Celebrating the centennial year of the genius lyrics of Johnny Mercer (he would be 100 on Nov. 18), the sophisticated cabaret star Mary Cleere Haran is serving up a banquet of musical delicacies at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency. For a hip New York component of everything cool, this soignée vocalist, once an Irish Catholic hippie from San Francisco, is so adaptable to songs she really loves that she even conjures the nostalgia of Mr. Mercer’s native Savannah with what sounds like a Southern drawl. There’s honeysuckle in the air when she croons “Moon River,” and with a voice shimmering and polished as Sunday night silverware, she tweets her way through a verdant backyard Georgia barbecue on “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” with such aplomb that you can visualize every character at the party. Instead of a string of tunes, she delves deeper. To illustrate Mercer’s darker side—his drinking, depression and late-night insults followed by guilty roses the next morning—there’s a haunting “Days of Wine and Roses.” Talking about his inheritance of his mother’s love of empty train whistles, she turns out a haunting “Blues in the Night” and continues with two of his greatest movie songs about trains, both from the Technicolor musical The Harvey Girls. “Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” and “It’s a Great Big World” are also telling tributes to Judy Garland, and Mercer’s love affair with her, from which he never recovered. Her reconstruction of the three choruses sung by Judy, Virginia O’Brien and Cyd Charisse on “It’s a Great Big World” is so cleverly done that it becomes a mini-version of an MGM musical with everything but the camera angles. From the wrenching “When the World Was Young” to the bouncy “Jeepers Creepers,” every aspect of Johnny Mercer is revealed; these songs fit Ms. Haran’s relaxed style like kid gloves. With hundreds of favorites in the prodigious Mercer catalog, it is impossible to cover them all, and I admit I missed my all-time favorite, “This Time the Dream’s on Me.” But it’s a show chock-full of classic gems. I have no reservations about Mary Cleere Haran. This time, the dream’s on her. 

Before I get into the serious, depressing stuff, baby let me light your fire. At Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, one of my favorite singers, Mary Cleere Haran, is staging a glorious musical tribute to one of her favorite singers (and mine), the one and only Doris von Kappelhoff. Miss it only at the risk of being a little less sophisticated in life. Of course, if you don’t already know that Doris von Kappelhoff is Doris Day, then you already are. Catch up. Her melodious songs and sunny disposish have never been more desperately welcome than they are today, and Mary is the perfect lady of taste, imagination and charm to do them justice. Resurfacing from the cocoon of a cabaret hiatus that has kept her off the bandstand too long for my taste, she has turned, once again, into a moonlight butterfly nourished by a pink gel. Nothing could be finer for us all.

Before Oscar Levant called her a professional virgin, before four husbands and Mary Baker Eddy took their toll on her peace of mind, before rock ’n’ roll wiped out the Great American Songbook she loved to sing, and before she retired from her unique career as the No. 1 female box office movie star in the universe, Doris Day sounded like what I expect to hear if I ever get to heaven. A series of forgettable sex comedies produced by her third husband finally reduced that career to a Tinseltown footnote that doesn’t begin to honor her greatness. Fortunately, the memory is still alive and swinging on DVDs of Day’s early Warner Brothers musicals with scores by geniuses like Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn, Harry Warren, Ralph Blane and others; countless albums that have become collector’s items; cabaret acts like Mary Cleere Haran’s; and CD’s like Sue Raney’s distinguished new tribute to Doris that is one of the best recordings of 2007. At Feinstein’s, you get a tasty Reader’s Digest condensed version of why this is important.

Today, at 83, the reclusive Doris spends a lot of time in her house by the sea in Carmel, Calif., in bed, sipping green tea and reading books on Christian Science, divorced from everything that doesn’t bark. She doesn’t listen to music or watch movies, especially her own. Every attempt to honor her at film festival events or concert-hall tributes is met with a firm no. So let’s be thankful to Ms. Haran for keeping her memory alive. She couldn’t possibly sing everything in the vast Doris Day catalog (she’s only got an hour!), but she makes every minute count. Material from movies (“I’ll Never Stop Loving You” from Love Me or Leave Me, “Put ’Em in a Box, Tie ’Em with a Ribbon” from her first film, Romance on the High Seas) and hit records (the novelty ditty “Shanghai”) is cleverly blended with sad biographical information that formed a dramatic counterpoint to her fresh, vitamin C appeal on the screen. The personal hardships (parental divorce, the train crash that shattered her dreams of a dance career, learning to sing along with Ella Fitzgerald records on the radio while her broken bones healed, four miserable marriages, the death of her only son from skin cancer) often seem to outweigh the high points (the segue from Les Brown’s band vocalist to world adulation) of a life spent in tears. Distilling the essence of a spirited muse who was her own worst enemy, Ms. Haran is witty enough to eschew sentimentality, even when she appears on the verge of tears herself. As with all of her shows, she works in parallels to her own life, but this time wisely keeps them to a minimum. Best of all, she keeps the music coming with the aid of pianist Don Rebic, ace bass player Chip Jackson, and the sensitive guitar clusters of Jim Hirschman. Two Rodgers and Hart masterpieces from Jumbo, “Little Girl Blue” and “Why Can’t I?” (sung in the film as a touching duet with Martha Raye), are the evening’s highlights. “Sentimental Journey” should satisfy the most demanding Doris Day fanatics. Even the calcified corn of “Que Sera, Sera” is tolerable, although I would have preferred “It’s Magic” or a few underrated gems like “Blame My Absent-Minded Heart,” “It’s You or No One” and “I’ll String Along with You.” But why carp? This is choice stuff, and a bountiful harvest of music worth hearing again. Doris sang just about every important song written during the 40’s and 50’s, so you have to draw the line somewhere. I could never draw a line around Mary Cleere Haran. Singing Doris Day finds her at the top of her game, but no matter what she does, she always reminds me of the old days when preview audiences filled in cards and dropped them into lobby boxes in movie palaces like Grauman’s Chinese—cards that read “Super-duper!” and “Give us more like this!” When I am fortunate enough to share some quality time with her vocal stylings in the candlelight of an intimate cabaret, I feel the same way.

From Rita Hayworth’s show-stopping black-and-white Sexorama on “Put the Blame on Mame” (from Gilda) to Judy Garland’s historic Technicolor rendition of the Oscar-winning “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (from The Harvey Girls), Mary provides everything but the boom, dolly and camera angles. For a Catholic girl from California who married a boy from Manhattan with a show-business yarmulke (“He was born Jewish but raised Equity”), she has lived and loved and absorbed it all. So when she spurs old Trigger for some cowboy spoofing, don’t expect “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” (“Too creepy and mindless,” she sniffs): Expect an exquisite rendition of the way Ella Fitzgerald sang Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In.” Eclectic is her middle name, so the leap from Roy Rogers’ boots and Stetson to Ethel Waters’ Harlem is an easy transition. The audience isn’t always as soignée as Mary is, but even if they’ve never heard of Lady Mendl or Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the ringsiders at the Café Carlyle are having one elegant good time.

Meanwhile, the Algonquin’s Oak Room is bathing the sultry Venus of a diva, Karen Akers, in a pink champagne spot through May 13. Songs by the sterling-silver team of John Kander and the late Fred Ebb are the focus, but don’t hope for “New York, New York” or the overworked hits from Cabaret and Chicago. Ms. Akers has sought more unjustly neglected songs from lesser-known scores like The Act, The Happy Time and Steel Pier to illustrate the variety, optimism, wistfulness, dazzle and dreams of the composers—and the singer herself. Lanky, elegant, cool in appearance but warmer in heartfelt emotion than I’ve ever heard her, this graceful gazelle with Jane Wyman bangs has obviously been wrongfully mislabeled “the ice sculpture” by mumpy critics in previous appearances. I am happy to say she has turned radiant, not melancholy, and displays a contagious sense of humor, not a stoic mantle of marble. Her burnished baritone is ideally suited to undervalued gems like “Isn’t This Better” (from Funny Lady) and “Sorry I Asked,” a ruminant piece of special material written for Liza Minnelli and never performed by anyone else—until now. (Even John Kander had forgotten it.) With wonderful support by pianist Don Rebic and Brian Glassman on bass, Karen Akers can ditch those suicidal old songs by Jacques Brel and Piaf. Discovering Kander and Ebb, she’s found a whole new audience and come home at last.

Oh, Maggie!

Maggie Cheung, the beguiling veteran actress who collected critical raves like daffodils in the films of such formidable directors as Wong Kar Wai, Wayne Wang and Zhang Yimou, won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for Clean. Now that it’s finally opening commercially in the U.S., no need to ask why. Speaking French, Cantonese and fluent English, she catalogs every up and down on the carousel of a recovering drug addict with a mix of despair, pain, strength, realism and poignancy that is mesmerizing.

Ms. Cheung and Nick Nolte, challenged with demanding roles as mother and father-in-law, are both in good hands. French director Olivier Assayas, her ex-husband in real life, guides them through a psychedelic junkie fantasy world with cinematic brilliance. She is Emily, a once-promising singer whose career-demolished rock-star husband dies of a heroin overdose in a seedy Canadian motel room. After serving six months in prison for providing him with the drugs that killed him, Emily emerges a battered ruin on methadone. Moving to Paris to push some songs she wrote behind bars with a fellow inmate and lean on her old friends for support, Emily begins the long journey to clean health and redemption. Waiting on tables in an uncle’s Chinese restaurant, answering phones in a fashion agency, struggling to stay off heroin and rebuild her life, Emily has one goal: to reunite with her son Jay, who lives in the nurturing sanctuary of his grandparents’ rural home in Vancouver after the courts awarded them custody of the child.

The old man (a ravaged but effective Nick Nolte, with dyed orange hair, a white beard and a face that looks bulldozed) is sympathetic to Emily’s desire to see Jay, but insists she leave behind her dead-end lifestyle before he will allow a reunion. But the child (luminously played by an extraordinarily gifted tyke named James Dennis) has passionate and resourceful ideas of his own about the mother he never knew, the mother that might have been, and the mother whose future depends on so much forgiveness from so many.

Ms. Cheung shows the loneliness and frustration of a woman whose life has been rewritten so many times it has disappeared from the printed page. Trying valiantly to get through one day at a time, she makes the climb personal and human. Mr. Nolte and the illustrious Canadian stage actress Martha Henry, as the grandparents embroiled in an emotional chess match for the heart and soul of the young boy who means so much to them, give a strong stamp of universality to the film’s message of the power of love to triumph even in the most daunting of circumstances. Mr. Assayas wrote the elegant screenplay expressly for Ms. Cheung, and her transformation is riveting, her every move, statement and facial expression suffused with a fragile, complex grace. Her English is patrician and perfect, and she even performs her own musical numbers. Mr. Nolte is, in a word, endearing. Filmed in the scenic beauty of a Canadian fishing village as well as the bright lights of Paris, London and San Francisco, Clean is a stunning visual treat and a resounding testament to pragmatism and faith. Life-affirming without sentimentality, it’s an admirable accomplishment.

Lolita’s Revenge

Hard Candy is supposed to be another cautionary tale about the dangerous risks of online chat-room dating, but ends up being just another psychological horror flick about pedophilia in which Little Red Riding Hood turns the tables on the wolf. The title makes no sense, unless “hard candy” refers to the kind of lure dirty old predators dangle before the eyes of innocent victims. In today’s sick society, hard candy has been replaced by vodka martinis.

There is nothing innocent about smart, charming, 14-year-old schoolgirl Hayley (played by thumb-sucking Ellen Page like a cross between Elsie Dinsmore and Theda Bara) or sexy, good-looking thirtysomething photographer Jeff (played by all-American nice guy Patrick Wilson in a far cry from his starring roles on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park and Oklahoma!). She’s a precocious nymphet with a sense of adventure. He’s a horny wannabe pervert with a lust for naked girls and X-rated videos.

After meeting cute on the Internet, they make a date at a local coffee shop, and the flirtation leads to his bachelor apartment, where she mixes drinks and strips for an impromptu camera session. Jeff, who can scarcely contain his excitement, sees this as one photo-op destined for the bedroom. He may have always entertained a fantasy of seducing an adolescent, but this time the wrong teen responds. She pretends she’s out to punish a pedophile, but she’s really more twisted than he is. Hayley is really a little girl with a puckered rosebud mouth who stalks older men in chat rooms and drags around her own arsenal of weapons in her backpack. After drugging Jeff, tying him up and stripping him naked, she brings out a razor and shaving cream to prep her struggling, sweating and utterly terrified “patient” for the ultimate humiliation: total castration! What happens next is for you to discover. Suffice it to say, Mr. Wilson brings new dimensions to the word “vulnerability.”

Directed with white-knuckle tension by newcomer David Slade and written with elements of edgy, quirky surprise by Brian Nelson, Hard Candy is a neatly conceived detour on the familiar wacko-thriller road map. The actors are first-rate, the production values impressive. The problem for me is that the girl is so insane that I ended up sympathizing with the devious creep she sets out to destroy. There’s something oddly unbalanced about the equation when you want to punch out Red Riding Hood and save the wolf.

Unlucky Us!

On the other side of the moon, take my sage advice and run as fast as you can from a dismal, pretentious and brain-damaged piece of New Age junk art called Lucky Number Slevin. This overwrought muddle, derived from the worst elements of Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and incompetently directed by Paul McGuignan, is a model of sloppy frat-house humor and incompetence and smart-aleck film-school experimentation that tosses plot points and disjointed characters around like Tinker Toys the dog chewed on. Everything in it—every confusion, every line of unspeakable dialogue, every red herring, every camera setup—has been borrowed from some movie you’ve seen before.

Bruce Willis snaps the neck of a young man in an airline terminal, then ships him in a truck to New York. Cut to Josh Hartnett, a vagrant named Slevin staying in a friend’s apartment. The girl next-door (Lucy Liu) is a coroner who lives on peanut butter. A mugger breaks Slevin’s nose, and he gets dragged off in a towel to see “The Boss” (Morgan Freeman), who has one leg and keeps corpses in his walk-in freezer. The black-gangsta cliché says Slevin owes him $97,000, but he’ll cancel the debt if Slevin will kill the gay son of his archrival, a gangster who is also a rabbi (Ben Kingsley). The Jewish-gangsta cliché says Slevin owes him another $33,000. Clearly a case of mistaken identity that drops dead while tickling the funny bones of a few gullible critics, nothing about this miserable gibberish makes one word of sense.

It’s not supposed to. The actors are all laughing while they try to speak their lines. They are all abominable. Josh Hartnett can’t even act clad only in a towel. No wonder. Here’s a sample of the idiot dialogue by Jason Smilovic: “I’ve gotta see The Boss by tomorrow morning.” “What are you going to tell him?” “I’m gonna tell him what any man with two penises tells his tailor when the tailor asks him, ‘Do you dress to the right or the left?’” “What’s that?” “ Yes.”

The Tower of Babel upon which Love the Hard Way is constructed automatically invites raised eyebrows. It's a New York story, written and directed by Peter Sehr, a German chemist and physicist who teaches film in Munich, and based on a book by Wang Shuo, a political dissident and self-described Chinese beatnik who writes novels about hard-boiled urban characters in Beijing and lives in Hollywood. Mr. Brody's co-star is Charlotte Ayanna, born in Puerto Rico, raised in Vermont, crowned Miss Teen USA in 1993 and a former star of Ricky Martin videos. Are you beginning to get the picture? Lurid and crudely made, Love the Hard Way takes a cynical look at mixed-up, alienated, unfocused young people who are looking for love without commitment in all the wrong places in an atmosphere of jaded urban decay. Mr. Brody plays Jack, a con artist who shakes down foreign businessmen with the help of a tightly knit gang of partners-in-crime-a German boy who works as a hotel desk clerk, two girlfriends who pose as prostitutes, and a pal who breaks in at the last minute dressed as a cop and extorts money from the innocent victims. It's a nice racket, and everybody ends up with enough money to live in utter poverty in the South Bronx. Then Jack tries his scruffy, cynical charm on a smart, beautiful graduate student named Claire (Ms. Ayanna). He treats her like toxic waste; she crumbles like fried rice. Infatuated with this punk loser for reasons nobody ever successfully manages to clarify, Claire starts skipping classes, missing exams and wandering the streets without sleep in a stupor of unrequited love. Before it ends, she's in handcuffs for fighting in a disco, snorting whatever it takes to stay awake, and turning tricks in cars, tunnels and men's rooms-whatever she can do to prove that she can be just as fabulous a scum-sucking lowlife as Jack. Everyone comes to a bad end: Jack goes to prison and Claire slashes her wrists with a butcher knife-though miraculously, through it all, she continues to make straight A's. It probably read better in the original Chinese.

The cinematography is so ugly that the whole movie looks like it was shot through tomato juice. The actors work hard to look natural in their attempts to show the calamitous effects of nihilism and sex on mismatched lovers who sacrifice everything they believe for physical passion. Unfortunately, the cool, detached German director lacks the kind of warmth needed to bring such characters to life. In any event, Adrien Brody is hardly my idea of a contemporary Don Juan. He's tall and gangly, with the bony, protruding look of a scarecrow with four elbows. With too much hair, the nose of a parrot and the eyes of a humongous praying mantis, I can't imagine why he hasn't been cast as either Pinocchio or Tartuffe.

Eye Job

The Eye is an Asian horror flick: I only bring it up because, I mean, how often do we see one of those? It was made in Hong Kong and directed by the Thailand-born Pang Brothers, Oxide and Danny. (I don't make these things up.) The plot: 18 years after she went blind, Wong Kar Mun (Lee Sin-Je) undergoes a risky corneal-transplant surgery that restores her eyesight. But the result holds less promise than it seems. When the bandages come off, the nightmares begin: When Mun looks in the mirror, she sees the face of her retinas' previous owner, a girl who killed herself. Suddenly, nocturnal apparitions in black appear in her peripheral vision; the girl in the next hospital bed dies of a brain tumor and returns to haunt her. Joined by her boyfriend, Dr. Wah, on a quest to get to the bottom of this mystery and reclaim her own identity again, Mun brings back the horrors of the past and predicts a few holocausts of the future, including the film's best sequence: an exploding traffic jam that blows up most of Hong Kong in a burning rampage of apocalyptic fire.

Too bad the rest of The Eye doesn't live up to its final half-hour for the kind of old-fashioned hugga-mugga that looks like John Woo meets Godzilla . For a fright flick that supposedly plunges its hapless heroine into a terrifying ordeal, it's more concerned with images and clashing electronic music than challenging the imagination or brutalizing the senses. The movie's pace is funereal, and when, in the end, Mun reaches the conclusion that some people are just not meant to see everything the world has to offer, you'll know just what she means. I've had worse scares at my optometrist's office.

Girl Power

A number of recent films have won audience applause and critical approval for their winning tributes to women overcoming traditional odds to achieve love and liberation. The Mexican-American girl in Los Angeles eschewing a career in colorful native sewing to study at Columbia in Patricia Cardoso's Real Women Have Curves , or the Indian girl in London who scandalizes her disapproving family by invading the male-dominated world of soccer in Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham , come most readily to mind. Now add in New Zealander Niki Caro's Whale Rider , a modern retelling of a fable passed down by the Maori for centuries. This time, a 12-year-old girl challenges tradition to find her own spiritual awakening in a patriarchal society that has kept women in their place as second-class citizens for 1,000 years.

A box-office hit in its country of origin and a popular entry on last year's festival circuit, Whale Rider is about the Whangarei people on the east coast of New Zealand, who believe their existence dates back to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death in the China Sea a thousand years ago by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From that day forward, all Whangarei chiefs are said by tradition to be the first-born sons of the venerated Paikea's direct descendants. Now a crisis has occurred. In a wrenching opening scene, a young mother and the male of her newborn twins both die in childbirth. The widowed husband flees to Europe to nurse his grief, leaving his infant daughter to be raised by her grandparents. The surviving child, an enchanting girl named Pai, spends the next 12 years trying to win the affection of her cold, stoic and eternally disillusioned grandfather. Unlike other girls, Pai learns the old speeches in the forgotten language of the ancient tribal chiefs, swims and dives better than any of the boys her age, and perfects the ancient warrior rituals of the Maori, which are forbidden to women. Her aloof grandfather is mortified, but Pai is adored unconditionally by her sympathetic, secretly emancipated grandmother, who tutors and encourages her coming of age with equilibrium and brio. The moment of truth arrives when Pai saves a group of beached whales from extinction by bravely riding their leader out to sea-and her own certain death. But this is a fable, so she miraculously survives in time for the crusty old grandpa to pronounce her "the wise leader" she has always dreamed of being.

Whale Rider has much native chanting in loin cloths, rowing in formation like the Tahitians who paddled Esther Williams out to sea in Pagan Love Song , and some powerful underwater shots. The uplifting narrative by director Niki Caro, from the best-seller by Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, is clear-sighted and admirably sugar-free. The striking landscapes and authentic performances from both people and whales add a nice mix of realism to the native magic. Special praise must go to Keisha Castle-Hughes, who makes a radiant debut as the lonely but indomitable little girl who battles all the odds to take her rightful place in a pantheon of masculine elders. If the story isn't always particularly riveting, and the telling of it sometimes seems as slow as middle age, it is nevertheless a sweet and informative film that allows people of all ages to rediscover innocence and wisdom without cynicism or doubt. Whale Rider is unexpectedly touching, generous with its insights, and offers an exceptionally human glimpse into the heart of a land as exotic as it is remote.

Rich Dish

For pure ambrosia, take a bite of Mary Cleere Haran. She loves songs, romance and the movies of the 1940's, so her new show in the burnished glow of the newly refurbished Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel has a perfect theme that serves her well. She calls it My Shining Hour-Movie Love in the 1940's because, as she proves in the course of one perfect musical hour, "everything changes, but these songs and the period they represent are eternal."

The astringent redhead who has brought jazz-tinged vocals back to vogue in an age of dissonance and hip-hop horror has spent an inordinate chunk of her successful cabaret career exploring the larky, frivolous ditties of the 20's and 30's, flapper songs meant to be sung while chewing Juicy Fruit. What a thrill it is to see and hear her cooling her chops on beautiful, ageless standards without the shackles of a "book." This act contains less of the well-researched and carefully manicured talk she has been praised for in the past-a good thing, if you ask me, because with pared-down patter and fewer historic embellishments, there's more time to sing songs that matter. This is Mary in satin, warm as brandy, sultry as a lighthouse in the fog. She's singing better than ever, with riskier arpeggios and lusher lower registers. And the songs! "Put the Blame on Mame," a tribute to slinky Rita Hayworth in Gilda , has an imaginatively phrased tempo; Judy Garland's "Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" is crooned as a ballad, slick as new porcelain, a unique and startling revelation; Betty Hutton's breakneck pacing on Frank Loesser's "Papa Don't Preach to Me" has enough rocket fuel to land the first woman on Mars. Ms. Haran would never lay claim to the term jazz singer, but her experimental mood shifts, risky rhythmic changes and the way she phrases behind the beat are all tools of the jazz singer's trade, and she's refined them all. Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In" is many corrals removed from the way Roy Rogers sang it in Hollywood Canteen . Mary's take on this sagebrush saga is sexy enough to be sung to a lover, maybe, but never Trigger. An entire section dedicated to Bing Crosby (it's his centennial year, you know) spotlights several Burke–Van Heusen gems from the Crosby-Hope-Lamour Road pictures, but you can't top "But Beautiful." The pianist, Don Rebic, and the exceptional bassist, Chip Jackson, provide crisp, swinging challenges that this classy, soignée thrush meets on every arrangement. Ms. Haran recasting the best songs ever written in new and exciting ways is as good as it gets in 2003. She's at the Algonquin for a month, through June 28, so you have no acceptable excuse for missing an act that will make you feel a little bit richer, in life and in love.

They're all celebrating the 100th birthday of Richard Rodgers. Bernadette Peters is in the wings, revving up her motor to celebrate the songs he wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II (June 19 at Radio City Music Hall). Kitty Carlisle Hart and Celeste Holm take the stage to introduce "Favorites and Rarities" from the Rodgers songbook (June 26 at the Museum of the City of New York). On June 27 at 2 p.m., at the New York Public Library, Barbara Cook will teach you how to sing them yourself. On June 28, every glamour girl on Broadway invites the public to a free concert at noon at the Gershwin Theatre. You'll be humming "Some Enchanted Evening" in your sleep.

Meanwhile, something special is happening at the Algonquin. Toned and terrific, Mary Cleere Haran is back after too long an absence, illuminating the fabled but musty Oak Room with the fire and force of a klieg light. Eschewing the billowy, lyrical and harmoniously schematic banquets from the second half of Rodgers' career with Hammerstein, she's focusing on the charming, melodically simple but agelessly sophisticated amuse-bouches he wrote with Lorenz (Larry) Hart. She loves these songs. It shows. In Falling in Love with Love , which runs through June 29, she serves up a heart-filled, Hart-healthy diet to fit every menu.

From the gorgeous, seldom-heard verse of "Dancing on the Ceiling," to the wacky, champagne-impaired flapper bubbling her way through a 1929 gem called "Baby's Awake Now," to the melancholy cynicism of "Nobody's Heart," Ms. Haran swings into whatever moods the songs plead for, then matches them with the sharp acting ability to play all the characters who sing them. She mixes musical cocktails and laces them with humor. "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" is so full of mischief it could be about J. Lo's rear end. Her customarily witty patter is a carefully researched mix of biographical facts and personal memorabilia. Between songs, you learn what happened the first time Rodgers, a serious Columbia student, met the slap-happy Hart at his home on West 119th Street, and how they struggled in the lean years before a 1926 revue called The Garrick Gaieties , staged to raise money for sets and costumes for the Theatre Guild, turned them into "overnight sensations." Relaying a synopsis of the disastrously misguided 1948 MGM biopic Words and Music , she ranks the miscast Mickey Rooney's portrayal of Larry Hart on a par with Patty Duke's drunken Neely O'Hara in Valley of the Dolls . (Aside from the fact that they were both midgets, the similarities were nonexistent. Hart was dark, Jewish and gay; Rooney was an Irish redhead, and such a satyr with the backlot starlets that Louis B. Mayer ordered the waiters to add saltpeter to his food in the studio commissary.)

The Algonquin show traces the rise of this mismatched team from Broadway, where they wrote 20 scores in five years, to Hollywood, where they penned songs for Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, Jean Harlow and Bing Crosby. During the time they were turning out hits like "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine" and "The Lady Is a Tramp," Hart was a train wreck waiting to happen. In his sad, declining years, Larry succumbed to depression and alcoholism, and in 1943 Rodgers finally threw in the towel and moved on to a new collaborator, producing the history-making Oklahoma! with Hammerstein II. Larry died the same year, at the age of 48. The songs survive them both. Ms. Haran could be speaking for me when she sums up the Rodgers oeuvre with these words: "When he worked with Hammerstein, they wrote for the whole world. When he worked with Larry Hart, they only wrote for five guys at Sardi's. For better or worse, I've always felt like one of those guys."

Of course, nothing illustrates the timeless fascination of Rodgers and Hart like the songs themselves. Exquisitely gowned and elegantly self-assured, Ms. Haran explores a diverse canvas of those classics-"Ten Cents a Dance," "Where or When," "It Never Entered My Mind"-with a voice warm and rich as Belgian cocoa. She's in good company. The beautiful arrangements are by Richard Rodney Bennett, whose sensitive piano chords are supported by the distinctive bass lines of Linc Milliman. Ms. Haran would not classify herself as a jazz singer, but she can change tempos, croon ballads and phrase behind the beat with the best of them. Best of all, she has elegance and spruce and-I hate to use the term- class! That may be a dirty word, at a deplorable time in our history when there's so little of it around, but she's reinvented it, in a show as tasty and sophisticated as it gets. Singing a rare but dreamy evergreen like "Blue Room," she offers, promises and delivers freedom from second-rate rock 'n' roll bondage with stress-free purity. Mary Cleere Haran-get used to that name-is a throwback to the great days when debonair men and glamour girls in orchid corsages and Ceil Chapman gowns wandered forth after dark to dance, dine and fall in love, content in the knowledge that there was no mood so gloomy in life that it couldn't be lifted or lightened with a song by Rodgers and Hart.

Woo's Carnage

Just when you thought there was nothing new to say about World War II, along comes Windtalkers , another exciting, head-bashing action epic from Hong Kong's John Woo ( Face/Off and Broken Arrow ), about a little-known footnote to history-the heroic role played by Native Americans in winning the war against the Japanese in the South Pacific. The battle sequences are exhausting, violent and overwhelming, but it's the story of how the Navajo used their native language to invent a secret military code the Japanese could never break that makes this movie memorable. Expect a box-office bonanza.

After the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese broke every encrypted U.S. military transmission, causing relentless damage to U.S. warships and severely curtailing all Allied progress in the Pacific. In the following year, 29 Navajo were summoned from their reservations, recruited as Marines, and instructed to create new codes out of their own words to symbolize 211 common military terms. (The Navajo word for "crow" stood for "patrol plane," the word for "potatoes" substituted for "hand grenades," etc.) These men-some of whom were the sons of honored tribal chiefs-were called "code-talkers," and their mystifying banter on walkie-talkies was essential to winning the war. In the end, as many as 400 "windtalkers" hit the front lines to bravely defend the country that once scalped them, yet their contribution has been classified by the Pentagon until now. These warriors were so vital to U.S. victory that officers were assigned to protect them (and the codes) from the enemy "at all cost." To the filmmakers, this includes killing the Navajo if they were captured. In truth, no such orders ever existed: It would have been illegal for any Marine to be ordered to kill a fellow Marine. The premise is pure poetic license, but it does make for a great moral dilemma. Hell, it's a John Woo movie, not a documentary.

The characters are fictional, too, although the events that surround them are true. Set during the bloody 1944 Battle of Saipan, Windtalkers explores the racial intolerance, ignorant skepticism and physical abuse to which the Navajo were subjected, as well as the eventual bonds they forged with their fellow Marines, who learned to like them, trust them, depend on them for survival and ultimately treat them like brothers. It's quite a story, and Mr. Woo's direction, mixing his usual brand of carnage with more introspective character development than he's famous for, evokes both horror and tears.

Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater are excellent as the officers reluctantly forced to "baby-sit" the American Indians in combat. Mr. Cage is powerful, persuasive and sympathetic as the sole survivor of a suicide mission in the Solomon Islands that got his entire squadron killed. Seriously wounded, riddled with guilt, dehumanized and depressed, and mostly deaf from a perforated eardrum, he has only one drive-to kill all the "Japs" on the planet. After a sympathetic nurse (Frances O'Connor, fresh from The Importance of Being Earnest ) helps him cheat on his hearing exam, he even spurns her love for the sake of duty and heads back to battle, only to discover that he's been designated to guard two Navajo who have no combat experience. Mr. Slater, as his sidekick, warms to the task faster, sharing a love of music and family values with the men. It's the kind of soft-hearted nice-guy part he does in his sleep, and continues to do charmingly. Mr. Cage's role is the complex centerpiece-a tough loner living on booze and painkillers who is so lacking in emotion that he even gives away his medals of honor to the widow of a young comrade. The most interesting part of the film is the slow unpeeling of layers in Mr. Cage's focused portrayal of a man so tortured by the past that he's lost all faith in the future. When he relinquishes his medications to an injured child in a bombed-out island village, we know he's still capable of some emotion behind the stoic mask and the battle scars, but nothing will prepare you for the ironic dilemma he eventually must face when forced to make an ethically challenging life-or-death decision involving the young Navajo he has come to respect and befriend.

The two code-talkers, Ben Yahzee and Charlie Whitehorse, are beautifully rendered portraits of pride and humanity under fire, dynamically played by Adam Beach and Roger Willie. The ensemble work by the Marines is exceptional; special mention must be made of Noah Emmerich as the radical bigot whose hatred dissolves when his own life is saved by one of the Indians he has bullied in the latrine as well as the foxhole.

Windtalkers crams so much divergent information into its running time that the script often seems like a filing cabinet. Disturbing action scenes and exposition of military tactics are separated by getting-to-know-each-other dialogue; then it's back to more destruction. The film is so full of John Woo's trademark graphic violence that some people will see it with their eyes closed-but it's worth it for the slick camerawork and polished production values. It's like the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan stretched over two hours. I liked it a lot, but the weak and the skittish are hereby warned.

The Gift , superbly directed by Sam Raimi, with a dark and brooding script by veteran screenwriters Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton, is a chilling, suspenseful thriller with supernatural overtones that features a smashing performance by Cate Blanchett as a character with psychic powers, loosely based on Mr. Thornton's own mother. She is Annie Wilson, a widow with three kids living in a backwoods hamlet in Georgia full of eccentric oddballs right out of the pages of Carson McCullers. Annie is a kindhearted soul who makes ends meet by using her gift for E.S.P. to see into people's futures. It's a gift that helps distraught clients like Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), a manic- depressive garage mechanic with suicidal tendencies, and Valerie (Hilary Swank), a poor housewife who suffers savage beatings from her violent redneck husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves). Annie is the closest thing in this backwater wasteland to a shrink, but her gift is regarded by some with fear, prejudice and anger.

When the town slut (Katie Holmes) is murdered, Annie's psychic powers lead the sheriff to the location of the dead woman's body and the subsequent arrest, trial and conviction of the crazy, homicidal Donnie. But Annie's troubles are far from over. Her gift tells her that Donnie was not guilty, and the real killer was somebody else in the town who will stop at nothing to silence her. Was the fiend really the monstrous Donnie, who was cheating on his wife, or Donnie's jealous wife Valerie? Everyone is a suspect, including the prosecuting attorney (Gary Cole) who had an affair with the dead girl himself. When Annie joins forces with the victim's clean-cut, respectable schoolteacher fiancé (Greg Kinnear), the nicest guy in town, using her clairvoyant gift to solve the case and uncover the true identity of the killer, her compassion puts her own life at risk and she has to race the clock before she becomes the next body in the lake.

The script seems lightly constructed, but it's got enough white-knuckle tension to keep you guessing while it builds to a surprising climax of nerve-jangling terror. Everyone in the distinguished cast is against type, and astoundingly good. Greg Kinnear has never shown this much of a stretch, and Keanu Reeves is so scary he makes you wonder why he hasn't been making horror movies all along. If a good fright is not your idea of an ideal start to the new year, you should still see The Gift for the mesmerizing accuracy, strength and commitment of Cate Blanchett's supercharged performance. This is a far cry from her Oscar-nominated work in Elizabeth , but she's as striking and boldly riveting in faded cotton as she was in royal vestments.

For a supernatural murder mystery, The Gift is as logical as it is hair-raising, 10 times more effective than the phony stuff in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable , and a movie that could teach the overrated M. Night Shyamalan a thing or two about real filmmaking.

Mary Cleere Haran at the Carlyle

As the new cabaret season begins, the game of musical chairs continues. First, Barbara Cook fled home base at the Café Carlyle and set up shop at Feinstein's at the Regency. Now, Mary Cleere Haran has deserted her annual perch at the Algonquin to begin 2001 at the Carlyle. Ah, the divas, bless their pointed little heads. The musically deprived will follow them anywhere. Ms. Haran, who has been away from the microphones much too long, is worth a special trip to 76th and Madison. Her retro songs and nostalgic patter about New York in bygone days blend as perfectly with the Bemelmans murals at the Carlyle as her plunging Harlow gowns. She calls her new act "Sweet and Low Down," and she's not kidding.

Although every night is New Year's Eve at the Carlyle, Mary undulates her way into a crowded room full of noisy people guzzling Veuve Clicquot and waving credit cards, cleverly works her way through all the seasons of love, marriage, parenthood and the rocking chair explored in myriad daunting choruses of Cole Porter's "It's De-lovely," and reduces the inattentive revelers to a hush. From there, it's her room for the night. Great lyrics can illustrate, magnify, define, reflect and intensify the emotions we all feel but fail to express, and in this act she seems determined to tackle them all in an effort to prove "America's cultural heritage did not begin with the Eisenhower administration."

Toned and lovely, with a dance-closer voice that would have made her a big recording star in the gone-forever days of the big band era, Ms. Haran occupies a respected position in the American musical spectrum for her refusal to sing junk and her devotion to keeping alive the songs of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. I admire her for her unshakable faith in true-blue songs you do not hear on the radio, and for the responsibility she obviously feels for turning people on to lyrics while educating a younger generation about old songs, even though some of those songs are so old they've grown beards. Those of us who have heard songs like "Lullaby of Broadway" and "Fascinatin' Rhythm" a million times-my ears bear witness-are always pleased by the way she sings them all over again. But most of the material in this show comprises recycled tunes from the early 1920's, much of it by the Gershwins, penned at about the time when sex was first being discovered by Elinor Glyn. Given my choice-and who is asking, please?-I'd prefer the more sophisticated songs from the 1940's. When a hip lady with a dreamy voice dredges up a silly ditty like "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil," it may suit the feminist sensibility of a late bloomer shaking off the binding ties of an Irish Catholic girlhood, but it's still a big waste of time and talent.

But why grouse, when everything she does is accomplished with so much style and finesse? From the satiny caress of a ballad like Rodgers and Hart's "The Blue Room" to the blasé homesickness of Josephine Baker on Irving Berlin's "Harlem on My Mind," she fuses vocal artistry with the craft of acting on every song. On the humorous "Way Out West on West End Avenue," she's a cross between Cass Daley, Judy Canova and Minnie Pearl, and then replaces Marilyn Monroe's familiar tongue-in-cheek approach to Buddy De Sylva's suggestive lyrics for "Do It Again" with raw animal sex. Hanging a left to the West Coast, she tackles movie songs, brassily belting out Busby Berkeley golddigger songs from black-and-white Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930's with a Joan Blondell heart of pure platinum. "A Fine Romance" milks the sarcasm out of Dorothy Fields' canny lyrics. Meltingly, haltingly and introspectively, "I'm in the Mood for Love" shines a light on the vulnerable side of Ms. Haran's feline intelligence, while the overdone "S'Wonderful" is creamier than usual, almost conversatonally romantic.

Moving with assurance and poise from passionate chronicler of Broadway lore ("Bojangles of Harlem") to giddy, bubble-brained Betty Boop flapper ("The Girl Friend") she builds characters and weaves informational patter through the fabric of her songs like the two-ply threads in a complex carpet sewn by blind Portuguese nuns. An excellent actress and a charming singer with power, intonation, vibrato in all the right places and a stunning presence, Mary Cleere Haran is just what the cynics need for what ails them. This act coincides with the release of her new CD Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the 20's on the Sin-Drome/After 9 label. She is ably assisted on both occasions by the tasteful bass lines of Linc Milliman and by the distinguished pianist-composer Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, who occasionally joins in on vocal duets. While I long to hear them polish off headier stuff from richer musical periods in the American song book, I can't think of a better group to have around if the stock market crashes again; they've already worked out the songs. They're at the Café Carlyle through Feb. 17.

"All Southerners go home sooner or later, even if in a box," said Truman Capote. In Hope Floats , a tender film of warmth and insight directed by that fine actor Forest Whitaker and written with uncommon sensitivity by Steven Rogers, Sandra Bullock plays a former beauty queen from a small town in Texas who returns home in search of a new beginning after life has kicked her in the shins. In clothes off the rack, with no makeup and only her talent to lean on, she redeems herself from the bad rap she's had recently and gives an appealing, no-frills performance of moment-to-moment honesty and naturalism. Both the film and its star are a quiet, reassuring revelation.

When she left Smithville, Tex., Birdee Calvert was the Girl Most Likely to Succeed. Popular and beautiful, she was a high school celebrity who married the man of her dreams and moved to Chicago, shaking the Texas dust from her boots with an air of haughty grandeur. Now, with a marriage on the rocks and a child to raise, Birdee experiences the ultimate humiliation when her best friend (Rosanna Arquette) announces on one of those trashy Jerry Springer -type TV confessionals that she is sleeping with Birdee's husband Bill (Michael Paré). Disgraced on network TV and emotionally mangled beyond repair, Birdee packs up her daughter Bernice (played with peachy precocity by Mae Whitman) and moves home to Smithville to live with her eccentric mother Ramona (Gena Rowlands in another of those luminous portrayals of feisty, undaunted maternal strength that light up the screen).

It's hard for Bernice, adjusting to a small-town elementary school after Chicago, but it's even tougher for Birdee, a once-arrogant prom queen who lands back in town with her life in bruised pieces. What happens to these lovable, offbeat characters in Hope Floats is nothing much and everything. This is a movie that is not so much about life as it is about the dumb, brave choices we make while living it. While Birdee copes with her own depression and learns self-reliance for the first time in her life, her mother discovers the value of showing real feelings before it's too late. Ms. Bullock plays a woman on the verge of losing her natural zest for life, while Ms. Rowlands plays an older, wiser woman with too much zest to go around. The daughter has never felt loved, the mother has always loved too much but has shown it poorly. There's also a father who is wasting away in a nursing home from Alzheimer's disease and an unlikely beau (Harry Connick Jr.) who wants to recapture the awkward feelings he and Birdee had for each other when they were 16. This, too, is difficult when the only make-out spot in Smithville is a deserted drive-in movie.

Before the languorous pace of hick town life moves toward a confrontation with priorities, all of the beautifully realized characters grow and change and find out it's O.K. to be who they really are. The point, as one character discovers, is that "Life just kind of moves along, and you have to move along with it." Through death and tears and renewed hope, these gritty Texans learn to survive what life dishes out and play the cards they've been dealt bravely. Although Hope Floats depends a lot on folksy charm and has been photographed ripely by the great cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, it is never mawkish, sentimental or inconsequential. From the daily lives lived out around them to the central characters and their emotional confrontations, from the natural sleepiness of Smithville (a bump in the road near Austin) to the haunted-house personality of Ramona's timeless home, you are lured into a setting oblivious to progress, a perfect place to take deep breaths, reflect and ponder. The filmmakers have skillfully created an unflashy Texas world decorated by the Sears Roebuck catalogue, where heartbreak and redemption may seem limited to matters of finance, but in the bigger picture have their most lasting effects on the heart. It comes as no surprise that Birdee discovers the things she always needed for peace were right in her own backyard.

Mr. Whitaker, who proved he could handle women's problems with Waiting to Exhale , examines the lives of these Texans in midlife crisis with the dexterity of a man testing a sirloin for doneness on a patio grill. The performances he coaxes out of an exceptional cast are so human and honest, you forget they're professional actors and start regarding them as friends and neighbors. Ms. Bullock gives the most emotionally direct yet complex performance of her career, while the rapturous Ms. Rowlands, in another of her sexy-over-60 turns, is tough, generous, complicated and proud. She's a Mack truck disguised as a powder puff. Together, they breathe life into a delicate film about love, loss and sharing, and show the generational ties that bind them together inescapably.

Hope Floats is the kind of film about the feelings and emotions of ordinary folk that rarely gets financed now, but in a summer of giant lizards and crashing comets, it's a welcome antidote to trashy, brainless stupidity. Its dramatic scope may seem narrow, but do not dismiss it as just another woman's picture. For anyone concerned with destiny, the courage to turn adversity into triumph, or the healing powers of love, it's a very big picture indeed.

1,000 Pictures and Their Songs

Cabaret goes legit as the Manhattan Theater Club inaugurates its summer music season with Mary Cleere Haran's cleverly structured compilation of movie songs from the 1930's under the umbrella title Pennies From Heaven . This is a reworked, sharpened and skillfully restaged version of the highly acclaimed club act she unveiled last year at the Algonquin Hotel and contains some additions to the original repertoire. You can thrill to the joy and panache of it all in Ms. Haran's new CD on Angel Records (on sale in the lobby at City Center as you enter) but for maximum impact, the show's the thing. For this foray into the Depression years, when people escaped their travails for two hours at a time in dark movie palaces and came out recharged, the liltingly lovely singer leaves no stone unturned.

Through the powerful persuasion of songs like "Breezin' Along With the Breeze" and "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!" she transports us on a guided tour of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, dust bowl migrations, Jack Armstrong's secret whistle codes, bullet-ridden crime sprees, union strikes, gardenia corsages and big band swing, as we conjure up treasured memories, for 25 cents a ticket, of gangsters, hobos, orphans and gold diggers of paradise in celluloid. For the transition from cabaret lounge to concert stage, John Lee Beatty has designed an elegant setting-blue gels on a brick wall adorned with Art Deco sconces and separated by mahogany pillars and sheer chiffon drapes behind the extra-long grand piano-where the dreamy chords of ace composer-pianist Richard Rodney Bennett complete the midnight mood. It's like being in a swanky penthouse with a bad view.

Against this setting, Ms. Haran swirls, slinks and sensually sells her songs in a Jean Harlow gown of backless, clinging one-piece black velvet for 90 intermissionless minutes of musical ecstasy. Without wasting a moment, the singer and the songs blend into a March of Time panorama, punctuated by wry observations of the era, the music and the performer's own life. While Ms. Haran was growing up with an interest in proms and pep rallies, it was her sister Bronwyn who knew, at the age of 9, where Sing Sing was, as well as the names of all the Dead End Kids. An interest in old movies rubbed off, and now Ms. Haran exhibits a passion for speak-easies and their raucous hostesses, like Sophie Tucker and Texas Guinan, that is equaled only by her enthusiasm for Canadian whisky runs, truck hijackings on the Warner Brothers highway and the bombastic energy of James Cagney.

From heaven-sent working girls such as Alice Faye, Jean Arthur and Joan Blondell to the eye-rolling antics of Eddie Cantor, she brings a forgotten era back to life engagingly, and rediscovers some great songs in the bargain: the smoldering "Night in Manhattan," a rap-tap "Broadway Jamboree" by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson from the 1937 Alice Faye musical You're a Sweetheart , a satiny "I'm in the Mood for Love," which she croons meltingly with its beautiful but seldom performed verse intact. Dreamily phrasing "I Only Have Eyes for You" behind the beat, or dueting with Mr. Bennett on a lazy "Sweet and Low," which James Cagney and Joan Blondell sang sensually on a Chesterfield sofa in Footlight Parade , a broad canvas is embroidered of tarnished sequins and lost innocence that will never come again. From the Busby Berkeley showgirls plunking their neon violins in the surreal feminist nightmare of "Shadow Waltz" to the black-and-white RKO musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Ms. Haran covers a lot of territory and establishes squatter's rights.

As cabaret singers go, there is none more appealing or savvy than Mary Cleere Haran. She was obviously born in the wrong decade. In the old days, she would have sung with Tommy Dorsey or Benny Goodman and ended up in the movies like Doris Day. And as cabaret in concert goes, there is no more enchanting offering on view than this. Unlike the movies of the Depression, Ms. Haran provides her own happy ending, through June 7.

One of them is Mitsuko Uchida, who is at her formidable best in a new recording of Beethoven's first and second piano concertos with the Bayerische Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kurt Sanderling (Philips 289 454 468-2). The sovereign quality of Ms. Uchida's playing has always been its luminosity (witness her famously strobe-lit Mozart recordings)-her ability to give each phrase a kind of inner glow that allows us both to hear and see each note as sound, thought and image in a gold-threaded tapestry. More than any pianist I know, she puts you immediately on intimate terms with the music-which is exactly where you want to be in these two early, sunny, least stentorian of the Beethoven concertos. The lovingly cushioned geniality of Maestro Sanderling, an old pro at this stuff, makes him an ideal partner for this beautiful pointillist.

The most spectacular set of piano concertos in our century-the five concertos of Sergey Prokofiev-has been given what must be its most fully realized performance on disk by the pianist Alexander Toradze and the Kirov Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev (Philips 289 462 048-2). Mr. Toradze is one of the last exemplars of the more-is-more school of pianism, and he and Mr. Gergiev take almost shocking delight in revealing the Soviet showman's bulging bag of tricks in all their gaudy swagger. Has anyone thrown fistfuls of notes so gleefully in the air as these two old friends, whose grinning camaraderie on the album's cover suggests that they are involved in some epic joke. But Mr. Toradze goes well beyond razzle-dazzle. His supersonic flights through Prokofiev's manic "chase" sequences never lose sight of the marvelous inner colors and rhythmic wit-even the usually lumpen Fifth Concerto dances with incisive grace. The delicacy and depth of feeling he brings to the relatively quiet moments (notably in the opening of the great Second Concerto) are, weirdly, rich and bleak at the same time-utterly Russian.

A couple of seasons back at the Metropolitan Opera, the Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos , as sung by the French lyric coloratura soprano Natalie Dessay, was an unforgettable knockout, not only for Ms. Dessay's spot-on vocal agility but for the warmth and charm she brought to what is generally the most cardboard of characters. Honest-to-goodness vivacity, of the Gallic School variety, has been largely absent since the glittering days of Lily Pons in the 1930's and 40's. But here was a chic warbler who, unlike her sparkling predecessor, could even sing in tune.

Ms. Dessay's timbre may lack the bell-like ping that was the Pons hallmark, but its slightly chalky, dark-hued grain is perfect for the exotic flights of ornithological fantasy on display in her new album Vocalises , in which she is accompanied by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schonwandt (EMI Classics 7243 5 56565-2). Most of these display pieces from an earlier age of affectionate kitsch (by, among others, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns, Ravel and Johann Strauss II) are songs without words, bringing back memories of Rima, the bird girl, in W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions . This makes it all the easier to savor the almost onanistic (but never too indulgent) delight Ms. Dessay takes in letting her cloud-hopping soprano wander where it will above the treetops-hold the stage smoke, please.

He's too young for full-virtuoso status yet, but I am pleased to report that Max Levinson, the American Wunderkind whose triumphant New York debut I wrote about several weeks ago, has produced a stunner of a second album, Out of Doors , devoted entirely to the piano music of Béla Bartók (N2K 10028). Much of this music was the fruit of Bartók's ethnomusical fascination with the folk idioms of his native Hungary and Romania, with their spiky rhythms and archaic melodies; these pieces are stirring reminders that, along with Stravinsky, he was the century's most sophisticated "primitive." Mr. Levinson is rigorously alive to the wild Bartókian swings, from bacchanalian frenzy to lyrical wistfulness-above all, to the music's sheer sense of fun.

If the term "virtuoso," with its mixed connotations, can be applied to any modern composer, it is Krzystof Penderecki, the Polish polymath whose works over the past four decades have swept up just about every "ism" in the book, rearranged them with breathtaking assurance, and grabbed audiences by the throat, or whatever else came immediately to hand. I have generally found Penderecki's music more fustian than profound-it's always coming at you. However, I was enthralled by his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, No. 2, titled "Metamorphosen," as played by the violinist for whom it was composed-Anne-Sophie Mutter-and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer (Deutsche Grammophon 289 453 507-2). As a teenager, Mr. Penderecki considered becoming a virtuoso violinist, and he has written a hugely demanding work that puts the soloist through the most extreme paces of propulsive frenzy, hushed sinuosity, and broad, almost Brahmsian soulfulness.

The typical Penderecki vehemence is always present-has he never not been portentous?-but his narrative line is thrillingly taut, and since no idea (or effect) is allowed to linger too long, you at least get the illusion that all this gorgeous writing must be going somewhere. If anyone can polish off Mr. Penderecki's work with utter dispatch, Ms. Mutter can, and the clarity with which she skitters, darts and knifes through this 38-minute work is breathtaking. Accompanied by her usual splendid pianist, Lambert Orkis, she is in even more impassioned form in the rhapsodic thickets of Bartók's Second Sonata for Violin and Piano, which rounds out the program.

Finally, a crossover to the most rewarding vocal album I've heard in years-and that includes those labeled "classical": Pennies From Heaven (Angel 7243 5 56625-2), a program of 11 songs written for the movies during the Great Depression, as performed by Mary Cleere Haran with the pianist and sometime singer Richard Rodney Bennett. Ms. Haran, who is currently performing these songs at the Manhattan Theater Club, is as true a virtuoso in what she does as any more rarefied musician you might care to name. She and the superlative Mr. Bennett plainly agree that what got America through its most dismal economic collapse was not just F.D.R's New Deal, but Tin Pan Alley's care package of songs, with titles like "Love Is Just Around the Corner," "When My Ship Comes In," "I'm in the Mood for Love," "Breezin' Along With the Breeze," and "I Only Have Eyes for You." Ms. Haran's dusky pipes and pull-up-a-chair enunciation can flutter, wail, scat, soar, sass and moan in ways that recall-but never merely imitate-singers as various as Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald and Lee Wylie. There is no corny homage going on here, though, just a lot of singing that's really smart, really sly and really sweet-qualities that should be in every virtuoso's arsenal.

Brainy and beautiful, Mary Cleere Haran would be worth the cover charge even if she didn't also possess one of the dreamiest singing voices since Marilyn Monroe. Fortunately, her attributes are many, and they are all fusing in a combustible entertainment package that gives you top value for your investment in a bright and tangy new act called "Pennies From Heaven" at the Algonquin's fabled Oak Room (through Nov. 15). She is literally jamming them in, and no wonder. She is simply, in a word, sensational.

Ms. Haran, like me, has been shaped and influenced by old movies. In this witty, well-researched act, she concentrates on the films of the 1930's-a treasure chest of dumb blondes and dumber plots that made it more fun to be broke, homeless and depressed in the Depression. As she points out in her study of Busby Berkeley production numbers, orphans, shopgirls and gold diggers, people may have been penniless, but there was always enough spare change to go to the movies. And when you got there, everyone on the screen sipped vermouth cassis and dodged machine gun bullets without spilling a drop.

Although Ms. Haran's father was only 7 years old when the stock market crashed, and times were often rough, he told his children all about the movies that saved him from despair. Much later, when she was growing up Irish Catholic in San Francisco, it was her 9-year-old sister who was glued to Warner Brothers gangster flicks. Mary was more interested in boys and cheerleader tryouts and high school proms, but her sister knew where Sing Sing was and how many of the Dead End Kids were actually dead. Only now, in retrospect, and with the aid of her local video store, has this late bloomer become an expert on that dazzling age of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Using her passion for dolls and molls, lugs and thugs, and other 30's nostalgia, she has needlepointed a rich and rapturous act about the times that changed America, weaving events and places and themes together with the songs of that decade. You go away sated, but feeling trim and terrific.

From a jaunty "Breezin' Along With the Breeze" to every hobo's happy theme song "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," she demonstrates how smiling through the tears became a national pastime. A highlight is the obscure ballad "When My Ship Comes In," which Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson wrote for Eddie Cantor to sing in Kid Millions in 1934. Then she blends "Night in Manhattan," a Texas Guinan speak-easy centerpiece to end them all, into an astonishing ballad arrangement of "42nd Street" unlike anything I've heard before. It takes courage, and the talent and musical savvy to back it up, to turn the traditionally bouncy "Lullaby of Broadway" into an actual lullaby light as blancmange and soft enough to sing a child to sleep. And the surprises never end. Saluting the ladies of the silver screen, she imitates such 30's icons as Ruby Keeler, put-up-your-dukes Joan Blondell, and Jean Arthur, who was the quintessential wisecracking working girl.

Accompanying Ms. Haran is the literate, tasteful pianist-arranger-singer and Oscar-nominated film composer Richard Rodney Bennett, who not only provides lush chords for her creamy voice to languish in, but who joins her in an undulatingly suggestive duet on "Sweet and Slow," a Harry Warren-Al Dubin song. On everything from a marshmallow-coated "I'm in the Mood for Love" to a slap-happy "Pick Yourself Up," Ms. Haran explores every musical nuance of the decade before World War II. She croons. She swoons. She swings. She's got musical wings. She calls this perfect act "Pennies from Heaven," but the gems she offers are more like gold nuggets from the United States Mint.

A Tom Cruise From Down Under

More singers: Twenty-four-year-old David Campbell may be a case of too much, too soon. This Tom Cruise from Down Under has a big voice, a clean-cut countenance, a self-assured demeanor and a spectacularly naïve ignorance of the kinds of songs that should be sung in a posh, expensive, glamorous and exclusive New York supper club like Rainbow & Stars. Landing a three-week gig there-especially at a time when so many seasoned veterans can't get in the door-is a feather in his cap. But a classy room full of sophisticated high rollers weaned on Cole Porter, Harold Arlen and Rodgers & Hart is not the place to sing "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

To be fair, this young man has talent. And growing up in South Australia, he had the added advantage of a mother who played a lot of Johnny Mathis records. Unfortunately, he sounds too much like the quavering, tremulous Mr. Mathis on ballads and too much like every other noisy pop singer bridging the gap between show tunes and rock on faster tempos. Like most kids who like songs but lack the life experience to interpret them, he thinks "Alexander's Ragtime Band" is a sophisticated standard. I don't want to seem churlish about this because I believe he has enough intelligence and curiosity about music to learn and grow. His first six songs in this outing aim high. (Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You" and Stephen Sondheim's "Not a Day Goes By" are two of the better entries in his repertoire.) And there's a nostalgic tribute to fellow Aussie Peter Allen that is as rhythmic as it is sincere. But it's all downhill from there.

One problem all of these young singers in the chasm called cabaret succumb to unwisely is that they all have buddies who think they are songwriters, and they insist on introducing their friends' songs whether they're worth singing or not. Mr. Campbell wastes a lot of valuable time singing a number of these adolescent, immature songs, to no avail. In his earlier New York engagements, down at the Greenwich Village club Eighty-Eights, he tried out some of these humdrum songs with no danger of damage. Rainbow & Stars requires a more challenging repertoire. With so many raw materials, it would be nice if someone could come along with the taste and vision to shape them into a polished product that doesn't sound like it just came off an assembly line. I admire Mr. Campbell's passion and nice-guy demeanor, but taking New York's cabaret world by storm (which is what I wrote when I saw him down at Eighty-Eights early this year) is a far cry from conquering the rarefied air 65 floors above Rockefeller Center.

For headier stuff, experience Lynne Charnay, who has been enchanting the crowds on Monday nights at Danny's on West 46th Street in the heart of Restaurant Row. Ms. Charnay was a staple on every musical menu back in the 1960's. Those were the days when Mabel Mercer reigned, and great performers held the center spot in intimate boîtes Dorothy Kilgallen's column called watering holes. After decades of retirement, this soignée lady is back, to great acclaim, with the kind of hip, fresh repertoire only a seasoned pro who has lived can sing knowledgeably. Her songs are funny, sad and wise, she sings the lyrics with a dusty no-nonsense approach, and you always learn something valuable in her presence. Old evergreens like Billy Strayhorn's and Roger Schore's haunting "Bittersweet" and Bart Howard's poignant "Where Do You Think You're Going" find themselves rubbing elbows with bright contemporary baubles by Portia Nelson and John Wallowitch. "Luncheonette," by the always brilliant Francesca Blumenthal, is a nostalgic lament for the long, lost days of counter food and waitresses named Maisie and Iris, of pimento cheese on toast, hot chocolate that is hot and meatloaf that is not. I remember them well. "On the Streets of Paree," another Francesca Blumenthal newcomer, has wonderfully satiric lyrics about the French ("They're so amorous on the buses/ They sin on the cinema line/ The natives won't make any fusses/ They save their complaints for the wine"). On the night I caught this delectable act, Ms. Charnay sang 21 songs, and there wasn't a dud in the bunch. One tires of the arrogance of youth and all those colorless, soporific songs they sing. Give me a mature woman with a sultry voice no longer encumbered by the blush of schoolgirl know-nothingness. If sauce and seasoning are your ingredients of choice, Lynne Charnay is the gourmet special you've been hungering for.