Dante Camara (not Alighieri) is the maître d’ at A Voce (which means “word of mouth”), a new Italian restaurant near Madison Square Park. The team behind this venture is impressive. Chef Andrew Carmellini cooked for six years at Café Boulud, where he earned a Michelin star and two James Beard awards (including being named best chef in the city last year). The sommelier, Olivier Flosse, is also from Café Boulud, as is Mr. Camara. And the pastry chef, April Robinson, worked at Alain Ducasse and Café Gray.

A Voce is on the ground floor of an office building on 26th Street. It’s a very noisy place because it’s all hard surfaces—or as one friend put it, “The only soft surface here is us.” The dining room, done up in chocolate and vanilla with stainless steel, is minimally decorated in a modern, corporate style, with a maple floor, moss-green, leather-topped tables and swiveling leather Eames chairs. It feels like a staff cafeteria for the upper echelon.

Picture windows down one side of the room offer a view onto the street where, come summer, tables will be set out on a piazza landscaped with lemon trees and plants in tubs. The additional seating, enough for 80 to 100, should be a saving grace for A Voce.

Lining one wall of the L-shaped dining room is an art installation, backlit with a pink glow, constructed out of more than a dozen towers of Lincoln Log–like blocks. A blue painting that looks like a computer screensaver decorates another wall.

At our request, Dante sat us in a corner where it was somewhat quieter than the main section. But the overhead lighting here was bright enough for interrogation. It couldn’t be turned down, he explained apologetically, because it was controlled by a computer. “The lights don’t dim until 10 o’clock.”

Why?

We turned our attention to the wine list. It’s superb, ranging in price from $18 a bottle to $9,500 for a bottle of 1947 Pomerol for that special occasion. Half the bottles are Italian; the rest are from France and America. Forty percent are less than $80. The waiters, dressed in bright blue shirts, are as enthusiastic, confident, knowledgeable and interested a group as I’ve come across in a while.

Mr. Carmellini cooked mainly French food at Café Boulud, but he’s not new to Italian cuisine. He worked for two years at San Domenico and spent a year studying in Italy. At A Voce, he’s serving straightforward, rustic Italian dishes such as tripe, braised lamb shank, grilled pork chop and chicken cacciatora. There are also novelties, like duck meatballs with dried cherry sauce and ramps with spaghetti. The menu is printed daily and reflects the seasonal produce available at the market.

If you go to the Union Square greenmarket these days, you’ll see chefs lining up to buy ramps—small wild leeks that are piled up in gritty heaps. These ramps, to paraphrase P.G. Wodehouse, cause the sap to rise in a chef’s veins. They have a subtle, garlicky taste, and Mr. Carmellini tosses them with strips of speck in a bowl of spaghetti coated with a creamy sauce of Parmesan and olive oil. This dish couldn’t be simpler or more delicious.

The duck meatballs are on the level of some of the fancier stuff Mr. Carmellini turned out at Café Boulud. They’re soft and satiny, mixed with foie gras and pork, and served on puréed celery with a dark cherry sauce. Quail saltimbocca is so tender under its crisp skin you don’t need the steak knife that’s offered. It’s rare, on a bed of lentils, with a rich fig sauce. Duck glazed with fennel and honey is sliced in meaty, pink pieces and garnished with duck sausage, chopped sugar snap peas and a bracing olive sauce.

Much of the food at A Voce is good without knocking your socks off. Grilled octopus was tender and nicely charred, with peperonata, tomatoes, lemon and tiny pieces of chorizo. Steak tartare is seasoned with truffle oil and mixed with walnuts. It arrives Italian-style, with Parmesan and arugula, and it was pleasant but bland. The squid-ink risotto, topped with a cuttlefish stuffed with shrimp, was bland too, although perfectly cooked. But tripe with borlotti beans and spring vegetables was excellent, light and clean-tasting. I also liked the rigatoni with broccoli rabe, chickpeas and tiny, spicy pork meatballs in a subtle tomato sauce.

Halfway through dinner, the lights dimmed. I checked my watch: 10 o’clock. But by now the restaurant was so noisy we had to shout to make ourselves heard.

One of my friends said he’d once sat next to Charlton Heston in a Hollywood restaurant. “When he spoke,” my friend said, “his voice sounded as though the sky had opened and the tablets had been given to Moses.”

A Charlton Heston voice is required here.

Desserts are uneven. A ring of pineapple, topped with ice cream, is far too sweet. Lemon sorbet, on the other hand, is pleasantly tart. Tiramisu, served in a brandy snifter and sprinkled with shavings of chocolate, is cloyingly sugary and doused with too much liquor. Chocolate cake isn’t the molten kind but a hearty sponge, subtly flavored with amaretto.

At A Voce, Mr. Carmellini is serving some very good food, but I won’t come back until I can eat outside under the lemon trees, and have a conversation sotto voce.

A little more than an hour before the film was scheduled to begin, Fox publicists raced up and down the red carpet jabbering anxiously on headsets, trying to make themselves heard over the wailing wall of young women trapped behind the barricades screaming, "Oooorlandoooo!!"

The film's leading man, Orlando Bloom, was as yet nowhere in sight.

But anticipation didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the teeming masses for this unlikely stud, who, after all, made his name playing a fairy.

Some even held action figures fashioned after the character of the elf, Legolas (Mr. Bloom's role in Lord of the Rings); others waved copies of the current Rolling Stone, the cover of which featured Mr. Bloom gazing Mona Lisa–like from the cover, clad in a white tank top.

Studio reps whipped the crowd into greater frenzy, tossing out T-shirts emblazoned "Mrs. Bloom" on the front.

Yes, I said, yes, I will. Yes! the teenage girls and overweight suburban moms-along with a few misguided gents-seemed to be saying by promptly pulling them on.

It was 30 minutes before the first Town Car pulled up in front of the theater and Liam Neeson appeared, a tall drink of water wearing a dark blue suit.

"I don't think they're all here for me," he deadpanned, pausing to expound on the merits of his young co-star. It was the usual spiel: good work ethic, professionalism.

"Right. He'd better well say something nice about me now," Mr. Neeson concluded as the crowd obligingly switched their cries to "Liam!!" They were not rewarded with "Mrs. Neeson" T-shirts for their efforts, but the actor signed autographs and posed for photographs taken with camera phones. (Everyone's a paparazzo now.)

The chant switched back to "Orlando!!" as Brendan Gleeson and Martin Csokas, foils to Mr. Bloom's Balian in the movie, strode along the narrow defile of the stars, looking semi-dazzled by the attention.

"Ooh, I loved playing bad," said Mr. Gleeson, who in the movie is the villainous Reynald. He paused to give Mr. Neeson, his fellow Irishman, a manly bear hug.

"I've just finished the next Harry Potter-I play Mad Eye Moody, another lunatic," Mr. Gleeson said.

"I loved the horses," said Mr. Csokas cheerfully. But a roar had risen up to engulf his little non sequitur: Orlando had arrived at the end of the red carpet.

In short order, a lineup of B-list celebrities was shunted along the carpet like a row of ducks at a carnival to make way for Balian. There was Bryant Gumbel, X-Men's Famke Janssen, Salman Rushdie and MTV TRL-er Vanessa Minnillo (who, according to the tabloids, would go on to become quite cozy with Mr. Bloom later that evening at the Flatiron nightspot Gypsy Tea). Inexplicably in attendance was also the formerly scandal-ridden ice skater Oksana Baiul, tiny in a red slip dress, who happily did a quarter-turn for the cameras. "I'll give you a triple Lutz!" she said gamely.

Finally, it was time for the Heartthrob to arrive. Dressed all in black with a rakish scarf-perhaps still in Pirates of the Caribbean mode (he's currently filming back-to-back sequels)-Mr. Bloom seemed to drink in the Beatles-like hysteria generated the crowds around him.

"No, I don't suppose you ever get used to this," he said, gesturing vaguely at the frenzied masses, a hint of exhaustion at the corners of his dark eyes. "But I'm very grateful to all of them. Ridley cast me in this multimillion-dollar movie, and it's my first time out as the lead-so if it wasn't for these guys, I'm not sure Fox would have taken a chance on me."

Asked about his director, Mr. Bloom broke into a grin.

"He's the man," he said. "I mean, this is the guy who gave us Gladiator, Thelma and Louise and Bladerunner-he's a genius!

"He takes historic material and makes it cool," he added.

"I almost never say this, but this is really one of the movies I'm most pleased with," said Mr. Scott moments later, arm in arm with girlfriend, Giannina Facio. "I think it's really difficult to take a mainstream movie and mix intelligent subtext to it."

Right, thought The Transom. Wouldn't want to put the intelligence where mainstream audiences could just grab it, would you?

As to the pressures of a high-budget film opening in a summer ripe with expectations, the twinkly-eyed director shrugged.

"I hope it does well, but you're never guaranteed anything in life, are you? We try to do the best we can, make the best movie, and hopefully people will like it and come out to see it."

The time was now 7:15, 15 minutes past the scheduled start time for the film, and Orlando Bloom was still signing autographs. Further down the carpet, Mr. Bloom's on-screen co-star Eva Green was being hustled into the theater. "No! No more questions," barked her handler, as Ms. Green continued to pose.

"I'm going to think about doing a cowboy movie next," laughed Mr. Scott, as he too was pulled into the theater, adding with a wink toward his leading man, who still glad-handling the crowd: "There's far too many pirate movies now."

-Sara Vilkomerson

Mite in the Piazza

Victoria Clark is gearing up to shop for a tiny tuxedo. Following her Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, the rising star of The Light in the Piazza has already picked an escort for awards night: her 10-year-old son, Thomas Luke Guest. "It'll be cute," she enthused. "He jumped so high when they announced it that I think he landed on top of my shoulders."

While young Thomas was unabashedly confident in his mother's success, holding her hand throughout the announcement, Ms. Clark admitted that the rest of the home team-herself, one cat and a dog-had been feeling a little queasy.

They needn't have. Before the announcements, Ms. Clark topped the critics' lists as a likely nominee for her performance, which has been roundly praised this season, even as The Light in the Piazza met with mixed reviews. Based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer and directed by Bartlett Sher, the show tells the story of a young American who embarks on an Italian vacation with her protective mother-played by Ms. Clark-and falls in love with one of the dashing young locals.

Other leading women who got the nod were Sutton Foster from Little Women, who won the award in 2002; Erin Dilly from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; and Sherie Rene Scott of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Last, and probably least, was striver Christina Applegate, who survived both her résumé (remember Kelly Bundy, the tawdry teen temptress on Married ... With Children?) and a broken foot to star in the revival of Sweet Charity.

Ms. Clark was gracious about leading in the standings and expressed excitement for all her colleagues.

Her son's allegiances are less complicated. He has already composed a song to honor the affair, which Ms. Clark gladly sang for us. It went something like this: "We're going to the Tony Awards, dah dah dah dah dah." Is this a harbinger of Mr. Guest's own nascent Broadway ambitions? Probably not. "He's a jock," she explained. "We just need to make sure he eats enough."

-Jessica Bruder

Ask Jeeves?

About 20 members of the Broadway Special, the official New York branch of the national P.G. Wodehouse Society, met for dinner recently at trendy Tribeca eatery Dekk before heading out to see the film adaptation of the Wodehouse novel Piccadilly Jim. It was only a matter of time before the subject of flying bread rolls came up.

"Only at the national conventions do these morons throw bread rolls and act like the asses Wodehouse wrote about," said David Jasen, the 67-year-old former friend and original biographer of the late humor writer P.G. Wodehouse.

Bread throwing, a standard practice at the Drones, the fictional men's club frequented by such timeless Wodehousean creations as Bertie Wooster and Ronald Eustace Psmith, became taboo among Wodehouse Society members after an errant roll landed in a wine glass and caused red wine to soil one lucky diner's white tuxedo at the 1997 national convention in Chicago. According to Mr. Jasen, Wodehouse fans commonly suffer from arrested development.

However, group founder Amy Plofker pointed out that Wodehouse's constant theme of extreme silliness offers a "profound strategy for dealing with life." Mrs. Plofker, a medical writer who lives in Sleepy Hollow, has read "at least 80" of the prodigious author's 90 books and says she started the group in an effort to bring some joy to New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11.

Indeed, most group members cited therapeutic benefits when asked the reason behind their obsession. "Wodehouse is my cure to depression," said Barbara Weider, a 35-year-old historical preservationist who has read more than 70 Wodehouse books, "some of them 10 times over." And member John Baesch, proudly donning the Society's official tie, comprised of green, red and gold stripes, credits "The Master" with saving his life. Bedridden after suffering a heart attack, Mr. Baesch immersed himself in a six-month regimen of pure Wodehouse. "The not-so-subtle message of Wodehouse is 'relax and enjoy,'" he said.

As with any good literary-society function, the evening culminated with a test, which turned out to be a nail-biter. Out of 15 Piccadilly Jim–related stumpers-including such doozies as "Name the female socialist detective operating in the Pett house as a maid"-Evelyn Herzog and Ms. Weider both answered three questions correctly. Ms. Herzog won the tiebreaker and was awarded a collection of stories entitled Women in Wodehouse.

"That's bullshit," Ms. Weider muttered upon learning that Ms. Herzog had just finished the book on the train in from Maryland. The Transom slid a breadbasket in her direction and she gladly whizzed a slice down the table. Her husband, Tom, joined in with two stealth no-look over-the-shoulder tosses. No one at the other end of the table seemed to notice. "The Dorothy Parker Society is more rowdy," Ms. Weider asserted.

Before the screening, hosted by the Tribeca Film Festival at the Stuyvesant High School auditorium, the current club president, Philip Schreffler, reviewing the film for the Society's quarterly, Plum Lines, had some pointed questions for the film's director, John McKay, about how faithful his movie had been to the novel.

"When Jim speaks in the novel he's got the Psmith or the Bertie Wooster cadence to his speech, will we see that?"

"You'll see a little of it," responded Mr. McKay, and started to say something about the film's star, Sam Rockwell, before being rescued by a publicist.

Fortunately for Mr. McKay, who said he hopes to rouse as many Wodehouse fans "from the bath chair" as possible, Mr. Schreffler was pleased with the film and felt it had been true to the novel.

"Yes, only one very minor subplot is missing," said Mr. Schreffler. "I'm planning to review the film as if it were a Broadway musical, updated from 1917 to the 1930's." Got that?

-Spencer Morgan

A decade ago, I was a 25-year-old magazine staffer trying to navigate the seemingly glamorous world of Condé Nast Publications. Being set adrift in such an expansive sea of well-tailored talent should have provided a rich vein of dating potential for a straight single man. Yet I was stunningly unsuccessful in my efforts, fumbling about like some minor P.G. Wodehouse character reincarnated as a twentysomething publishing hack with Internet access and a gym membership.

My work-related inadequacies thus forced me to fend for my romantic life at book parties, gallery openings and any other velvet-roped events I managed to doubletalk my way into. At one such affair, I met a captivating redhead who, as an added bonus, was a media bigwig with much to offer in the way of career advice. Ruth was fit and fantastic-looking; to stand next to her, you never would've known that she was 49 years old-a fact that eluded me when we met. Looking back, her lengthy digressions about Studio 54 and Patti Hearst should have stopped me cold. But as so often happens when copious amounts of complimentary off-brand vodka are involved, the night fell into a passionate state of affairs, leaving me no time to check her paperwork.

I soon began to enjoy the fact that she was older. Ruth had a wealth of life experience, and she brought this wisdom into the relationship. She was nurturing, warm and too out of touch with popular culture to realize that my "conversations" were simply recycled episodes of Seinfeld. And she did not impose the artifice of commitment. There were no demands for daily phone calls, or inquiries as to what our future together might look like. Ruth was able to date just for the moment-not the norm with women my own age. This independence was liberating, and my commitment to her grew out of respect, not a request on her part.

But more than anything, Ruth fell squarely into the wheel house of the female "sexual prime." Like a well-rehearsed orchestra, Ruth's talents had blossomed with years of practice; she was playing with the sophistication of the Vienna Philharmonic. And, unlike younger women I had dated, Ruth had few inhibitions. I recall several public romps in various museums that were likely jailworthy under the iron hand of Giuliani's "decency" laws.

And Ruth's emotional openness stood in striking contrast to my youthful detachment. Her willingness to discuss her broken marriage and career failings taught me how to open up and communicate-not a skill I had in surplus at that aloof age. By leaving herself so exposed, she showed me the difference between vulnerability and insecurity.

In fact, things were going very well-until the night we accidentally bumped into Zoe, her stunning, midriff-baring 24-year-old daughter. Men face enough romantic challenges as it is; the desire to sleep with your girlfriend's youngest child is an extra hurdle we don't need. But with her blue eyes and bohemian-chic outlook, Zoe was exactly the sort of woman I imagined myself settling down with. And here I was, dating her mother. If I ever had a chance with Zoe, this reality reduced the odds substantially (as did the fact that she was happily involved with a well-known artist).

Ruth was concerned that her daughter might not approve of our affair, so we were forced to create an elaborate ruse: I became Ruth's private yoga instructor, offering personal tutorials in exchange for media-world advice. That most Three's Company plots are rooted in better logic seemed unimportant to Ruth as she explained all of this to Zoe over a late meal at the Corner Bistro. Our explanation, in fact, raised more questions than it answered. Why, for example, was her mother out with her "yoga instructor" past midnight on a Tuesday? Why was a man so devoted to clean living ingesting red meat and Scotch with the fervor of an underfed Teamster?

The difference in our age became glaring when we socialized with friends. I grew to resent spending every Friday night at stuffy dinner parties discussing the escalating cost of Ivy League tuitions-especially when my most pressing economic concerns involved securing funds for upcoming Pavement concerts. And while Ruth never said anything, I don't think she felt comfortable with my gang, for whom "home décor" meant replacing our post-collegiate milk crates with equally unattractive unfinished wooden bookshelves. Making plans became an exercise in choosing between the gentrified bohemia of the East Village and an evening of canapés on Park Avenue. Neither of us fit neatly into the other's real life, despite our efforts to fake it.

The clincher came during a brunch I rashly set up with my parents during one of their spur-of-the moment weekend visits. I had told them I was dating someone, but did not provide any significant details. My folks are intelligent people, but they came of age in an era when courtship was a simple, expedient enterprise. They have never been exposed to the limitless romantic potential-or neurotic overanalysis-that accompanies modern dating. I usually operate under a strict "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Yet there I stood, one sunny Saturday morning, introducing them to my "chatty older ladyfriend," as my mother would come to refer to her. While my father's sidelong glances indicated a mild sense of confusion, Ruth and my mother hit it off, beginning a long discussion about the flea markets below 26th Street. And as fate would have it, they were both devotees of Murder, She Wrote. As they professed their mutual admiration of Angela Lansbury, a critical recognition dawned on me: Ruth and my mother were contemporaries. It suddenly felt as if I were dating my aunt, not a sultry divorcée with an account at La Perla.

As it turned out, Ruth was feeling the same way, which made the eventual breakup easier. Though I missed her for many months thereafter, it was time for me to get back to being turned down by women from my own generation. She is nearly 60 today, and probably a grandmother, which makes any sort of fallback far too weird for me to even consider. Not that I'd really want to. I'm now dating (at least until she reads this essay) a perfectly youthful 32-year-old, and she is the beneficiary of what I learned from Ruth: that older women are often self-aware and deeply sensual, but differences in age present some quirky, perhaps insurmountable obstacles. What's perhaps more important, though, is that Ruth opened my eyes to the possibility of a partner who has both the limitless enthusiasm of youth and the level-headed steadiness of maturity. So here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.

Peter Hyman's first book, The Reluctant Metrosexual: Dispatches from an Almost Hip Life, was published in August by Villard.

Oh, to be P.G. Wodehouse! There aren't many authors whose life one actually covets-not really. To come up with a Dorothy Parker witticism might seem like fun for a millisecond, but you'd also be the one to take that multi-bladed brain home at night and try and find a comfy spot for it on the pillow. From a distance, the life of Hemingway takes on a certain action-packed glamour, but up close it soon palls, and even the most ardent fan would opt out before the morning drinking and shotgun-loading stage. But Wodehouse! "A breeze from start to finish" was how he described his life, much of it spent pipe in hand, flanked by a small squadron of Pekes, nurturing internal-contentment levels that verged on the Buddhist. "Plum lives on the moon" was how his wife Ethel put it. Arriving in Hollywood in 1930-an event capable of causing even the most robust moon to wax and wane-Wodehouse soon settled into Hockneyesque bliss: "I can still picture him," recalled his stepdaughter Leonora, "floating motionless and happy in the pool, looking at his toes, or at the deep blue California sky, while presumably working out the next bit of writing complexity." Aren't writers who go to Hollywood supposed to end up face- down in the pool?

The dangers of such a life to the potential biographer are obvious enough: This "breeze" of a life might just blow right past, leaving the gorilla paws of biographical inquiry clenching and unclenching in thin air. One searches in vain through Wodehouse's private correspondence for any reference to intimacy, or love, reports Robert McCrum in his new biography; a "deafening silence" surrounds his (largely nonexistent) sex life, and his romantic entanglements appear "tantalizingly opaque." Mr. McCrum is, however, possessed of the patience of a man stalking deer, and the portrait that emerges, slowly but indelibly, is easily the best to date.

The product of the sort of mid-ranking colonial household that caused an entire generation of English upper lips to stiffen and draw shut, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of 3 and 15. He was raised instead by a small flotilla of nannies, grandparents and aunts. (Aunts outnumber parents in his fiction, at a rough estimate, by 10 to 1.) At age 12, he was sent to a boarding school, Dulwich College, which would remain Wodehouse's abiding template for heaven on earth: a girl-free idyll of muffins, cricket, cocoa and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle serials, into which Wodehouse fitted exactly and where he excelled at sports-particularly cricket, rugby and boxing. As surprising as it is to find so many contact sports in the biography of any English writer (most of whom are to be found quivering in the showers, towel clamped chastely around their midriff), it makes perfect sense for Wodehouse, whose work is as enlivened as it is horrified by the prospect of human contact, the burly scrum of our affairs with our fellow beings.

The Jazz Age finds Wodehouse holidaying on Long Island with the Fitzgeralds and sweeping up Broadway with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, but for all his affability, Wodehouse remained something of a bolter, socially. As he confided to a friend: "It's surprising how few people in the world one actually wants to see." Another friend, Denis Mackail, referred to what he called "the Wodehouse Glide"-the progenitor of the small subset of verbs ("glide," "shimmer," "hove," "materialize") that announce the arrival and departure of Wodehouse's best known creation, Jeeves. "I might hear him saying Goodnight, from the middle of the traffic I might catch a glimpse of his rain-coat swinging across the road," said Mackail. "But the general effect was that he had just switched himself off." No writer has been as funny on the subject of withdrawal-or as adept at watermarking the plush interior of consciousness from which we are winkled only under extreme duress. The great joke about Bertie is that a man who finds himself so drawn to the thick of the action should be so magnificently incurious about his surroundings. How often the books pit solipsist against solipsist, to see who dawns on who first: Distracted by their respective idées fixes, they run in ever tighter circles, their conversation sputtering and finally short-circuiting in mutual dumbfoundment.

The only other equal he had in this regard was Samuel Beckett, admittedly not the writer who springs unbidden to mind when Wodehouse is under discussion, but a writer equally haunted by boredom and energized by the clickety-clack rhythm of derailed trains of thought. When Wodehouse woke up one morning, aged 78, he was heard to exclaim, "What? Again!" Remove the exclamation mark and you have pure Beckett. Like Beckett, too, was the startling fixity-bordering on abstraction-with which Wodehouse organized and reorganized the elements of his fiction. Or, as Mr. McCrum puts it, "no other 20th-century English writer of consequence evolves in his mature work as little as Wodehouse." He wrote over 100 novels in under 90 years, with minimum variation along the way, producing ink rather more in the manner of a squid than a writer. Mr. McCrum performs his critical duties as best he can-noting that Bertie Wooster grows slightly more scheming sometime in the 1920's, and the girls slightly less doll-like-but otherwise, is quite happy to pay tribute to the eternal verities of the Wodehouse world, a sun-dappled Eden untouched by literary fashion, or sex, or war, which had the benefit of anachronism even when Wodehouse started out. (By the 1920's, butlers were already old hat, and Edwardian England a distant memory, which is why Jeeves keeps such a tight lip on the First World War: "some slight friction in the Balkans" is how he glancingly reports it to Bertie.)

Having missed him the first time around, geopolitics came back for another pass at Wodehouse in 1940, when, marooned in France during the German occupation, he found himself taken prisoner, interned and then shuttled to Berlin, where he made a series of disastrous broadcasts, on Nazi radio, reassuring his readers that he was O.K. and that internment suited him fine ("it keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up on your reading"). The broadcasts led to accusations of treason, from which Wodehouse's career took a long time to recover. Mr. McCrum tops and tails his book with the incident. "[T]he second world war finished Wodehouse," he writes; it was "the defining moment of Wodehouse's life," although it's arguable whether it was anything of the sort, since it illustrated only a pre-existing tendency on Wodehouse's part-rampant naïveté-which it also did nothing to change. To his dying day, Wodehouse never did see what all the fuss was about; his shows of contrition were entirely reactionary, like a child's.

You can easily forgive Mr. McCrum his one Big Incident, however, for Wodehouse's life was otherwise free of false dramatics. When Ethel confronted him about his sole extramarital affair, Wodehouse responded, "Who told you?"-an answer so free of bluster that you somehow just know that that marriage was destined to last. Wodehouse, it seems, was one of those quiet souls, happiest when left to till a private furrow, as alarmed by the blandishments of success as by the shame of failure. My favorite story has Wodehouse doing the rounds of Magdalen College with Hugh Walpole, just weeks after the writer Hilaire Belloc called Wodehouse the "best writer of English now alive."

"He said to me," Wodehouse remembered, "'Did you see what Belloc said about you?' I said I had. 'I wonder why he said that.' 'I wonder', I said. Long silence. 'I can't imagine why he said that,' said Hugh. I said I couldn't either. Another long silence. 'It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!' 'Most extraordinary!' Long silence again. 'Ah, well,' said Hugh, having apparently found the solution, 'the old man's getting very old.'"

Tom Shone is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press).

Apart from the decibel level, Euzkadi–tucked away on East Fourth Street between First and Second avenues–is every bit the romantic hole-in-the-wall restaurant. It's a first-date sort of place, with wine you can afford and appetizers priced in the single digits (not to mention no main course over 15 bucks and $5 desserts). The name means "Basque country," but with its bare brick walls, candlelit tables and wine racks, Euzkadi looks more like a Village bistro in the 50's. So many black turtlenecks were crowded into the front room that I half-expected to see a gaggle of Beat poets puffing away in a corner. Instead of cigarette smoke, however, the place was filled with the smell of garlic.

The patron, a tall, lanky fellow who became increasingly harried as crowds of people without reservations kept pouring through the door, had shown my companions and me to the bar, where he offered us a glass of wine on the house, even though it was our own fault that we had to wait for a table. (We were half an hour late; when I had called earlier to tell the restaurant that we couldn't get there before 8:30 p.m., the man who answered the phone–not the patron–sounded on the verge of hysteria: "I've no idea if we can seat you," he said, and put me on hold, never to return.)

Euzkadi's small storefront dining room is lined with dark red banquets that also act as a room divider, and the tables are packed in tightly. The shoestring décor is oddly charming, with murky black-and-white photographs of Basque country, Puck prints and antique mirrors (hung with tinsel) decorating the walls and a polished copper counter on the tiny bar, where we nursed our glasses of rather sweet Gascony wine.

The restaurant has a license for wine only–moreover, half the customers look as though they've barely reached the legal drinking age. The short list is inexpensive and limited, with the sort of rough French reds and interesting Spanish wines that go with Basque food. (I would have liked to have seen more wines from the Basque country, however.)

The vaguely Arab-sounding tunes of traditional Basque music on the sound system moved on to Peggy Lee and Dave Brubeck, and before long we were shown to a table by the window. Things started looking up when a pungent olive-and-anchovy tapenade was set down with the bread. Smelling the garlic wafting from the kitchen, I was reminded of a friend who used to impress his guests with complex dishes that he served, not "family-style," but artfully arranged directly onto the individual dinner plates, the way food arrives at a table in a fancy restaurant. When his guests arrived, they were greeted by similar hearty kitchen smells. But unlike the chef here, Serge Buzkowski (who is from Casimir), my friend couldn't cook at all. Instead, he would fry some garlic in a pan while he heated up a selection of boil-in-the-bag dishes created by Michel Guerard especially for Bloomingdale's, during the brief period that the department store had a food section.

Euzkadi offers a dozen main courses, many of which are served "à la plancha," sizzling on a cast-iron skillet. Mr. Buzkowski's menu features a mix of bistro dishes and traditional Basque specialities, such as a seafood stew with aioli, and codfish cakes with stuffed piquillo peppers. Don't expect much expertise from the help, though. "Is the grilled pork paillard with escarole and beans a typical Basque dish?" I asked the waitress.

"I wish I knew!" she exclaimed cheerfully before rushing off.

Actually, the most typical Basque dish is canned white asparagus, which is not on the menu. It's so popular that when the Guggenheim Museum was built in Bilbao, it was nicknamed "the asparagus can." We began not with asparagus but grilled sardines (marinated with herbs and cooked perfectly) and a wonderful, pungent garlic sausage, served with a warm lentil salad and mustardy dressing. But the cod-cake bacalao, which is normally one of my favorite Basque dishes, was disappointingly bland and dry. Beef carpaccio, a special of the day, was overwhelmed by a powerful balsamic sauce and topped with a mountain of frisee mixed with crumbled Parmesan cheese. You could barely find the meat. A better choice was the plate of charcuterie with onion marmalade or the salad of string beans, beets and walnuts, which was perfectly pleasant as a light first course.

The dishes cooked on the cast-iron skillet would have been better had they spent less time sizzling over the flame. The skate wing with brown-butter caper sauce was dry, and a duck breast with olives, ordered rare, arrived medium-well. Braised rabbit (not a sizzling skillet dish), cooked in a lovely dark sauce made with prunes and cognac, was also dry. One of the best dishes I had was a special of the day, salmon with turnips and chanterelles. It was a curious-sounding combination, but the mix worked: The salmon was very fresh and cooked rare as ordered, and the turnips acted as a foil to the richness of the fish.

Desserts, chalked up on a blackboard, veer from the mundane to the very good. The chocolate cake with pear compote is nothing special and a bit on the dry side, and I've had far better prune clafouti than the doughy version offered here. But the quince tarte tatin is terrific, with the fruit nicely caramelized under a light pastry shell. (It could use a dollop of crème fraîche, though.) The chestnut rice pudding was overwhelmed by whipped cream and could have done with a few more chestnuts. You can also get a selection of Basque cheeses ($8), which is a nice way to end dinner.

Were it not for the noise, I would heartily recommend Euzkadi, despite my reservations about the unevenness of the food (at these prices, why quibble?). Perhaps I've been to too many loud restaurants recently, but I'm tired of yelling my way through dinner. If you're made of sterner stuff, though, and you choose carefully, you can eat very well here. And how Basque is it? I don't think it matters. I'd go back for that garlic sausage with lentils; what could be better on a cold night? Just bring your earplugs.

euzkadi

[

108 East Fourth Street

982-9788

dress: Black turtlenecks, fake leopard-skin coats

noise level: High

wine list: Short, inexpensive French and Spanish selections

credit cards: American Express

price range: Main courses, dinner, $13 to $15

hours: Monday to Thursday, 6 to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, to midnight

[ good

[ [ very good

[ [ [ excellent

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no star poor

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote good-naturedly that the Swedish-Greek taverna show from London is "the worst show ever and proud of it." But I was wrong. Mamma Mia! is the second-worst musical ever (and still proud of it).

Boy, when things go wrong . The worst musical ever is, without doubt, Andrew Lloyd Webber's By Jeeves , which will be briefly at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. My apologies again to Mamma Mia! , which now moves up into a well-deserved second place, and hearty congratulations to By Jeeves .

Those wild and crazy Swedes, ABBA, are Mozart compared to Mr. Lloyd Webber. But I wasn't thinking that when I arrived at the Helen Hayes with hope in my heart, as always. I was thinking: "How nice. They're serving tea."

And chocky-bickies, too. The proud Englishman within me warmed to the sight of Union Jacks displayed in the foyer, where chocolate digestive biscuits were being offered as they poured welcoming English tea from a silver urn into-alas-paper cups. The paper cups weren't a good sign. One does not linger over a paper cuppa. But the idea was there. They were trying . We would take tea with the Brits in the foyer and, thus fortified, would proceed to the Wodehousean delights within.

I should have known there would be trouble when I was shown to my seat by a P.G. Wodehouse character in white flannels who might have been Bingo Little, or Stiffy Byng, or Harold (Stinker) Pinker. "May I help you with your coat?" he asked with exaggerated cheerfulness in a Hooray-Henry upper-class English accent.

Oh, dear. Is there anything worse than participation theater, I can't help but think, unless it's the clown with the whistle who sits in your lap at the circus? It's not that I don't want to join in. It's not that Harold (Stinker) Pinker, or Gussie Fink-Nottle, or Honoria Glossop can't show me to my seat at By Jeeves and chat about the weather and the price of eggs, if that's what they want to do. It's just that it's a little too soon to pretend. We haven't sat down yet.

Then the Wodehouse chap, still in sunny character, handed me a program entitled "An Evening with Bertram Wooster." "This will tell you all about it!" he announced, and went off to help others find their seats. It was sometime in the 1920's, I learned, and we were attending a fund-raiser in a church hall in England for the church-steeple fund. Bertie himself-Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, tenor vocalist-was to entertain us on the banjo.

Isn't that charming? It reminded me of a show I saw one time called Bernie's Bar Mitzvah , although I don't think Bernie's Bar Mitzvah would have been P.G. Wodehouse's paper cuppa. As I entered a theater space dressed up as a dining room, a friendly, middle-aged man came up to me and asked: "Are you one of the mishpochah?"

Well, it wasn't for me to break the magic spell. So I said to the actor pretending to be the bar mitzvah boy's uncle, "How did you know I was one of the mishpochah?" And he replied, "Because you look like Bernie."

The imaginary setting of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's By Jeeves is merely Bernie's Bar Mitzvah anglicized. I wonder if he knows. The tradition itself goes all the way back to Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding via dubious amateur charades in English stately homes. When the show actually begins, Harold (Stinker) Pinker, a muscular clergyman, is therefore thanking us-"his distinguished guests"-for coming along to support such a splendid, wonderfully worthwhile cause as the perilous state of our Little Wittam Church Steeple.

It was a little too soon to leave. Besides, Harold (Stinker) Pinker was encouraging rounds of faux jolly applause from us to thank Bernard (Bumpy) Bazely for the loan of the splendid hall, and Misses Apply-Witchurch and Hentleshaw "for their mouth-watering contribution to this evening's early proceedings," followed by several others who were greeted, I must say, with less and less enthusiasm as their names were announced.

Enter our hero Bertie, who sings a song entitled "Banjo Boy" as he strums for a while on a frying pan that he's somehow mistaken for his banjo. Now, Bertie is a silly arse in a Wodehousean world of silly arses, and without Jeeves, his loyal, effortlessly superior butler, where would he be? But the banjo–fryingpan joke was a bummer. There's just no way to confuse a frying pan with a banjo. You can't fry an egg on a banjo. Well, I can't. You can try.

The sight and sound of the British letting their hair down like this is never pretty. But Brit silliness-the perverse, dopey pleasure the English insist on taking in schoolboy humor and amateur nights out-has never felt more inbred. It takes brilliance to perform with deliberate badness. (See Noises Off .) When the banjo incident gave way to Bertie acting out the evening's amateurishly farcical story of stupendous foolishness-because the banjo had been stolen -it didn't look promising. But when the alleged comic adventures of clueless Bertie, Honoria, Gussie, Cyrus Budge III (Jr.) et al.-overseen by the ever-tactful "ahems" of that humorlesssuper-goy, Jeeves-turned out to be so incomprehensible that they would have defeated Einstein, the light of the exit door beckoned.

Andrew Lloyd Webber is many things, but never funny. Sir Alan Ayckbourn, the show's director, bookwriter and lyricist, can be very funny. But not with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. The score, such as it is, is nondescript, with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan. By Jeeves itself has been knocking around for years. They won't give up on it. I'm afraid it's time.

The Good News

There's just space to recommend at last Mary Zimmerman's lovely, memorable achievement, Metamorphoses , at the Second Stage on West 43rd. Don't feel inhibited for a second by the prospect of this retelling of Ovid. His classic, transforming tales are wonderful, and our theater needs great, mythic stories more than ever.

To be sure, Ms. Zimmerman can hover on the verge of the precious, but that's the risk of such unearthly experiments. Naïveté in theater is always dangerous, innocence made too easily suspect. Ms. Zimmerman and her committed troupe are generous, gentle, lunatic souls. Only lunatics-or geniuses-would convert the stage into a 27-foot-wide pool of water where much of the action takes place! Yet you will see such aquatic delights as dreams are made of. Oceans swallow mighty warriors and give birth to erotic dreams; they drown illicit love and wash up dead kings in deaths foretold. Water is made of tears and the translucent power of love, and Phaëton, the son of the Sun, lazes on his back in a swimming pool, talking about father complexes to his poolside shrink.

Do see Metamorphoses , if you can. It's the most unusual, innovative piece in New York, and it's the best.