad.”

The audience, well-versed in the two men’s biographies, girded for Mr. Pamuk’s response: he has spent nearly his whole life in Istanbul, though he also recently purchased a $1.8 million apartment on Riverside Drive, a few blocks from Columbia University’s Morningside campus.

“I highly disagree!” Mr. Pamuk shot back.

I thought very reluctantly, however, that its talented creators, Peter Ullian and Robert Lindsay-Nassif, weren’t quite there yet with their imaginative piece. But when the cast, led by the wonderful Donna Lynne Champlin, took its curtain call to enthusiastic applause, I found myself feeling guilty and asked myself, “What if I’m wrong?”

What if Flight of the Lawnchair Man is the greatest musical since West Side Story and I missed it? The original producer of West Side Story was Harold Prince, then a young man at the start of his career. His creative team—Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins—would become as legendary as the show. Their new musical literally changed the world—the musical world, anyway.

But wait! Flight of the Lawnchair Man was premiered at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where Harold Prince was its original director. Mr. Prince surely saw the talent at work in Flight of the Lawnchair Man and, at the very least, he wanted to nurture it. Perhaps he saw what I couldn’t see—a miracle in the making, the future.

“There is no substitute for talent,” wrote a resigned Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point. “Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.”

What we know about the mysteries of talent is that dedication to an artistic cause—the magnificent, honest endeavor and effort of it all—doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Eugene O’Neill used to emerge from his workroom exhausted and pale, his eyes bleary with the tears he shed in the struggle to exhume his ghosts and make sense of life’s wreckage. But the tortured O’Neill was a natural stage poet. He had no choice. He was born one.

I’ve found, in the reviewing game, that it also takes as much effort to fail in theater as it does to succeed. The most affecting, appalling scene in Citizen Kane comes when the suicidal Susan Alexander Kane finally confronts her Svengali husband, Charles Foster Kane, for trying to turn her into an opera star when she had no talent.

“Charlie,” she begs him after another humiliating appearance in the opera house he built for her, “you don’t know what it means when the whole audience doesn’t want you.”

“That’s when you’ve got to fight them!” he replies.

Like everything in his life, the millionaire Charles Foster Kane wanted the public to bend to his will. But you cannot fight an audience that’s found you out. An audience in revolt puts an unusual limit on the power of money. For Kane could buy anyone and anything he wanted in life—except the creation of God-given talent.

Kane’s terrified wife is like John Osborne’s mythic failed comic, Archie Rice, who’s dead behind his eyes. Archie is a comic who just isn’t funny. He hasn’t the talent for it. He tries. Oh, how he tries! But he knows it’s no use. He craves laughter and dies every night in the unforgiving spotlight.

Where does talent come from? Talent is kissed by God, who remains perversely democratic about it. He bestows talent without moral judgment on both the good and the bad. Poor old Salieri! That upright patron saint of the mediocre could never accept the capricious injustice of it all. Why not him? Why did God choose an idiot savant named Mozart?

On the other hand, talent needs luck, the helping hand of Fate. Or as Robert Benchley explained about his own success, “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

I was struck last season by a very odd and bold play for Broadway, Souvenir, which told the true story of the society lady, Florence Foster Jenkins, who became a famous opera star precisely because she had no talent. Ms. Jenkins could scarcely hold a note. Yet when she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1944, some 2,000 people were reportedly turned away from her sold-out recital.

We can only assume that Jenkins was either unaware that she was singing blissfully off-key, or she was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was on the floor with laughter at Judy Kaye’s straight-faced impersonation of her. So was everyone else around me. Not meaning to laugh at the disastrously flat notes—we therefore howled. Or worse, tried our utmost not to.

In their bizarre way, Jenkins’ legendary recitals were no different from Leonard Bernstein’s manically discordant “The Wrong Note Rag” in Wonderful Town. But here the deliberately crappy makes us happy. Jenkins’ unself-conscious talent was for singing badly, but you could claim her real talent was for making a public idiot of herself. And yet she was touching. She was treated as a freak show, but she was doing her best. Florence Foster Jenkins yearned in her soul to be the real thing. She wanted to be an artist.

Her contemporary version would be Rufus Wainwright, the popular singer-songwriter, who sold out Carnegie Hall in early summer giving a song-by-song recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 concert, Judy at Carnegie Hall. It mattered little—if it mattered at all—that Mr. Wainwright reportedly sounded nothing like Garland. He had his fantasy in the sun. He had a 40-piece orchestra accompanying him. He had his mother on piano during “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And he had an adoring audience who wanted to be up there like Judy, too.

It takes all sorts, as Wittgenstein used to say over tea and crumpets. Joseph Pujol—a.k.a. La Petomane or “The Fartist”—literally farted his way to great fame and fortune. His astonishing innate talent, which at the height of his powers earned him more than Sarah Bernhardt, was first noticed at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, when he appeared poker-faced, dressed in immaculate evening wear to fart at will in perfect pitch to various classical concertos and popular songs.

Women in the audience fainted from laughing so much. They had to be carried out on stretchers by attendant nurses. La Petomane’s farts could also render a perfect imitation of the sound of several yards of cloth being slowly ripped or, if he felt like it, of rapid machine-gun fire, and all while he accompanied himself on the violin.

Say what you like about him, he was like a breath of fresh air blown through the bourgeois theaters of Paris. He was a true genius of wind who proved the old Broadway adage, “You gotta have a gimmick.”

But the gift of convulsive, unearthly talent is never a mere gimmick. In Brian Friel’s magnificent Faith Healer, the hero lives in agony because he doubts his miraculous gifts. “Precisely what power did I possess?” the tormented faith healer demands time and again of himself. “Could I summon it? When and how?” And then one day, a day he predicted would happen, his gifts vanished overnight and the mob tore him to pieces.

As I say, I felt badly that I didn’t enjoy the New York Theater Festival Flight of the Lawnchair Man as much as some. I thought its talented creators revealed great promise, though—which is something, a lot even, but exactly what the talented never want to hear anyone say about them.

While that idea fits nicely with Mr. Sullivan's theories on the continued blurring of straight and gay culture and identity, it doesn't quite deliver, as Out's new editor, Aaron Hicklin, is actually not a heterosexual.

Mr. Hicklin and Mr. Sullivan have never met, although Mr. Sullivan did once write approvingly of a review by Mr. Hicklin in Gear magazine of a Moby album.

"He's going to be very disappointed when he sees my first issue devoted to Judy Garland," Mr. Hicklin said from the Black Book offices. "And the Cher issue!"

Mr. Hicklin is staying at Black Book long enough to close the June/July issue; he will then immediately transfer to Out, without a break.

—Choire Sicha

The title of All in Good Time, a memoir by Jonathan Schwartz-short-story writer, novelist and the most well-respected radio D.J.-connoisseur of American popular song in the world-is perfectly tuned to the wavelength of his book, which is being republished in paperback this month. The author is the son of the Broadway and Hollywood songwriter Arthur ("Dancing in the Dark") Schwartz and his beautiful songbird first wife, Katherine Carrington, whose "malignant" (pulmonary?) hypertension, diagnosed before their son was conceived, made her a permanent semi-invalid and their child an effective outsider to his own family.

Jonathan was born in 1938, a year before the release of The Wizard of Oz, and one of the earliest stories he tells here is of Judy Garland momentarily leaving one of his parents' parties to sing him to sleep with a lullaby in his bedroom. Garland's personal life, derailed by a variety of factors beginning with alcoholism, isn't rehashed; still, Mr. Schwartz counts on us to remember the tragic details-especially when we learn that young Jonathan, a lonely voyeur of a boy suffering from gross, if privileged, neglect, was spiking his colas with Scotch by the time he was 10 years old.

Indeed, much of his life as a child seems to have been a matter of adding ingredients to experience. Consider Mr. Schwartz's boyhood remembrance of the lyricist Ira Gershwin, a Hollywood neighbor. He paints us a portrait of the living subject, "revered for his authentic modesty, for the brilliance and bulk of his work," and also of the lingering presence of Ira's brother, George, who'd died some years before and whose absence, for those who had eyes to see and the willingness to admit it, modulated the sunshine of the survivor's success:

"The evasion at Ira's house was the only occasionally acknowledged shadow of his brother by his side, close to the easy chair, near his racquet on the tennis court, at poolside next to his glass of orange juice, in the constant sway of the wind. I felt it as a child. Everyone else did, too: The blood rushes to the neck and cheeks. Hands and feet grow warm, though clouds have obscured the sun. Ira survives in the mist, sedentary. The chuckle. The lack of grandiloquence, the soft uncertainty of self, the conviction that the magic lay elsewhere, deceased, silenced well before the war, and, in dying, cutting down everyone's chances, chopping years off the far end of their futures."

"All in good time," the line cackled by Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz as a mortal threat to Garland's Dorothy, has a foreground meaning here of catastrophe in general and catastrophe endemic to showbiz kids in particular. And there's a latent meaning as well: "all in good time" in the sense of musical timing. Beyond the miseries of Jonathan's childhood, and those that the morbidly watchful child sensed in adults, are the deep bonds to his parents and to his own gifts as a writer, a singer and a critic-historian-bonds forged by a family passion for song and, later on, by Mr. Schwartz's exploration of the larger landscape of classical and popular music.

Music saved Jonathan Schwartz's life: It gave his intellect and emotions a focus, it stoked his imagination, it provided him with lines of communication to the world, and, even more than writing, it represented a standard of integrity and purity. Absent any religious upbringing ("My father's Jewishness went unacknowledged. I had no idea I was considered a Jew until high school …. My mother, so clearly Christian, had no idea in the world what she was"), he developed an attachment to music that went far beyond a performer's ambition or a critic's intellect: Music became his repository of the sacred.

When he tells his radio audience-as he did on a recent edition of his radio program The Sunday Show (carried in New York on WNYC-FM)-that the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic "If I Loved You," from Carousel, is "for me … the greatest moment in musical theater," his audience knows that he means it. He's listened to the panoply of songs over the history of musical theater, considered them and chosen this one: a double solo that becomes a duet as Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow sing it to one another. Part of his choice can be reasoned, part is entirely intuitive personal taste, and he can both make the distinction for himself and explain it to an audience that doesn't have his mastery of the field.

The amazing thing about his memoir, though, is that all of its seriousness is latent. The actual narrative flies by, conversational in tone, inflected with humor, shockingly open about the author's mishaps and flaws, yet charmingly elusive about such matters as the physical particulars of his lovers-a simple beach read, it would seem. However, when one takes it apart to see how it's made, there's nothing simple about it.

The apparently casual transition between a phone call from his idol, Frank Sinatra, inviting him to come on over for a drink and his analysis of the way Sinatra attempted to exert control over his friends and colleagues has been prepared for 100 pages back: As a boy, Mr. Schwartz himself attempted to control his circle of family and friends with the invention of a primitive yet effective technology to achieve a radio broadcast in his apartment house.

This is a man who's able to wear his heart on his sleeve in middle age-who's comfortable with the idea that flowers are for the living-because, having written a suicide note in youth to his father, he didn't send it but instead filed it in the sleeve of a Sinatra LP. Underneath his response to "Ring-a-Ding-Ding" are the seething emotions of Tosca.

At one point, Mr. Schwartz says to his friend Lester Davis, "I am a disc jockey …. I wish you to feel music the way I do." Mr. Davis: "But Jonno, that's impossible. Your level of excitement is way out of my casual league." Mr. Schwartz counters, "That may very well be … but at least you could have the common decency to listen." And, speaking for Jonathan Schwartz's readers and listeners, Mr. Davis responds, "Oh, but I do."

Mindy Aloff's anthology, Dance Anecdotes, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

It should be noted that Wellesley graduates have been, for the most part, an elite group of young women with more options than most of their counterparts in humbler circumstances. Then again, more families managed to subsist on one salary in the 1950's than today; now, many women enter the workplace not so much out of political desire as out of sheer economic necessity. This is the dirty little secret of the supposedly booming American economy: Most middle-class workers are not paid enough to support their families in the manner to which the media have made them accustomed.

Having issued this introductory disclaimer, I must say that I enjoyed Mona Lisa Smile enormously, in large part because of the sheer virtuosity of the largely female cast, stranded by some infernal time machine in a period when men were expected to lead on the dance floor and everywhere else. Wellesley's current administration cooperated fully with the producers, and why not? There is no contemporary institutional disgrace in admitting the fact that a half-century ago, according to Mr. Konner, "they were doing French literature in the morning, and how to serve tea to your husband's boss in the afternoon." This satiric tidbit only attests to the progress made in women's education since then.

The movie asks us to assume that into this cauldron of conformity comes Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), an emissary of enlightenment from the advanced civilization of California, where she studied art history at U.C. Berkeley. Mr. Konner explains, "As recently as 50 years ago, New England was still an extension of the Old World, while California really was the New World. So we thought that would be the perfect place for Katherine to have grown up, both in terms of its less rigid class distinctions and more permissive social attitudes."

Back in the real-life 50's, this outer-borough provincial did not realize that the California of the Nixons and the Knowlands was so much more culturally advanced than the New England of the Kennedys and the Lodges. Also, I labored under the delusion that Jackson Pollock's action paintings, which so deeply distressed Wellesley's trustees in the movie, were more at home in nearby Manhattan than in far-off Los Angeles. But granting all the movie's geographical and cultural assumptions, and even buying into all the rhetoric about young women having options besides early marriage-and even the option of career supplements to early marriage-I couldn't help feeling that the movie was a bit smug in implying that people were so silly back then in comparison to how savvy they are now. Today, the big problem is not so much whether young women have a choice, but whether they can reasonably expect to have it all. And some things haven't changed much at all-for example, women in America still employ surgical procedures to reduce the size of their feet for man-hunting purposes. Shades of old China!

Katherine herself is one of the characters caught up in the buzz saw of society's conventional expectations. She's been engaged and even had affairs, but she has always hesitated before taking the final step, even with an engagement ring on her finger. Hence, she approaches her mostly upscale students in a state of middle-class vulnerability. Katherine's first class is an embarrassing fiasco as her students rattle off the names of paintings cleverly memorized from the school's traditional lesson plan. (Katherine herself has never been to Europe to see firsthand many of the art masterpieces she teaches from slides and picture books.)

Her main nemesis is Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst), the well-connected editor of the school newspaper, who commissions a mean-spirited front-page assault on Amanda Armstrong (Juliet Stevenson), a progressive nurse with sotto voce lesbian leanings, for issuing contraceptives to presumably promiscuous students. Betty gets Amanda fired and warns her new professor that her hands-on trustee mother can do as much to her if she dares to give Betty a bad grade. The other major student characters are Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), Katherine's brightest student; Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the defiantly faculty-bedding girl on campus; and Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin), the insecure tag-along member of the group. The young women all bond with the outrageously bitchy Betty to form the school's inner circle, which seems initially improbable.

But by degrees Betty, cowering under her mother's domination, is pressured into a school-ending marriage to a faithless husband, whom she eventually divorces-much to her mother's consternation-and then runs off to Greenwich Village, where she shares an apartment with Giselle. For her part, Joan applies to Yale Law School at Katherine's suggestion; she's accepted, but declines to attend when she also marries early, following her husband to the University of Pennsylvania, where he's been admitted to study law. Katherine is disappointed in Joan's decision, but Joan reminds the idealistic professor that she must respect the choices of others if she wants to be free to make her own. Katherine proceeds to follow her own rules by abandoning two male lovers and Wellesley College itself, after the trustees impose onerous conditions on a renewal of her contract. She embarks instead on a trip to Europe, where, presumably, she will try to find herself.

A particularly cautionary figure in this feminist morality tale is the repressed and frustrated Nancy Abbey (Marcia Gay Harden), who instructs the girls in speech, elocution, poise and homemaking. Ms Abbey carries the burden of the period's perceived absurdities as she almost literally withers on the vine.

Moan Lisa Smile is in all respects a middle-brow treasure, and I must confess I was all too relieved that none of the young characters encountered pregnancy or suicide as punitive strokes of melodrama. Their school year at Wellesley was fraught enough.

Girls In Pearls

Peter Webber's Girl With a Pearl Earring seems to have been made to appeal to viewers who believe that a prestigious painting is infinitely more important than a mere movie that celebrates the exalted existence of this painting. Consequently, a first-rate cast tends to be submerged in a painterly cosmos that focuses on the trail-blazing domesticity of Vermeer's artistic vision. Colin Firth as Johannes Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson as his maid, model and muse, Griet (the subject of the erotically elusive painting), become subdued figures in the Flemish landscape. The muffled disorder of Vermeer's household is dominated by his commercially astute mother-in-law, Maria Thins (Judy Parfitt), and bedeviled by his mentally unstable and frequently pregnant wife, Catharina (Essie Davis). Add to the mix the painter's wealthy and lecherous patron, van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson).

For her part, Griet has her hands full fending off Catharina's jealous rages, van Ruijven's exploratory gropings and Vermeer's piercing eyes, which seem to offer a creative assessment of her inner being. Griet even finds the time to respond tentatively to the courtly overtures of the honorable butcher boy, Pieter (Cillian Murphy). Unfortunately, Ms. Johansson never breaks out of her shell in this role, as she did so memorably in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation . The film is the poorer for it, Vermeer or no Vermeer.

For 3-D, Dial M

On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) is being revived in its original 3-D format at the Film Forum on Jan. 2 to 8 (209 West Houston Street; 212-727-8110). When I finally saw the 3-D version back in the 60's (more than a decade after I'd seen the standard 2-D format), I noted in my Village Voice column that in 2-D, Dial M is minor Hitchcock; in 3-D, it is major Hitchcock. The extra dimension exploited the film's limitations of a restricted visual field and a crowded set design by endowing the objects floating in 3-D's otherwise empty space with an ominous autonomy.

In this neat and snug spectacle, Grace Kelly plays Hitchcock's quintessential blond lady in distress; Ray Milland, the suave and charismatic villain; Robert Cummings, a bumbling adulterer turned chivalric defender; Anthony Dawson, an amusingly manipulated opportunist reduced to an ill-fated hit-man; and John Williams, a marvelously droll Scotland Yard inspector who steals the show just when everything seems lost. It's all great fun through the magic of Hitch's ultra-functional mise-en-scène .

Judy's Back!

Judy Garland (1922-1969) is the subject of a sparkling nine-film revival at the American Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue and 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-4520), and it's well worth a visit to see her at the peak, more or less, of her impressive and now-haunting talent. My own favorite Garland vehicle is Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) (Dec. 27 and 28, and Jan. 1). I much prefer St. Louis to the vastly and almost universally overrated The Wizard of Oz (1939), directed by Victor Fleming (Dec. 20, 21, 26 and 31). Indeed, I prefer every other Garland entry in this series to Oz , including one more from Minnelli, The Clock (1945) (Dec. 28), and Busby Berkeley's Babes in Arms , (1939) (Dec. 20 and 29) and Strike Up the Band (1940) (Dec. 21 and 30). George Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954) (Jan. 3 and 4) and Charles Walters' Easter Parade (1948) (Jan. 3) also made the cut.

Garland's male consorts in the series include Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Mason, Robert Walker and Mickey Rooney-not exactly chopped liver themselves-not to mention such period tunesmiths as Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, Irving Berlin, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Not a hip-hop virtuoso among them!

Clarion Call

Ellen Drew (1915-2003) recently passed away without much fanfare. Drew came along at a time when her brand of wholesome good looks were a dime a dozen in the 1930's Hollywood flesh-grinder. Not surprisingly, she was quickly consigned to stereotyped sunny parts. Perhaps the one shining moment in Drew's 21-year, 40-movie career was a close-up that would have made Norma Desmond green with envy. It occurs in Preston Sturges' screwball office-and-neighborhood, rags-to-riches comedy, Christmas in July (1940). Dick Powell plays Drew's ambitious sap of a boyfriend, who mistakenly thinks that he's won a coffee-slogan radio contest with the brilliant aphorism "If you can't sleep, it isn't the coffee, it's the bunk." The audience already knows that he is the victim of a practical joke perpetrated by a trio of office pranksters. But his boss is deceived as well, and our hero is promoted to the front office. When the hoax is discovered and the boss is just about to withdraw the promotion, the poor lug's girlfriend (Drew), who's been hanging sweetly on his arm all through the movie, suddenly steps forward and gobbles up the entire screen making an impassioned plea for her boyfriend and all the young men who are never given a chance even to fail in their quest for the big prize. Drew's emotional outburst is a stunner in the context of this witty but wacky farce, and it still resonates on the screen 63 years later-a proletarian clarion call to America to live up to its billing as the land of opportunity. Thank you, Ellen Drew.