Nathan Lane, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick.

The reverberation of dinner chimes echoed through the stairwell of the Plaza as a tardy Shindigger rushed up the steps to the 28th Annual Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards on Monday evening. And there we found what we like to call a “celebrity boil,” as a multitude of cameramen and reporters besieged a trio of thespian besties: Sarah Jessica Parker, hubby Matthew Broderick and the evening’s performing arts honoree, Nathan Lane.

While the petite and camera-ready SJP graciously posed and purred in her vintage Oscar de la Renta dress, her husband looked on sheepishly and Mr. Lane seemed somewhat overwhelmed.

“It’s been a lot of hard work,” Mr. Lane told Shindigger about starring in the upcoming production of Douglas Carter Beane’s new play, The Nance, which begins previews on March 21. “We’re now going in our fourth week of the rehearsal.”

Would the legendary comedic actor be taking refuge from the Broadway stage this summer in the Hamptons, we wondered?

“I’m not going to be getting out there a lot,” he replied. Right now, he was simply enjoying the moment. “I actually didn’t even know [Guild Hall] gave awards. I didn’t know I was up for one!”

Lifetime achievement awards sound stuffy. And yet this affair was anything but. Snatching a glass of cabernet sauvignon, Shindigger assessed the environment of high-society doyennes and dapper men. The energy was regal, but loose. The profound waft of money in the room was overpowering, but inclusive. These were the mighty East Enders—patrons of the arts—and they were beyond marvelous.

Better yet: they knew it!

As the first course was served, the evening’s master of ceremonies, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Marshall Brickman, welcomed Lorne Michaels and Dan Aykroyd to the stage in order to present the lifetime achievement award for visual arts to John Alexander.

“Don’t let that East Texas accent fool ya,” joked Mr. Aykroyd, handing over the prize to the American landscape artist. “John is one of the most intelligent and sensitive, semi-articulate Texans on the planet.”

The razzing continued as writer/critic Ken Auletta presented the honor for literary arts to biographer Walter Isaacson.

“He’s also a little weird,” Mr. Auletta began. “He only urinates once a week ... He owns 15 identical suits and one tie.” (Setting the record straight, Mr. Isaacson told the crowd that “only about a third of that was true.”)

During a pause for dinner, Shindigger decided to wander the ballroom. We interrupted Carl Spielvogel, who was lecturing Cristina Greeven Cuomo about the greatness of America and the importance of international diplomacy.

“I have been going to the Hamptons since I was the premeditated thought of my parents,” giggled Ms. Cuomo, the editor in chief of Manhattan magazine, patting her tiered-lace Chanel dress. “Southampton is my hamlet! I love it out there.”

Of everyone present, Ms. Cuomo confessed that tonight she was most excited to be in the company of Mr. Michaels. “I’m a huge closet comedy fan. I love everything he does. 30 Rock—I can’t believe it’s over! Devastating,” She said, adding that her soon-to-launch glossy rag, Beach, is “going to have a great sense of humor.”

Before Shindigger could table dance anymore, Mr. Brickman was back at the podium. “I’m Nathan Lane. Don’t fuck with me! I’m a professional,” he teased, before recalling several entertaining experiences with Mr. Lane from their time spent working on the commercially successful disaster that was The Addams Family. He then handed the stage over to Tony-award winning director Jack O’Brien, who delivered a less profanity-laden introduction and presented Mr. Lane with his plaque.

(Meanwhile, Shindigger noticed an exceedingly late arrival, as the endearingly lissome Blythe Danner slipped her way to a head table.)

Rounding out the awards, Alec Baldwin presented a special award for leadership and philanthropic endeavors to former investment banker, American Ballet Theatre trustee and Guild Hall chairman Melville “Mickey” Straus, whom power publicist Peggy Siegal described as “the bravest person in the room.”

“He’s the most loved,” she said.

Shindigger passed on dessert but eagerly refilled our wine, as our tablemate, gala co-chair and c/o Hotels owner Jenny Ljungberg, explained one of the organization’s goals moving forward.

“[We want] to get a younger crowd to come to Guild Hall,” she said. “It has sort of a stuffy connotation and a stuffy feel, even though their offerings are anything but stuffy.”

To help further Ms. Ljungberg’s cause, Shindigger approached Ms. Parker and demanded to know if she had introduced her little ones to Guild Hall.

“We try to see and do as much as they offer, as much as life with children allows,” she said.

As the night was coming to a close, Shindigger swung by the bar for a final refill. Ms. Danner had the same idea, and so we asked why she had been so late.

“I was doing an Actors Fund benefit,” she explained with a smile. “I was the stage manager of the first act of Our Town, and then B.D. Wong is the second, and S. Epatha Merkerson is it in. She’s wonderful! We were laughing and laughing and having a good time, but I was able to slip away.”

We then babbled on about her summer plans and her return to Broadway. “I took over for Estelle Parsons,” she told us. “I’m going to be Matthew Broderick’s mother. It’s a whole new cast!”

Which sounded like nice work, if you can get it.

Addams opened last Thursday night after a reportedly troubled run in Chicago and a significant creative overhaul—the veteran comic director Jerry Zaks was brought in and listed as creative consultant, effectively replacing the original direction-and-design combo of Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch. The result is a disappointment, sure—but mostly because this expensively produced, ideally cast show could have been so spectacular.

It’s not great, but it’s very good—an entirely entertaining and enjoyable two and a half hours in the theater. And as a clearly commercial-minded venture, designed to bring in tourist audiences and deliver a long run, it ably, if not perfectly, delivers the Big Broadway Show experience.

That is thanks to top-notch production values—the sets and staging are gorgeous and often witty—and an even better cast. Nathan Lane is Gomez Addams, the unusual family’s patriarch, and he’s the best I’ve seen him in years, blustery but tender, with his usually impeccable comic delivery. Sure, he’s doing Bialystock, but that’s a much better fit here than as, say, Ben Butley. Bebe Neuwirth is both gorgeous and sublimely deadpan as his wife; she’s a model Morticia, and she’d be better if only she’d been given more dancing to do.

The production, we’ve been told, is based not on the 1960s TV show but rather on the original Charles Addams cartoons, which appeared in The New Yorker. But The Addams Family’s overture nevertheless begins (wisely) with the da-da-da-da-snap-snap TV theme, and the show proceeds (less wisely) to deliver a sitcomish plot: Daughter Wednesday has fallen in love with a “normal” boy—Lucas Beineke, from Ohio—and invited his parents for dinner at the spectacularly gothic family mansion, hidden inside Central Park. At the dinner, she wants her family to act normal, too. (La Cage, 10 days early!) They try, and fail, but everyone ends up happy and in love.

The story would be compelling if something more was at stake than relations with the machetunim. And it’s a shame that the book, by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, who won a Tony for their first Broadway effort, Jersey Boys, draws such a traditionally cheery message—be yourself, and embrace love on your own terms—from such famously off-kilter source material. But it’s also defensible: Ultimately, even in the original Addams panels, the family is happy, in their skewed way, and if the mass audiences that lead to long runs were looking for weirdo depressives, more Sondheim shows would have made money.

What this script does have is a collection of excellent—if often audience-flattering—one-liners, presumably the work of Mr. Brickman, the former Woody Allen co-writer.

Addams also has forgettable music and lyrics, by Andrew Lippa, best known for The Wild Party. (One imagines, wistfully, what Hairspray’s Shaiman and Whitman would have done with this upbeat, happy interpretation of Addams, or Avenue Q’s Lopez and Marx with a more skewed, goofy take.) And Sergio Trujillo, also a Tony winner for Jersey Boys, delivers pleasant but unmemorable choreography.
But the rest of the cast is as good as the leads, and they’re so much fun to watch—and look so good—that you leave happy, despite the show’s weaknesses.

Wednesday, though at the center of the show, is the least-developed character, but Krysta Rodriguez sings well while pulling off a teenager’s frustrated petulance. Adam Riegler, as her younger brother, Pugsley, is genuinely discomfiting, an awkward kid with a barely hidden streak of gleeful sadism. The always-memorable Jackie Hoffman’s Grandma is a dotty old pill-pusher, with a craggy, mole-marked face and fond memories of Woodstock. And Kevin Chamberlin’s weird Uncle Fester steals his scenes: Secretly in love with the moon, he’s evil, scheming, sensitive, sad and sweet. (The Beinekes are fine but much less compelling.)

Fester’s second-act love song to the moon—he strums his ukulele and floats toward the object of his affection—is the loveliest moment in the show.

AND THE WORST thing I saw last week? Million Dollar Quartet, the jukebox musical set in Memphis’ Sun Records recording studio on the famous 1956 afternoon when Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley all stopped by for a jam session.

The day really happened, and Sam Phillips, the Sun founder, whose eye for talent and flair for publicity helped create rock ’n’ roll, made sure a photo of it got in the local paper. In a jukebox-musical era, you can see how that image—and the catalog that goes with it—seems like a good idea for a play-cum-concert.

But at the Nederlander, where Million Dollar Quartet opened Sunday night, it all looks less inspired.

The problem is that the photo is a moment, not a story. And it’s a real moment, not fiction. So Floyd Mutrux, who conceived, co-wrote and directed the show, and Colin Escott, who wrote it with him, can’t quite ape Jersey Boys (which tracks the real and interesting tale of a band’s creation, development, mob ties and internal rivalries), and it can’t quite ape Rock of Ages, which simply invents a plot to showcase songs. This musical tries to be both, but it works as neither.

This despite the best efforts of the four men playing the quartet, who all sing, dance, play instruments and are required to impersonate some remarkably well-known figures. (Poor Eddie Clendening is obliged to spend the evening with his lip awkwardly curled in an Elvis sneer.) Together with a bassist and a drummer, they work their way through 23 songs, some classics but a surprising number not. The performances are excellent, but they never take off—each time they’re about to, the music stops and Phillips, played by the underused Hunter Foster, delivers some historical exposition.

The only dramatic tension ginned up is that Johnny Cash plans to leave Sun and sign with Columbia, but he can’t bring himself to tell Phillips. Finally, he does, and Phillips is angry. Briefly. Then they have a drink, all is forgiven and it’s time for the finale. The set—the Sun studio, done up in red leather and silver crown moldings, like a hip steakhouse—disappears, and the band rocks through a final five tracks. This, at last, is what you’re here for, and it only took about 90 minutes to arrive.

joxfeld@observer.com

Samuel Beckett’s seminal Modernist masterpiece—first produced in America in 1956—is famously set in a void with only a near-barren tree (a Beckett tree: one too fragile upon which to hang yourself). But I felt sunk the moment the curtain went up to reveal the stage cluttered with fake rocks and boulders arranged into some kind of plastic mountain.

Meet the Flintstones Beckett. They’re the modern Stone Age family.

The Bedrock Estragon and Vladimir of Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin are one mismatched thing. But that ill-conceived set that the veteran British director has imposed on Godot is in direct contradiction to Beckett’s stated intentions.

Mr. Page—not an innovator, but usually a faithful director of classic texts—has made a very uncharacteristic lapse. It need not have been decisive had Santo Loquasto’s Flintstone set design worked better than any old mundane cliché, or even been relevant to the essence of the great play itself.

His un-Beckettian tree is far too sturdy. You could hang yourself from it, with ease. But his rocky landscape does not convince us half as much as the rocky landscape in the new production of the elm-free Desire Under the Elms (now nicknamed Desire Under the Rocks).

The Flintstone look is in. There was also the blasted moonscape that the British director Deborah Warner added recently to Beckett’s Happy Days, starring Fiona Shaw. O Sam, poor Sam! His spartan genius has bequeathed merely mortal directors and designers too much material to work with.

Will no one leave Beckett alone?

The new production of Waiting for Godot in London’s West End, starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, for example, takes the usual populist liberties: Beckett’s empty space has now become a hackneyed derelict theater, and the two stars—never innately funny performers in the first place—relish playing clowns too much, even singing and dancing creakily at the curtain call to the old British music-hall favorite, “Underneath the Arches.”

I trust they’re having a yabba dabba doo time.

THE DEBATE ABOUT “interpreting” sacred texts isn’t new. Nor are Shakespeare productions set in, say, the Wild West (which I’ve seen twice). Everything’s been done that mediocre directors insist on being done. Still, better a living reinterpretation of a classic play than a dusty revival of a museum piece.

I believe the plays of a precise minimalist like Beckett stand apart, however. My bias is in favor of staging his masterpieces as he intended. Let the characters and the words speak for themselves—stripped to the marrow of his lost souls damned at birth, or before.

Beckett’s notes are always musically the same; it’s a question of how you play them. Apart from the wayward stage design, Mr. Page—a traditionalist at heart—has kept conventionally to Beckett’s text for the Roundabout Theatre production at Studio 54. But Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin make a distant odd couple, whereas Estragon and Vladimir ought to be joined irrevocably at the hip.

The performers are too much themselves. Mr. Lane’s popular note of wryly comic exasperation belongs to his own familiar persona rather than to Estragon’s bleakly tragic emotionalism. Mr. Irwin—a brilliant mime, of course—makes a lightweight, fussily overintellectualized version of the cerebral Vladimir, and key line readings are disjointedly bizarre.

There’s no poetry in either of them, alas—and little of Beckett’s lament for humanity. Together, they fatally lack his tragic perspective. A generalized clownishness—with a comforting nod to Beckett’s love of music hall—only touches the reassuring surfaces of the play. It’s a tragicomedy. What in all dramatic literature could be sadder or more agonizingly hopeless than the news the child brings into the wilderness each bright new day: “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t be coming this evening but surely tomorrow.”

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I’ll grant you that”—as the mordant line goes in Beckett’s Endgame. Mr. Page’s production isn’t—thank goodness—the laugh riot of the Mike Nichols knockabout 1988 Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center (in which Mr. Irwin appeared as Lucky, and Robin Williams’ Estragon performed manic impersonations of Hollywood stars, as usual). “Every line a laugh,” Beckett commented about it dryly.

But Mr. Lane and Mr. Irwin do not take us to the anguished depths—to “how it is on this bitch of an earth.” My benchmark for Godot is the Dublin Gate Theatre production with Beckett’s greatest interpreter Barry McGovern as Vladimir, along with Johnny Murphy’s Estragon. It was directed by Walter Asmus—who assisted Beckett on his own seminal production of Godot for the Schiller Theater in Berlin.

Irish actors understand Beckett, the Irishman, in their bones. And what the masterly Dublin production revealed—beside Beckett’s essential Irish gallows humor—is Godot's trust in salvation, in tandem with an awesome sorrow "where the light gleams an instant."

There are two remarkable saving graces in the new Roundabout production, however. John Goodman’s Pozzo, the fat, bullying slave-driver with a posh British accent and the temperament of a ruined child, is a fabulous echo of Peter Bull’s original blustery Pozzo of Peter Hall’s celebrated London premier of Waiting for Godot in 1955. And the excellent John Glover’s unlucky Lucky, enslaved, beaten like Ireland, barely able to walk, exhausted, dying, could scarcely be better or more affecting.

Mr. Glover and a revelatory Mr. Goodman hit all the right notes.

jheilpern@observer.com

Say about it what you will, but in an election year, you can’t accuse Kevin Costner’s political satire Swing Vote of failing to keep up with current events. With an eye on the box office coffers and a finger on the nation’s nervous pulse, this romp with a conscience, directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who co-wrote the edgy screenplay (with Jason Richman), features the new scruffy, self-deprecating and slightly graying Mr. Costner dispensing oodles of paunchy charm as the unlikeliest American voter who ever turned cynical indifference into civic pride and a nation upside down. He is really engaging as a polecat from Texico, N.M., named Ernest “Bud” Johnson, a divorced single father who is such a lazy loser he can’t even hold down a no-brainer job at the local egg-packing plant. Bud is quite a challenge to his patriotic daughter Molly (newcomer Madeline Carroll, a genuine challenger to Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin), who picks up his empty beer bottles and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get him out of bed. It’s Election Day, and Bud refuses to vote, fretting that it might mean jury duty. Precocious Molly sneaks into the polling place just before it closes and casts her indolent dad’s vote for him, forgetting to pull the lever. The result is that with only five electoral votes, New Mexico turns out to be the swing state and Bud’s irregular ballot is the deciding vote that will throw the election. What follows is the equivalent of a sudden landslide for Ralph Nader.

Before he can recast his vote properly, every political power in Washington descends on Texico to influence the one man who will choose the next president, opening a floodgate for an all-star cast of scenery-chewing comics (Nathan Lane, Stanley Tucci, George Lopez, Willie Nelson) and a circus of gibberish-dispensing media pundits (Chris Matthews, Aaron Brown, Tucker Carlson, Tony Blankley, James Carville, Larry King, Bill Maher, Campbell Brown—even Mary Hart, for chrissake!) to invade Bud’s mobile trailer, competing for more interviews than the press corps trailing Obama in Iraq. Shrieks the manager of the local TV station when they arrive by bus, helicopter, and even Air Force One to put Texico on the national news: “This is bigger than O. J.!”

In the 10 days the Registrar of Voters gives Bud to recast his ballot, every fruitcake in Washington tries to influence his decision, and everything from Planned Parenthood to Outback Steakhouse wants a piece of the action. Both the Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and his Democratic left-wing rival (Dennis Hopper) appeal to Bud on every issue from immigration to global warming, doing and saying whatever it takes to get elected, and Bud becomes the composite market demographic that all the campaign strategists of Obama, Clinton and McCain have been groveling for all year. Mr. Costner is hilarious as he struts forth from his perch at the local bowling alley to awkwardly declare his views on everything from the environment to gay marriage. Funny, animated, appealing in an aw-shucks sort of way, the star milks maximum impact from a unique body language that is refreshingly knock-kneed and bow-legged at the same time.

It all leads up to a televised presidential debate in which Bud gets to ask questions of both candidates, and you get the horrible feeling you’ve seen and heard it all before on CNN. This is numbingly preposterous, of course, until you realize every joke is based on the crazy-quilt Cuisinart we’ve made of the U.S. Constitution, and the humor comes painfully close to election-year reality. Finally, perennial talking head Arianna Huffington faces the camera and says loftily to the brain-dead American public, “Something tells me Franklin and Jefferson are looking down and smiling.” Moaning in pain and disbelief is more like it. Does this election hurt? Only when we laugh.

rreed@observer.com

Matthews appears as himself in the trailer for Swing Vote, a film that appears to be a gentle political comedy starring a leathery Kevin Costner as a man whose vote—his solitary vote—will decide the presidential election.

Costner stars alongside Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper as presidential candidates, Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci as (at least according to the trailer) political operatives, and Madeline Carroll as Mr. Costner's adorable, smart-aleck daughter. Did we mention Judge Reinhold? He's in it, too. (Please, please—fingers crossed—let Mr. Reinhold play a Supreme Court justice so that Entertainment Weekly can take its "Here Comes The Judge" headline out of mothballs.) Willie Nelson's also in it for some added folksiness.

But the most important cameo appears to be Mr. Matthews'. He shows up at about the 50-second mark in the trailer to shout this bit of helpful exposition:

Mr. Matthews has previously flexed his acting muscles in Ivan Reitman's 1993 political comedy Dave. On the small screen, he's appeared in Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's HBO series Tanner '88, Aaron Sorkin's White House drama The West Wing, Lawrence O'Donnell's very short-lived series, Mister Sterling, and in Tina Fey's sitcom 30 Rock. In each project, he played himself.

“The problem is, you’re always looking for that pay-job and often that’s in television or film," said the 48-year-old Manhattan-dweller. "And that can take you to Canada, it can take you to Eastern Europe or something.”

Mr. Baker, who is perhaps best known for nailing the role of the creepy pedophile father Bill Maplewood in Todd Solondz’s 1998 Happiness, is now appearing in Theresa Rebeck’s play, Mauritius..

“Broadway’s always here, and for us, we live right in Hell’s Kitchen, so it’s a walk. So it’s just like you’re at home; you get to walk to work, you’re working with people you can relate with and they know what you’re going through and they know what you’re going through. You know the winter’s coming, you don’t care,” he continued with a smile under a foppish mane of thick dark hair.

“It’s great. The whole audience is going to go through the whole experience with you. There’s nothing about Broadway that I don’t love.”

After Mauritius’ curtain falls one final time for Mr. Baker later this month, he will begin rehearsals for David Mamet’s play November, co-starring Laurie Metcalf and Nathan Lane. Mr. Baker last acted alongside Mr. Lane back in the late 1980s—when the pair tromped the floorboards for The Common Pursuit.

Mr. Lane, 51, wearing a dark suit and glasses, has supporting parts in a forthcoming film based on The Nutcracker, as well as a David Mamet play. “The thing that seems to be on the wane is H.I.V. awareness and the notion that AIDS is easily dealt with and that it’s not still a huge issue,” he said. “Especially with young people going out there and having unprotected sex—that issue I do think has been dangerous.”

The Bravo contingent was also there at the Millennium Broadway Hotel: Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley, 37, in tight white pants, and Project Runway’s Tim Gunn, 53, who admitted that he had skipped the Gay Pride Parade. “We’re in the middle of production,” he said. “But I saw the crowds—and they looked enormous!”

Actress Jodie Foster, 44, attended the gala wearing a pale lavender boat-neck shift dress. She seemed very proud to be there, and had donated a record sum to the cause. But she didn’t want to talk about it.

That the defeated, whiplash Butley is played by Nathan Lane—an actor who usually likes to be liked—only makes the performance more arresting. Mr. Lane has boldly put himself to the fire in the marathon role made famous by Alan Bates back in 1974, and if I have one or two doubts about his performance, it’s still the best he’s ever given.

Mr. Gray, the literate, dyspeptic British dramatist, author of such fine plays as Otherwise Engaged and The Common Pursuit, just might be the last politically incorrect man on Earth (along with his friend Harold Pinter). To see someone smoking onstage nowadays is to experience instant nostalgia. But a set design that displays a poster of T.S. Eliot must rank as a near-miracle.

Eliot signals a certain literary sophistication, and Butley—which takes place in a university office—is nothing if not articulate. Wordiness might be the only thing it’s got going for it, but it’s one big, energizing thing even so.

The self-destructive anti-hero who’s given up on life is the source of the play’s vitality. Rarely has a man been left by his wife and male lover on the same day. But Mr. Gray’s clever, serio-comic plot device proves enough to hang the play on. Spiraling his way into a drunken coma, Butley is at the center of every scene. He’s visited by everyone in his futile life, as if in a dream play. (John Osborne’s more furiously bilious Inadmissible Evidence, from 1964, has a similar plot and was a healthy influence.) In his fashion, Butley is a truth-teller, and he’s someone who can’t cope with life’s disappointment and its loveless, irredeemable mediocrity. His own first-rate mind is going to seed. Nothing works any more for this man, including the light switches on his desk. His spleen is so witty, however, that it makes his unpleasantness forgivable.

Nicholas Martin’s production, which comes to Broadway via the Huntington Theatre in Boston, is a superior one, with fine contributions from everyone in the ensemble, particularly Julian Ovenden’s restrained Joey, and the cameos of Pamela Gray and the delightful Jessica Stone. (For my taste, Dana Ivey gives too much of a crowd-pleasing turn as Butley’s flustered fellow teacher). But the evening stands or falls on Mr. Lane’s hunched shoulders.

His comic genius and timing are innate, of course, and almost unstoppable. Nathan Lane the performer has successfully reined himself in, though one occasionally senses the effort. He’s on best behavior, as it were, conveying bad behavior. His British accent (and various other accents, from North Country to Scots) is perfect. He’s battened down his broad comedy to suggest the unspecified wound and yearning within Butley, who “turned queer,” as the script puts it. But Mr. Lane is more sorrowfully hapless than consumed by wormy self-disgust and squalor. The star gives an admirable, affecting performance, but he can’t help milking it a bit at the curtain when he breaks down briefly in tears.

Butley ends up alone, all right. But big Brits don’t cry. Simon Gray is no sentimentalist. Butley doesn’t crave our sympathy and he doesn’t expect it. It’s enough that Mr. Gray originally ended the play with his damaged hero trying feebly to turn on his desk lamp three times.

Butley’s light has been snuffed out.

Trick or Treat

The quality I love most about the young and terrific American troupe with the French name, Les Freres Corbusier, is their weirdly original minds.

Les Freres cannot be anticipated. Their choices are always surprising. They’re so provocatively smart and fun that I, for one, don’t mind if they go wrong. Danger is an essential element of their risky balancing act—namely, the apparently impossible task of taking sacred cows seriously while simultaneously deconstructing them.

Les Freres are fair to unlikely people. (A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, a life of L. Ron Hubbard performed by schoolchildren, is their signature piece.) Their latest, Hell House, directed by Alex Timbers at the adventurous St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is a near-exact recreation of the fundamentalist fright nights first staged by Jerry Falwell in the 1970’s to scare nonbelievers with visions of hell. But far from offering a glib satire, Les Freres wrong-foots us at the outset by staging their guided multi-room tour of the apocalypse utterly without cynicism or irony. To the contrary, everything we see is horribly sincere.

Our guide is Satan—excellently played by a large (and unbilled) actor in a black hood beaming evil from a flushed face. The devil wears rouge. (And he looks exactly like Sir Peter Hall.) We follow him dutifully in groups through a haunted house of screaming ghosts and ghouls and ghastly sights in rooms that at first made me laugh uncomfortably. Hell House is part funhouse, and perhaps my discomfort goes back to when I was a little boy who paid sixpence to stare with nervous embarrassment at a bearded fat lady seated on a golden throne in a circus sideshow. But I couldn’t help noticing that her beard was coming unstuck. She stared back at me, and eventually broke her disdainful silence to ask in a squeaky voice, “What do you think you’re laughing at, sonny?”

I was at first similarly embarrassed by the apparently amateur scenes and parables on the short, 45-minute tour. We’re shown a cheerleader who’s raped, a bloody abortion, a gay wedding, an AIDS hospital tableau, a high-school massacre and more delights. Then a Dante-esque corridor leads us to Lucifer, whereupon a tubby angel in blinding light rescues us from damnation, and a vision of Jesus invites us to pray with Him. We exit into a church hop hosted by a nice and clean Christian rock group. There are little doughnuts to eat.

It made a change. But all is staged by Les Freres Corbusier unapologetically, while the depictions of bloody death and suffering are performed without a trace of Christian compassion. This is what happens if you don’t believe, goes the uncharitable evangelical message: You deserve to die.

Les Freres have invented only one scene—and it’s a brilliant choice. An unexpected sight in mid-tour—entitled “The Ironists”—depicts three Jon Stewart disciples planning to write a sketch sending up Christian fundamentalists. You can’t satirize a Hell House, but that isn’t the point. Irony, groans our flushed Satanic guide at the intrusion of these smug smart alecks, is “soooooo 20th-century.”

It’s also glib—too glib for the innovatory Les Freres Corbusier, anyway.

That the defeated, whiplash Butley is played by Nathan Lane—an actor who usually likes to be liked—only makes the performance more arresting. Mr. Lane has boldly put himself to the fire in the marathon role made famous by Alan Bates back in 1974, and if I have one or two doubts about his performance, it’s still the best he’s ever given.

Mr. Gray, the literate, dyspeptic British dramatist, author of such fine plays as Otherwise Engaged and The Common Pursuit, just might be the last politically incorrect man on Earth (along with his friend Harold Pinter). To see someone smoking onstage nowadays is to experience instant nostalgia. But a set design that displays a poster of T.S. Eliot must rank as a near-miracle.

Eliot signals a certain literary sophistication, and Butley—which takes place in a university office—is nothing if not articulate. Wordiness might be the only thing it’s got going for it, but it’s one big, energizing thing even so.

The self-destructive anti-hero who’s given up on life is the source of the play’s vitality. Rarely has a man been left by his wife and male lover on the same day. But Mr. Gray’s clever, serio-comic plot device proves enough to hang the play on. Spiraling his way into a drunken coma, Butley is at the center of every scene. He’s visited by everyone in his futile life, as if in a dream play. (John Osborne’s more furiously bilious Inadmissible Evidence, from 1964, has a similar plot and was a healthy influence.) In his fashion, Butley is a truth-teller, and he’s someone who can’t cope with life’s disappointment and its loveless, irredeemable mediocrity. His own first-rate mind is going to seed. Nothing works any more for this man, including the light switches on his desk. His spleen is so witty, however, that it makes his unpleasantness forgivable.

Nicholas Martin’s production, which comes to Broadway via the Huntington Theatre in Boston, is a superior one, with fine contributions from everyone in the ensemble, particularly Julian Ovenden’s restrained Joey, and the cameos of Pamela Gray and the delightful Jessica Stone. (For my taste, Dana Ivey gives too much of a crowd-pleasing turn as Butley’s flustered fellow teacher). But the evening stands or falls on Mr. Lane’s hunched shoulders.

His comic genius and timing are innate, of course, and almost unstoppable. Nathan Lane the performer has successfully reined himself in, though one occasionally senses the effort. He’s on best behavior, as it were, conveying bad behavior. His British accent (and various other accents, from North Country to Scots) is perfect. He’s battened down his broad comedy to suggest the unspecified wound and yearning within Butley, who “turned queer,” as the script puts it. But Mr. Lane is more sorrowfully hapless than consumed by wormy self-disgust and squalor. The star gives an admirable, affecting performance, but he can’t help milking it a bit at the curtain when he breaks down briefly in tears.

Butley ends up alone, all right. But big Brits don’t cry. Simon Gray is no sentimentalist. Butley doesn’t crave our sympathy and he doesn’t expect it. It’s enough that Mr. Gray originally ended the play with his damaged hero trying feebly to turn on his desk lamp three times.

Butley’s light has been snuffed out.

Trick or Treat

The quality I love most about the young and terrific American troupe with the French name, Les Freres Corbusier, is their weirdly original minds.

Les Freres cannot be anticipated. Their choices are always surprising. They’re so provocatively smart and fun that I, for one, don’t mind if they go wrong. Danger is an essential element of their risky balancing act—namely, the apparently impossible task of taking sacred cows seriously while simultaneously deconstructing them.

Les Freres are fair to unlikely people. ( A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, a life of L. Ron Hubbard performed by schoolchildren, is their signature piece.) Their latest, Hell House, directed by Alex Timbers at the adventurous St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, is a near-exact recreation of the fundamentalist fright nights first staged by Jerry Falwell in the 1970’s to scare nonbelievers with visions of hell. But far from offering a glib satire, Les Freres wrong-foots us at the outset by staging their guided multi-room tour of the apocalypse utterly without cynicism or irony. To the contrary, everything we see is horribly sincere.

Our guide is Satan—excellently played by a large (and unbilled) actor in a black hood beaming evil from a flushed face. The devil wears rouge. (And he looks exactly like Sir Peter Hall.) We follow him dutifully in groups through a haunted house of screaming ghosts and ghouls and ghastly sights in rooms that at first made me laugh uncomfortably. Hell House is part funhouse, and perhaps my discomfort goes back to when I was a little boy who paid sixpence to stare with nervous embarrassment at a bearded fat lady seated on a golden throne in a circus sideshow. But I couldn’t help noticing that her beard was coming unstuck. She stared back at me, and eventually broke her disdainful silence to ask in a squeaky voice, “What do you think you’re laughing at, sonny?”

I was at first similarly embarrassed by the apparently amateur scenes and parables on the short, 45-minute tour. We’re shown a cheerleader who’s raped, a bloody abortion, a gay wedding, an AIDS hospital tableau, a high-school massacre and more delights. Then a Dante-esque corridor leads us to Lucifer, whereupon a tubby angel in blinding light rescues us from damnation, and a vision of Jesus invites us to pray with Him. We exit into a church hop hosted by a nice and clean Christian rock group. There are little doughnuts to eat.

It made a change. But all is staged by Les Freres Corbusier unapologetically, while the depictions of bloody death and suffering are performed without a trace of Christian compassion. This is what happens if you don’t believe, goes the uncharitable evangelical message: You deserve to die.

Les Freres have invented only one scene—and it’s a brilliant choice. An unexpected sight in mid-tour—entitled “The Ironists”—depicts three Jon Stewart disciples planning to write a sketch sending up Christian fundamentalists. You can’t satirize a Hell House, but that isn’t the point. Irony, groans our flushed Satanic guide at the intrusion of these smug smart alecks, is “soooooo 20th-century.”

It’s also glib—too glib for the innovatory Les Freres Corbusier, anyway.

Seventy-two members and invited guests of the Friars Club lined the dais. Mr. Lewis was seated immediately to the left of the podium, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese alongside him.

This was not Mr. Lewis’ first time being roasted, said Stewie Stone. He had also been roasted in 1955, when the only woman on the dais was Marilyn Monroe.

“And in 1986, we roasted you again with, again, Frank Sinatra, Jack Benny”—well, Mr. Benny died in 1974—“Buddy Hackett. And today, we roast you with [Richard] Belzer and Gilbert Gottfried,” Mr. Stone told Mr. Lewis. “You realize five generations of comedians have called you an asshole.” There was another Jerry Lewis Roast in 1971.

“What a hero he is in France,” said Norm Crosby. “Then again, those are the people who invented cocksucking.”

The abbot position has been vacant since Alan King passed away two years ago, exactly, to the day of the roast. That position has also been held by Frank Sinatra, Ed Sullivan and George M. Cohan (twice)—names belonging to the masters of the genre, of which few remain. This knowledge was foremost in the minds of many.

“Most of Jerry’s contemporaries are no longer here,” said Friars Club dean Freddie Roman.

His “iconic status and his age—he’s 80,” might have had a calming effect on the insult-hurling affair, said roaster Richard Klein from his seat on the dais later on. “I have to try to be funny and maybe a little irreverent, you know, but not disrespectful.

“I already sense that it’s tamer than most roasts,” he said. “You know, they get very scatological.”

But was it respect for Mr. Lewis’ reputation, or fear of it, that led some presenters to pull their punches? How do you top a legend, a man who laid the stones for the path so many of those present barely dare to tread.

“I enjoyed this roast because this is legendary—Jerry has been here 80 years long,” said Don King, who was last year’s honoree at a cutthroat gathering that saw roasters jettisoning any semblance of reserve and bringing up some of the muckiest details of Mr. King’s personal and professional background. “You can’t say there’s a line that can’t be crossed. It’s supposed to be impromptu and it’s supposed to be cutting up, and they are born and bred in comedy,” he said. His necktie was in a flashy stars-and-stripes design, with the Statue of Liberty planted in the center. “So, you know, coming in—they’ve got a license to kill you.”

Gilbert Gottfried didn’t even mention Mr. Lewis from the podium. “I don’t really know him,” he said later. “I just met him like maybe twice before, for about less than a minute. I just always enjoyed dick jokes a lot. I just go up, do it as disgusting as possible, and I’m off.”

For his turn, Mr. Klein chose to mock Mr. Lewis by performing a screeching, off-key rendition of him singing Handel’s Messiah. Paul Shaffer also serenaded the guest of honor, with a song strewn with expletives and descriptions of sex acts and defecation.

During Mr. Shaffer’s closing monologue, Mr. Lewis rose from his seat and began to walk off the stage. The Letterman sidekick ran after him and directed him back to his seat.

Mr. Lewis laughed frequently throughout the proceedings. He also flexed his jaw frequently, in an expression that looked a bit like a yawn, but wasn’t.

Richard Belzer served as roast master. “Jerry Lewis, Jerry fucking Lewis,” he said. “One day, he calls me up on the phone and tells me how much he enjoys my work. Me—little Richie Belzer. Turns out Jerry was a huge Munch fan”—Mr. Belzer’s most current on-screen persona is Detective John Munch—“and had been one for as far back as 1948, when one night he went down on every woman in the Copacabana. Three hundred and eighty-one women. And that was considered a lot of pussy in those days.

“Jerry recently played my uncle on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” he said.

“Now he’s been fucking my aunt for eight weeks. And when my Aunt Martha came out of that coma …. ” The creepiness of Mr. Belzer’s appearance made the joke’s suggestion of near-necrophilia that much more comically distasteful.

The comics sometimes found it easier to go for each other. “I’m not going to make fun of Sandra Bernhard,” said comic Lisa Lampanelli. “She’s the only person on this dais who can get chicks.

“Sandra’s very proud to be a lesbeen. You know how I know? Before the show, she made me smell her finger.

“But enough about Sandra,” said Ms. Lampanelli. “We’re here tonight to roast the great Jerry Lewis. Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of talk about people saying they wish Dean was here to see this. Quite honestly, I would settle for Jerry to be alive to see this. Seriously, Jerry is old. His ball bag hangs so low, he has to hold it when he takes a shit.”

“How can one person be so annoying in so many movies? Seriously, Nathan Lane, you would know—how?

“You may not know this,” she said of Mr. Lane, who was seated to her right, “but he actually was up for a part in Brokeback Mountain, but the producers were afraid he’d make the film seem too gay.

“Nathan Lane has been opened more times on Broadway than Neil Simon plays.”

Mr. Lane looked back at her with a twisted mouth.

“But you look fantastic, Nathan,” she said to him. And then to the crowd: “Up until recently, he had a goatee. He shaved it because it kept irritating Matthew Broderick’s balls.”

Deana Martin, the daughter and feminized namesake of Mr. Lewis’ comedic partner of yesteryear, took the microphone.

“When I was born,” she said, “he and my father, Dean Martin, were the biggest comedy team in history, and I remember that they would go on tour together. Jerry came by the house one day to pick up Dad on his way to the airport, and I said, ‘Uncle Jerry, why is Dad leaving me to go to Las Vegas with you?’, and he took my little hand in his and he said, ‘Because he likes me better.’”

Ms. Martin made no jabs about Mr. Lewis’ weight, age, career, sex life. After the ceremony, she said, “He’s such a good friend, I could have said anything, but I don’t choose to.”

At the end, Mr. Lewis took to the microphone. “I have absolutely no recall in the last 75 professional-forming years that I have remembered such morale-building,” he said.

“Today I am not taking anything for granted. I knew what today represented. It represented part and parcel of what has made a whole lifetime in this business an exceptional one.”

Mr. Lewis never erased, he said, the mental picture he had of himself as “a Jew kid from Newark who’s trying desperately to graduate grammar school wearing his cousin’s white tux that he wore the graduation before. Now,” he said, “I’m sitting next to Robert De Niro, for God’s sakes.”