Talk about irony. Kelli O’Hara and KT Sullivan are two sparkling blondes who are lighting up the cabaret season in the same week—both Irish colleens, and both of them from Oklahoma! This may be something of a first. I know one thing. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a diva on a supper club stage who is six months pregnant. Ms. O’Hara is supposed to be on maternity leave from the smash-hit revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center. But a lovely, resourceful mother-to-be with her energy and dazzle can spend just so much time munching pickles and knitting booties. So she’s passing the time wisely at the Carlyle. Years ago, she worked as a reservations clerk at the same hotel and quit after one day. You could call this upward mobility.

Eating for two has taken no toll on her vibrant talents. She looks wonderful in her high, carefully designed Josephine Bonaparte waistline; her skin glows in the dark; and her voice is still clear as Baccarat. Best of all, her eclectic program of take-home tunes fits every taste. She wastes no time winning over her fans. “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy” sounds as good in an intimate setting as it does in the theater, but this time it’s obvious that her “wonderful guy” is husband Greg Naughton, who joins her onstage for an inspired duet on his own composition, “The Sun Went Out.” Sondheim’s “Take Me to the World,” a song from Evening Primrose sung by a department store mannequin who dreams of what lies beyond the plate-glass windows, sets the tone for the positive sense of adventure that permeates the act. Songs from her own successes, like “Hey There” from The Pajama Game and, of course, the rapturous title song from Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza, have never sounded more stunning. She transforms the room with “That’s How I Say Goodbye,” a Marvin Hamlisch song deleted from the score of Sweet Smell of Success, and a new arrangement of Adam Guettel’s “Fable” written by Harry Connick Jr. has a beat that sounds remarkably like Sondheim’s theme from the French film Stavisky. Ms. O’Hara grew up on a farm singing country music, won a scholarship singing opera and ended up in musical comedy. Is it any wonder that her nightclub debut at the Carlyle is intelligent, musical and versatile? In one show-stopping piece of special material called “Opera-Country” that encompasses her natural affinity for both, she gives you her life, chapter and verse. She arrived in New York 10 years ago and she hasn’t wasted a day. Stardom was inevitable, and attendant fame is a given. I love her snubbed mushroom cap of a nose, her deeply soulful eyes, her questioning expressions (placid but far from blank) and her Ivory soap glow. Kelli O’Hara is a blooming marvel. She’s warm and down to earth, and you could spend the winter in her smile.

Kelli O’Hara, through April 15, www.thecarlyle.com

Oklahoma! To the Oak Room

KT Sullivan
Algonquin Oak Room

About 30 blocks south of the Carlyle, KT Sullivan is back at the Algonquin’s fabled Oak Room, turning New York’s most jaded sophisticates into gushing fans, clamoring for more. She’s a staple now on the cabaret circuit, but no show in her vast repertoire has ever been better than this. “Dancing in the Dark,” a celebration of the legendary songwriting team of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, is as sophisticated and beguiling as anything I have enjoyed in a long, long time. It is doubtful that any living performer loves the classical songs from the golden age of musicals as much as this fizzy blond bombshell, and I am convinced her goal at this junction in her life is to sing them all. And she can always be counted on to unveil a few surprises.

Dietz and Schwartz could write anything, and from the 21 songs in this show, you get the cream of the crop, including not only the evergreens they wrote together, but their separate collaborations penned with Dorothy Fields, Vernon Duke, Leo Robin, Frank Loesser and—are you ready?—Johann Strauss. The latter is represented by special lyrics added for Patrice Munsel in a production of Die Fledermaus that brings down the house. From a book of Dietz lyrics shown to her by his widow, the great designer Lucinda Ballard, KT enlisted the late Bart Howard to construct a beautiful ballad called “Lovely.” Love is explored from the point of view of an ingénue (“Make the Man Love Me” from the Schwartz-Dorothy Fields score of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and a prostitute (“The Love I Long For,” introduced by June Havoc in the brilliant Dietz–Vernon Duke score for Sadie Thompson). KT even does a pretty darn ravishing impression of Bette Davis introducing “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” from the Warner Brothers movie Thank Your Lucky Stars (“What’s good is in the army/ What’s left will never harm me/ I’ve looked the field over and lo and behold/ They’re either too young or too old”). You’ll thrill to the hilarious rhymes of “Rhode Island Is Famous for You” and the obscure “Blue Grass,” from the revue Inside USA, about a Kentucky gal who loses her guy to a horse (“Blue dawn … Blue noon … Only see him in a blue moon …”). Accompanied by Tedd Firth on piano and Steve Doyle on bass, she fills an hour with more music than you can remember. With Cole Porter or Jerome Kern, you get largely what you already know. With Dietz and Schwartz, together and apart, you make discoveries: “Rainy Night in Rio,” “Confession,” songs written for Beatrice Lillie and Libby Holman, and a new arrangement of “That’s Entertainment” that sounds less like a salute to vaudeville and more like a Biblical litany of show business possibilities through history. One of the few sopranos who overcomes power and range to achieve intimacy, KT is a marvel. Even when she’s introspective, she is never somber. Johnny Mercer used to say there are three kinds of people in the world—men, women and girl singers. Pity he never met KT Sullivan. She could charm the honey out of a nest of bees with that kewpie doll smile. Even her ears grin. She’s a cross between Jeanette MacDonald, Mae West and Little Lulu. Drop in the Algonquin and see what I mean. She does all the work while you sit back, have fun and learn something.

KT Sullivan, through April 11, www.algonquinhotel.com

The career has been as fractious a roller-coaster ride—highlighted by heights and dips, punctuated by applause and thrills, accented by nerves and screams—as the life. Her critics and fans alike still have trouble pronouncing “Liza,” and the press still can’t spell “Minnelli.” But it’s written in stone: The one-word mention of her name will always have its own instant, built-in recognition factor. And the best of it all (a compilation of all highs and no lows) is captured in Liza with a “Z,” the historic 1972 NBC television special directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, written by Fred Ebb, broadcast three times and—despite winning four Emmys—not seen for 33 years.

Get ready. It’s back, digitally remastered, fluffed and slick’um’d up in Dolby sound, premiering April 1 on Showtime, with a DVD following three days later. At 60, Liza may have another race in her before the bone yard. But at 26, in red Halston sequins and singing in stereo, she was already a Derby winner.

Filmed with eight cameras on a Broadway stage before a “live” audience, Liza with a “Z” was the first filmed concert for network TV. From the downbeat, the air is charged with a breathless electricity rare even by Broadway standards, and Judy’s little girl provides the kilowatts. Fresh from their Oscar-winning Cabaret, the Fosse, Minnelli, Kander and Ebb collaboration was in full throttle in 1972, and Liza’s myriad illnesses, surgeries and addictions (enough to render most performers catatonic) had not yet surfaced in tabloid headlines. Sparkling and shimmering, her Punchinello body looking a few potato sacks lighter than it is today, her chops soaring with power and strength, she is splendid and larky and nervous and overwhelming all at the same time, and there isn’t a wasted minute in one hour of solid entertainment.

From her show-stopping signature requests, like the title song and “Ring Them Bells,” to a heartbreaking, beautifully acted rendition of Charles Aznavour’s “You’ve Let Yourself Go,” the repertoire is eclectic, funny, touching and, at least once (in a tribute to Billie Holiday on “God Bless the Child”), blue as a jazz saxophone. The highlight, of course, is the lengthy Cabaret medley, which doesn’t seem lengthy at all. In the past 34 years, she has sung these songs so many times that she often seems more Sally Bubbles than Sally Bowles, but they are fresh as sprigs of spring mint here. Sally is a foolproof role, and you’d have to be pretty mediocre not to shine in it, but Liza brings it to life with added personal vulnerability and huggable wistfulness that have often been obscured in other, flashier interpretations of the role. Her Sally was like a cross between a Berlin chanteuse in an Emil Jannings movie and a giddy, teenage Kay Francis.

All of these elements have been coordinated with panache by Bob Fosse, riveting attention to small points of interest as well as big ones. He knew in his marrow that from her own genes, she inherited her mother’s razor-sharp wit and indestructible talent, her father’s impeccable sense of style and what her godmother, Kay Thompson, always called “bazazz,” not to mention what Joan Collins defined as Liza’s ultimate tool for show-business survival (“Balls of brass, darling, balls of brass!”). Somewhere between these attributes and the stage that reflects them, Fosse established an interplay that broadened the horizons of the one-woman show in a profound, adult way, taking its rightful place in television history and enriching our experience as nothing ever does on the idiot box anymore.

So sound the trumpets. It’s another planet, place, era and girl, but Liza with a “Z” strikes gold again in bankrupt times. It’s Artistry with an “A.”

All’s Swell

I can think of no better way to usher in the badly needed first embrace of spring than a splash of Cole Porter, and KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler have both faucets wide open. In their delightful new cabaret act at the Algonquin’s Oak Room, they’ve got the subject well covered. They call it “A Swell Party!” and you’ve still got until April 1 to RSVP.

One thing this show does is remind us what a devil Mr. Porter was. The lyrics are often quite naughty (“Let’s Do It” never sounded so double-entendre). When the mischievous pianist-singer-arranger-comic Mark Nadler tackles them, every line is a punch line. Then he does an about face and sings “You’ve Got That Thing” in a slow, sensual and suggestive tempo that is almost lascivious. Versatility is the key. KT Sullivan, usually a bubbly cross between Lillian Russell and Lorelei Lee, manages, in this outing, to blend the emotional content of “So in Love” with the arc of theme and melody on “Get Out of Town,” giving happiness new meaning.

Some other subtle changes in their patter, delivery and timing pay handsome dividends: Though never less than entertaining, they have in past performances sometimes been verbose and overly descriptive with the biographical material, talking at the same time like the maddening sound track from a Robert Altman movie. This time, they wisely dissolve the segues between songs and dispense with the unnecessary details of Cole Porter’s life. It’s the songs that count. Without sacrificing an iota of subtlety or imagination, less chatter leaves more time for music, and there is plenty of it, with the excellent bass player John Loehrke and the dreamy saxophone of Loren Schoenberg lending vibrant support.

From the insatiable lusts of “Kate the Great” to a Paris medley with “After You, Who?” in French, this duo is out to dazzle. She has joie de vivre; he has verve and sheen. I like the antic Danny Kaye side of Mr. Nadler, but when he explores the minor keys of songs like “I Love Paris,” or idealistically feels his way through an obscure Porter masterpiece like “Wake Up and Dream,” the softer, warmer side of his voice becomes a most appealing counterpart to his usual antics.

What a swellegant, elegant party this is, and KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler are the perfect hosts. They may end the show with “Just One of Those Things,” but don’t believe it. You’re in for much, much more.

Ballroom Bliss

At the movies, there isn’t much to write home about, but compared with the violence and filth of today’s Hollywood action epics and the creeping deadliness of all the independent productions that look like they were made for $100, a sweet, unpretentious and heartfelt little movie like Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School begins to look like a wayward valentine from the dead-letter office, lost in transit and delivered late.

A despondent and recently widowed bread baker named Frank Keane (played by the sometimes unintelligible Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, thankfully exchanging his thick brogue for a more decipherable Irish accent) is driving down a California highway when he finds a man seriously injured in a car accident. Although the injured driver (John Goodman) is near death, 911 tells Frank to keep him conscious and talking until the paramedics arrive. An extraordinary story unfolds when the stranger reveals that he’s on his way to fulfill a promise made 40 years earlier to meet his childhood sweetheart at the Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, where they first met as kids—and that he’s broken out of prison to do it.

Frank keeps his appointment but never dreams that when he enters the old social club in Pasadena, his own fate will take a remarkable right turn. The original Marilyn passed on in 1972. But her dance classes are still conducted by her grown daughter (Mary Steenburgen), and they have such an unexpectedly liberating effect on the shy, inarticulate Frank that even the miserable members of his group-therapy sessions for grieving widowed husbands move to the ballroom, and the Thursday-night lindy hops and tangos become metaphors for exorcising demons and opening up new doors to hope and affirmation.

Directed by Randall Miller and co-written by Mr. Miller and Jody Savin, the movie is similar in theme to Shall We Dance? But unlike that film, it doesn’t narrow its focus to what happens inside the classroom. The story is complex, involving a variety of characters at different ages in their lives, so the structure understandably has a hopscotch effect, with three different looks: The past has a historic sepia-tone quality, the California-freeway scenes between Mr. Carlyle and the dying Mr. Goodman have the bleached and antiseptic hue of an ambulance interior, and the ballroom scenes that grow from awkwardness to passion are rich and colorful.

The performances are whimsical and touching, with solid and human portraits etched by Marisa Tomei, Donnie Wahlberg, Sean Astin, Sonia Braga, David Paymer, Adam Arkin, Camryn Manheim and Danny DeVito, among others. Today’s movies are so bad that when respected performers with established reputations find a script they believe in, they work for next to nothing. By the end of this film, every life has been changed or impacted in positive ways (some more whimsical and less believable than others) through the group experience of ballroom dancing. The point of the film is that anything is possible when you open your heart to new experiences. Simplistic, for sure. Simple-minded, maybe. But the feel-good pleasures in a movie with this much positive thinking are undeniable.

Thud

No such luck awaits the victims of Brick, a two-bit indie-prod that gives new meaning to the four most dreaded words in cinema: “Big Hit at Sundance!” It should have been burned there, instead of winning a jury prize for “originality of vision.” It sends the new genre of cut-rate filmmaking with video cams to the garbage dump. Typed on a keyboard in cyberspace and directed with mind-bending incompetence by somebody named Rian Johnson, Brick transfers the film noir ambience of old Humphrey Bogart flicks to new depths of teenage dopiness. Even its claim to be a murder mystery solved by kids is nothing original. (Dean Stockwell, Peggy Ann Garner and Connie Marshall did it so much better in Home, Sweet Homicide in 1946.)

This one’s got slackers, dopers and cretinous teen skanks just waiting for a felony to happen. There’s an invisible plot about a gang of high-school heroin pushers run by The Pin, a killer with a clubfoot whose mother serves him cookies and apple juice between murder sprees. Leading a cast of unknowns in the role of the just-learning-to-shave-but-doesn’t-own-a-razor “detective,” there’s an unbearable performance by a zombie named Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who acts with a permanent scowl, shoulders hunched and angry fists dug deep into the pockets of his Wal-Mart windbreaker. The unspeakable dialogue is so incomprehensible it seems like a whole new language. The title refers to a brick of heroin cut with laundry detergent. The moans you hear are from Dashiell Hammett, turning over in his grave.

The career has been as fractious a roller-coaster ride—highlighted by heights and dips, punctuated by applause and thrills, accented by nerves and screams—as the life. Her critics and fans alike still have trouble pronouncing “Liza,” and the press still can’t spell “Minnelli.” But it’s written in stone: The one-word mention of her name will always have its own instant, built-in recognition factor. And the best of it all (a compilation of all highs and no lows) is captured in Liza with a “Z,” the historic 1972 NBC television special directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, written by Fred Ebb, broadcast three times and—despite winning four Emmys—not seen for 33 years.

Get ready. It’s back, digitally remastered, fluffed and slick’um’d up in Dolby sound, premiering April 1 on Showtime, with a DVD following three days later. At 60, Liza may have another race in her before the bone yard. But at 26, in red Halston sequins and singing in stereo, she was already a Derby winner.

Filmed with eight cameras on a Broadway stage before a “live” audience, Liza with a “Z” was the first filmed concert for network TV. From the downbeat, the air is charged with a breathless electricity rare even by Broadway standards, and Judy’s little girl provides the kilowatts. Fresh from their Oscar-winning Cabaret, the Fosse, Minnelli, Kander and Ebb collaboration was in full throttle in 1972, and Liza’s myriad illnesses, surgeries and addictions (enough to render most performers catatonic) had not yet surfaced in tabloid headlines. Sparkling and shimmering, her Punchinello body looking a few potato sacks lighter than it is today, her chops soaring with power and strength, she is splendid and larky and nervous and overwhelming all at the same time, and there isn’t a wasted minute in one hour of solid entertainment.

From her show-stopping signature requests, like the title song and “Ring Them Bells,” to a heartbreaking, beautifully acted rendition of Charles Aznavour’s “You’ve Let Yourself Go,” the repertoire is eclectic, funny, touching and, at least once (in a tribute to Billie Holiday on “God Bless the Child”), blue as a jazz saxophone. The highlight, of course, is the lengthy Cabaret medley, which doesn’t seem lengthy at all. In the past 34 years, she has sung these songs so many times that she often seems more Sally Bubbles than Sally Bowles, but they are fresh as sprigs of spring mint here. Sally is a foolproof role, and you’d have to be pretty mediocre not to shine in it, but Liza brings it to life with added personal vulnerability and huggable wistfulness that have often been obscured in other, flashier interpretations of the role. Her Sally was like a cross between a Berlin chanteuse in an Emil Jannings movie and a giddy, teenage Kay Francis.

All of these elements have been coordinated with panache by Bob Fosse, riveting attention to small points of interest as well as big ones. He knew in his marrow that from her own genes, she inherited her mother’s razor-sharp wit and indestructible talent, her father’s impeccable sense of style and what her godmother, Kay Thompson, always called “bazazz,” not to mention what Joan Collins defined as Liza’s ultimate tool for show-business survival (“Balls of brass, darling, balls of brass!”). Somewhere between these attributes and the stage that reflects them, Fosse established an interplay that broadened the horizons of the one-woman show in a profound, adult way, taking its rightful place in television history and enriching our experience as nothing ever does on the idiot box anymore.

So sound the trumpets. It’s another planet, place, era and girl, but Liza with a “Z” strikes gold again in bankrupt times. It’s Artistry with an “A.”

All’s Swell

I can think of no better way to usher in the badly needed first embrace of spring than a splash of Cole Porter, and KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler have both faucets wide open. In their delightful new cabaret act at the Algonquin’s Oak Room, they’ve got the subject well covered. They call it “A Swell Party!” and you’ve still got until April 1 to RSVP.

One thing this show does is remind us what a devil Mr. Porter was. The lyrics are often quite naughty (“Let’s Do It” never sounded so double-entendre). When the mischievous pianist-singer-arranger-comic Mark Nadler tackles them, every line is a punch line. Then he does an about face and sings “You’ve Got That Thing” in a slow, sensual and suggestive tempo that is almost lascivious. Versatility is the key. KT Sullivan, usually a bubbly cross between Lillian Russell and Lorelei Lee, manages, in this outing, to blend the emotional content of “So in Love” with the arc of theme and melody on “Get Out of Town,” giving happiness new meaning.

Some other subtle changes in their patter, delivery and timing pay handsome dividends: Though never less than entertaining, they have in past performances sometimes been verbose and overly descriptive with the biographical material, talking at the same time like the maddening sound track from a Robert Altman movie. This time, they wisely dissolve the segues between songs and dispense with the unnecessary details of Cole Porter’s life. It’s the songs that count. Without sacrificing an iota of subtlety or imagination, less chatter leaves more time for music, and there is plenty of it, with the excellent bass player John Loehrke and the dreamy saxophone of Loren Schoenberg lending vibrant support.

From the insatiable lusts of “Kate the Great” to a Paris medley with “After You, Who?” in French, this duo is out to dazzle. She has joie de vivre; he has verve and sheen. I like the antic Danny Kaye side of Mr. Nadler, but when he explores the minor keys of songs like “I Love Paris,” or idealistically feels his way through an obscure Porter masterpiece like “Wake Up and Dream,” the softer, warmer side of his voice becomes a most appealing counterpart to his usual antics.

What a swellegant, elegant party this is, and KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler are the perfect hosts. They may end the show with “Just One of Those Things,” but don’t believe it. You’re in for much, much more.

Ballroom Bliss

At the movies, there isn’t much to write home about, but compared with the violence and filth of today’s Hollywood action epics and the creeping deadliness of all the independent productions that look like they were made for $100, a sweet, unpretentious and heartfelt little movie like Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School begins to look like a wayward valentine from the dead-letter office, lost in transit and delivered late.

A despondent and recently widowed bread baker named Frank Keane (played by the sometimes unintelligible Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, thankfully exchanging his thick brogue for a more decipherable Irish accent) is driving down a California highway when he finds a man seriously injured in a car accident. Although the injured driver (John Goodman) is near death, 911 tells Frank to keep him conscious and talking until the paramedics arrive. An extraordinary story unfolds when the stranger reveals that he’s on his way to fulfill a promise made 40 years earlier to meet his childhood sweetheart at the Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, where they first met as kids—and that he’s broken out of prison to do it.

Frank keeps his appointment but never dreams that when he enters the old social club in Pasadena, his own fate will take a remarkable right turn. The original Marilyn passed on in 1972. But her dance classes are still conducted by her grown daughter (Mary Steenburgen), and they have such an unexpectedly liberating effect on the shy, inarticulate Frank that even the miserable members of his group-therapy sessions for grieving widowed husbands move to the ballroom, and the Thursday-night lindy hops and tangos become metaphors for exorcising demons and opening up new doors to hope and affirmation.

Directed by Randall Miller and co-written by Mr. Miller and Jody Savin, the movie is similar in theme to Shall We Dance? But unlike that film, it doesn’t narrow its focus to what happens inside the classroom. The story is complex, involving a variety of characters at different ages in their lives, so the structure understandably has a hopscotch effect, with three different looks: The past has a historic sepia-tone quality, the California-freeway scenes between Mr. Carlyle and the dying Mr. Goodman have the bleached and antiseptic hue of an ambulance interior, and the ballroom scenes that grow from awkwardness to passion are rich and colorful.

The performances are whimsical and touching, with solid and human portraits etched by Marisa Tomei, Donnie Wahlberg, Sean Astin, Sonia Braga, David Paymer, Adam Arkin, Camryn Manheim and Danny DeVito, among others. Today’s movies are so bad that when respected performers with established reputations find a script they believe in, they work for next to nothing. By the end of this film, every life has been changed or impacted in positive ways (some more whimsical and less believable than others) through the group experience of ballroom dancing. The point of the film is that anything is possible when you open your heart to new experiences. Simplistic, for sure. Simple-minded, maybe. But the feel-good pleasures in a movie with this much positive thinking are undeniable.

Thud

No such luck awaits the victims of Brick, a two-bit indie-prod that gives new meaning to the four most dreaded words in cinema: “Big Hit at Sundance!” It should have been burned there, instead of winning a jury prize for “originality of vision.” It sends the new genre of cut-rate filmmaking with video cams to the garbage dump. Typed on a keyboard in cyberspace and directed with mind-bending incompetence by somebody named Rian Johnson, Brick transfers the film noir ambience of old Humphrey Bogart flicks to new depths of teenage dopiness. Even its claim to be a murder mystery solved by kids is nothing original. (Dean Stockwell, Peggy Ann Garner and Connie Marshall did it so much better in Home, Sweet Homicide in 1946.)

This one’s got slackers, dopers and cretinous teen skanks just waiting for a felony to happen. There’s an invisible plot about a gang of high-school heroin pushers run by The Pin, a killer with a clubfoot whose mother serves him cookies and apple juice between murder sprees. Leading a cast of unknowns in the role of the just-learning-to-shave-but-doesn’t-own-a-razor “detective,” there’s an unbearable performance by a zombie named Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who acts with a permanent scowl, shoulders hunched and angry fists dug deep into the pockets of his Wal-Mart windbreaker. The unspeakable dialogue is so incomprehensible it seems like a whole new language. The title refers to a brick of heroin cut with laundry detergent. The moans you hear are from Dashiell Hammett, turning over in his grave.

Written and directed by quirky Neil Jordan ( The Butcher Boy ) and starring the mesmerizing Annette Bening (I wonder if Warren Beatty really deserves her), In Dreams filled me with so much anticipation, I couldn't imagine a better way to get 1999 off to a smashing start. Now that I've seen it, I say we have nowhere to go but up.

In this lurid psychological thriller, a wacko serial killer (Robert Downey Jr. on another bad hair day) possesses the mind of a neurotic psychic (Ms. Bening, proving she can do junk films as well as the next wasted talent in Hollywood) and everyone comes to a bad end, including the audience. The gifted and charming star plays a once-prominent illustrator of Grimm's fairy tales turned mother and wife (of pilot Aidan Quinn) whose quiet life by a New England lake turns ugly when she suffers from continual nightmares. Mr. Downey's homicidal maniac is on the loose in the nearby woods, kidnapping and murdering little girls, and Ms. Bening sees it all in her mind. When her own daughter is plucked away from a gruesome school play about Snow White–that appears to have been written by Bram Stoker and directed by F.W. Murnau–the screams in her dreams hit closer to home. By the time the child is fished out of the lake like a pile of seaweed, it's too late for over-the-counter dual-relief Unisom.

The killer invades her subconscious, then her computer, then her life. Her husband doesn't believe her. The cops think she's a

real Section 8, ready for a straitjacket. She slashes her wrists and ends up in a lunatic asylum, in the same padded cell from which the killer himself escaped years ago. (Ms. Bening is quite feisty, even while crawling the walls with her hair chopped off like Glenda Jackson.) But where is this lurid trash, wallowing in terrifying excess, going, with its close-ups of apples and blood and children chained to their beds in rooms filling with water?

Ms. Bening, in a Thorazine stupor, is finally lured to the killer's hiding place (a deserted apple orchard that still produces thousands of luscious varieties without an ounce of insecticide!) where Mr. Downey, in a red dress, lipstick, high heels and wigs that make Psycho 's Norman Bates look as harmless as the Good Humor man, is terrorizing his latest nubile victim. He plays Mommy, then she plays Mommy, then he plays son, and the loopy Freudian absurdity of it all is positively stultifying. While all of this bizarre S&M is going on, poor Aidan Quinn gets eaten by the family dog. Stephen Rea, who starred in the director's famous film The Crying Game , plays a psychiatrist who almost goes bonkers himself, and I don't blame him. By the time the two stars fall off a bridge into an underwater city destroyed years ago by a flood, you don't know what to do first–yawn, raise an eyebrow, or laugh out loud. I did all three.

With this cast and Neil Jordan at the helm, I expected more. But even on the level of your basic paranormal potboiler, In Dreams is a numbing and delusional disaster. Shot at so many odd angles it looks like life in a Coney Island fun-house mirror, it's too pretentious to be scary. Lit almost entirely in shadows, you rarely have enough light to discern the dreams from the reality. Mixing the metaphysical spiritual gloom of Peter Weir with the murky mumbo jumbo of Neil Jordan's worst films ( Interview With the Vampire springs to mind), it's a lame duck that should send a number of overpaid agents to the unemployment lines. Maybe I do know what Warren Beatty did to deserve Annette Bening, but what did Annette Bening do to deserve In Dreams ?

Three Reasons to Hit the Town

Some extraordinary talents are ushering in the musical New Year with a bang and flourish on the cabaret scene. Buddy Greco, a polished practitioner of the fading art of saloon singing, is celebrating his 50th year in show business with a rare and welcome appearance at the Algonquin Hotel's famed Oak Room. He has come out with a new CD, Like Young , and by the time we reach the millennium there will be a new book and a television movie about the life of this underrated singer-pianist pal of Frank Sinatra who has been playing jazz piano since the age of 4.

On Like Young , Mr. Greco swings with a humongous orchestra in full-bodied arrangements of such staples as "I Can't Get Started" and "My Romance." At the Algonquin–without his usual glitzy Vegas showgirls and big-band throttle–we get an uncommon opportunity to see him work with an intimate trio, in the kind of relaxed setting audiences were accustomed to in the halcyon days of Manhattan night life 30 years ago, and it's a pleasure to add he's performing better than ever. Just Buddy Greco, swinging and singing at the eighty-eights, taking a few requests, sharing anecdotes about Frank and Sammy and Dean and the Rat Pack, and even resurrecting a few of his early recorded hits–corny audience-pleasers like "I Left My Sugar in the Rain." A good time is had by all, including Mr. Greco himself, who says often, "I haven't done that one since 1960."

He's been snapping his fingers so long some people may have forgotten how accomplished his playing can be. From the surprising midchorus section on "They Can't Take That Away From Me" to the speeding-train tempo of an unusually upbeat "I'll Remember April," he constantly stuns and reduces the ringsiders at the Oak Room to oohs and ahs. Heavily influenced by Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, Mr. Greco can switch from a jaunty stride to hard-driving melodic swinging in a few chords. The incredible riffs on "I Can't Get Started" prove that if he ever loses his chops, he can earn his living in gold, just playing with passion and informed precision. On mediocre pop tunes like "The Summer Wind" and "MacArthur Park" (fortunately, with the silly, psychedelic lyrics missing) his skills begin to seem less astonishing, but for most of this warm, witty appearance, he explores a variety of moods and tempos with accomplished panache. In the cold of a January night, Buddy Greco is a hearty antidote to the winter blahs.

In her sparkling new act at the merlot-colored Firebird Cafe, vivacious KT Sullivan, Oklahoma's pride and joy, proves what a long way from Will Rogers' plains she's come. The show is called "Noël, Cole and Bart" and is, quite naturally, a cornucopia of prime, patrician songs by Messrs. Coward, Porter and Howard. These are the kinds of songs Mabel Mercer used to sing–the finely crafted pearls of great wit, intelligence and musical sophistication I used to hear in rooms like L'Intrigue, R.S.V.P. and the Blue Angel. Mabel is gone now and the memory grows dim, but Ms. Sullivan keeps the flame at her altar burning brightly. She's not old enough in years to remember how privileged New Yorkers were to sit around in exalted clusters at 2 A.M., listening and learning from Mabel about the art of song. But Ms. Sullivan is quite prepared in terms of compassion, enthusiasm and good taste. From Howard's piercing "Walk-Up" and "It Was Worth It," a raspberry to growing old that he wrote for Mabel's 50th birthday, to Noël Coward's hilarious 1945 obscurity "That Is the End of the News," you are in for some delicious surprises.

Sifting through the peculiar individualities of these three cherished tunesmiths, Ms. Sullivan finds amazing parallels and similarities. This sleuthing pays off in the alternative lyrics Porter and Coward wrote for "Let's Do It." It's an even toss as to which composer was more clever. And Howard's "Who Besides You," inspired by Gertrude Lawrence, could easily have been penned by either Coward or Porter. Noël's jaded style is perfectly represented by "World Weary" and "Weary of It All," both introduced by Bea Lillie, belying the fact that this lonely, tortured man was not, as the songs suggest, surrounded by smoke and parties and empty laughter between naps.

As curvaceous as she is kittenish, Ms. Sullivan sashays her fanny and bats her eyes like a pubescent Mae West trying to find the ladies' room, too myopic to find her way but too proud to ask for directions. She kids sex like an undulating, thumb-sucking Lolita, but she knows exactly what she's doing musically, rhyming an entire glossary of medical terms on Porter's "The Physician" with physiological delight, then breaking your heart on Howard's "Perfect Stranger." The heart that beats within her bra has an obvious fondness for songs that are unusual and underexposed, but she's not unfamiliar with the tried and true–Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon" is prominently featured, with historical footnotes. Ditto Coward's "Mad About the Boy" and a vibrant melody from Porter's score for Kiss Me, Kate . She's running through Jan. 23. Catch her before she runs away. You'll be ever so glad you did.

In its new late-night policy, the Firebird has extended an open-ended invitation to another excellent performer, singer-pianist Daryl Sherman, who is packing them in on Restaurant Row for her midnight soirées. She's lovely, talented and a walking encyclopedia of great songs. Where else can you drop in for a nightcap and hear a beautiful woman crooning "Autumn in Rome"? I stayed for a couple of enlightening hours the other night and heard songs by Cy Coleman, Carolyn Leigh, Hoagy Carmichael, Ira Gershwin, Harry Warren, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn, Vernon Duke and Irving Berlin, deftly played and effortlessly sung with uncluttered emotional directness that left everyone clamoring for more. For the price of a cocktail or two, Daryl Sherman is the brightest, most attractive mellow-mood music bargain in town. Ms. Sherman's march through midnight Manhattan takes no prisoners, but she's captured us all.