Outside the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, The Observer caught sight of designer Betsey Johnson storming by and leading a model on a metal chain. The model lifted her skirt and mooned the photographers. The model represented "anger" in a project of conveying the seven deadly sins (we didn't see any of the other six during the evening) and had expletives and "ANGER" written across her chest and arms in what appeared to be Sharpie marker. Was the model in pain? "Do dogs complain?" Ms. Johnson asked The Observer.

New ballet trustee Sarah Jessica Parker, chic in glittering Valentino, came down the carpet immediately after Ms. Johnson. "You should talk to Sarah Jessica!" said a P.R. flack attached to Ms. Johnson. Ms. Johnson looked abashed for a moment, and did not. Also dressed for the evening: Alexandra Lebenthal in teal tulle, with long train and ribbon in her hair. Was the tulle a tribute to ballerinas? "That's interesting! I didn't even make the connection. My husband always fights with me because I yell at people for stepping on my train--but I love a train!"

Brooke Shields came down the red carpet next, and we asked the Broadway veteran what the difference was between a dancer and an actor. We'd been intrigued by dancers' monomaniacal, mercurial temperaments since seeing Natalie Portman in Black Swan--an interest compounded by Ms. Portman's beau Benjamin Millipied's recent freakout at a Times reporter who asked after Natalie. "There's a certain discipline that comes with the physical," said the ultrafit star. "You see unbelievable performances from actors who aren't that healthy, but dancers..." So they must be pretty boring, or crazy, right? "No! They've just been exquisite specimens, and committed... and fun!"

The program for the evening included both The Seven Deadly Sins, in which Ms. LuPone intoned the tragic story of a woman's loss of innocence in her travels across America, set to dance, and Viennese Waltzes, the George Balanchine classic writ large with a sumptuous forest set. 

For the designer Erin Fetherston--resplendent in purple of her own design, accompanied by her rock-star boyfriend Gabe Saporta--experimentation can't beat Balanchine. "I think I'm a sucker for the more classic. I love ballet-I want to learn so much more about it." She sat down, awaiting her halibut; the room's serene calm revealed nothing of the anti-Tea Party protests against the Koch family that had erupted outside the Koch Theater earlier in the evening. 

Patti LuPone had knocked out a terrific performance, the culmination of more than a year of planning and rehearsal, but she didn't look peaked at all as she stood on the dance floor, hugging one well-wisher after another. Though she's a master of her form, she said there'd been much to learn from Wendy Whelan, the lead dancer in The Seven Deadly Sins. "To watch her every night is perfection."

So, she hadn't fallen down the rabbit hole of Black Swan psychosis?

"No. And I hated the way they represented ballet." She paused for emphasis. "Haaaaated it." Another pause. "Big time."

Social fixture Coco Kopelman, digging into her mango sorbet, explained that she hadn't been familiar with the Brecht-Weill ballet: "1933's a little before my time."
There was Ms. Whelan, the dancer. Had she heard about Mr. Millipied--her New York City Ballet colleague--and his tantrum? She paused and looked unnerved, if gracefully so. "All I can say is ... I've never experienced anything like that."

We made our way past a crowded dance floor--now packed with boogieing social types showing off their best moves with the gusto of ballerinas--toward Vanessa Williams, the actress, who invited us to sit by her. Could she have been a dancer? Ms Williams replied, "Well, I did dance!" She amended: "I only took two years." Why stop? Never one to be unduly modest, Ms. Williams replied, "Because I could do singing and dancing and acting. I could do all three!"

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Edited by Daisy Prince

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I’m not so sure that all the world’s a stage, actually. Actors are different from you and me. They pretend to be other people via a state of deliberate amnesia.

It’s commonplace to say that actors must speak the lines as if for the first time. The more beguiling mystery about theater is that the secret art of acting is to forget the lines, rather than remember them.

Onstage, the performer must become an amnesiac in search of the miraculously spontaneous. It never fails to astonish me how they do it.

Is there any job more weird than an actor’s?

I’m not so sure that all the world’s a stage, actually. Actors are different from you and me. They pretend to be other people via a state of deliberate amnesia.

It’s commonplace to say that actors must speak the lines as if for the first time. The more beguiling mystery about theater is that the secret art of acting is to forget the lines, rather than remember them.

Onstage, the performer must become an amnesiac in search of the miraculously spontaneous. It never fails to astonish me how they do it. If we mere mortals kept repeating the same scenes from our lives night after night like our own nightmare version of Groundhog Day, we’d shoot ourselves. But actors lap it up (and so do their characters).

All bets are off for the farewell performance of a show, however—particularly of a Broadway musical when emotion and tears are common on both sides of the footlights. At the triumphant, closing performance of Gypsy recently, the house was packed with the usual showqueens; friends and family of the cast; nostalgic fans of the show; and, above all, Luponistas (as Patti LuPone’s devoted followers are known). Ms. LuPone received a thunderous standing ovation the moment she first appeared bustling down the aisle toward the stage as that mythic showbiz monster, Mama Rose. She stopped the show with three words: “Sing out, Louise!”

At such celebratory times, tinged with sadness, saying farewell to a show always becomes a process of remembering. We—the audience—want to pay tribute and offer our thanks. But the performers are no longer speaking the lines or singing the songs as if for the first time. To the contrary, everyone is all too aware that this is touchingly for the last time.

DRAMA CRITICS—eunuchs in a whorehouse, Oscar Wilde called us—have grown accustomed to seeing revivals. Or as the lady said when declining an invitation to Hamlet: “I’ve seen it before. He dies in the end.”

I feel sorry, therefore, that I don’t care for the new social comedy Becky Shaw as much as my enthusiastic colleagues. Gina Gionfriddo is one smart writer, and I would sooner join in the acclaim for a fresh voice than not. But I found myself agreeing with the muted half of the audience at the Second Stage Theatre who weren’t convulsed with laughter at the playwright’s worldly cynicism about love and marriage and, among much else, blind dates and white lies. (The other half of the audience, let it be said, had a whale of a time).

If the title of Becky Shaw is meant to remind us of Becky Sharp, anti-heroine of Vanity Fair, it’s a misleading form of name dropping. Thackeray’s Becky is a conniving and successful social climber; Ms. Gionfriddo’s pale version is an aggressive loser. This suicidal, contemporary Becky only appears to manipulate people, sort of. She isn’t, in fact, at the center of Ms. Gionfriddo’s unfocused comedy. Who is? It’s difficult to say. But if anything, Becky Shaw ought to be titled Max.

Max is the antagonistic force and raison d’être of the piece. He’s a wealthy 30-something money manager—remember them?—and he’s played by the excellent David Wilson Barnes in the steely, emotionally repressed manner of Kevin Spacey. Max thinks love sucks (but will reveal himself, in time, to be needy). He’s a nasty piece of work, a charmless pup. Why anyone would wish to spend any time in his perpetually sneering company is one of the mysteries of the play.

Max is the adopted brother of the deeply neurotic Suzanna, who’s studying psychology and who loves him like a sister (sort of). The two of them have a one-night stand at the close of scene one. By the start of scene two, Suzanna has married a dope, Andrew, who’s a writer (sort of). She’s also been grieving for her father, who died in financial trouble and may have been gay. Her indomitable mother, the sharp-tongued Susan—who’s the one sensible figure in the play—is suffering from muscular dystrophy, and with undue haste has taken a shady young lover who ends up in jail to be bailed out, perhaps, by Max.

Strictly speaking, none of this makes much sense (or pretends to). Ms. Gionfriddo’s knee-jerk one-liners struck me as too hit-or-miss. “Be careful chasing goodness. Goodness and incompetence often go hand in hand in men” is one of her wittier riffs. But what of this joke that begs for an automatic laugh (and got one)? “No one respects a woman who forgives infidelity. It kept Hillary Clinton from becoming president.” (It did?)

The talky plot of Becky Shaw lurches harmlessly from episode to episode. (Ms. Gionfriddo is a writer-producer of Law & Order.) But the one big thing that rings most unlikely is in the motor that propels the entire play: a blind date between pathetic, baleful Becky and the utterly uninterested, contemptuous Max. It’s an unbelievably foolish match arranged by dimwits, and it produces the funniest line of the evening.

“What would you like, Max?” the exasperated Becky asks him eventually.

“I would like you to try harder next time to commit suicide,” he replies.

IT'S GOOD NEWS that the Druid Theatre Company’s smashing revival of Martin McDonagh’s gothic farce The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997) has extended its run at the Linda Gross Theater through March 1. While we might argue that its plot is just as messily incredible as Becky Shaw’s, Mr. McDonagh’s mad daring is of a higher, scintillating order—some would say the highest—provided you have a taste for liberating, darkly Irish humor, which you surely do.

The Cripple of Inishmaan isn’t the first play Mr. McDonagh wrote, but when it was staged by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre a decade ago, it was the first of his black rural comedies I’d seen. It astonished me. (It still does.) Its tale of the crippled boy Billy of blighted Inishmaan who auditions for the role of a cripple in a Hollywood movie is a brutally funny dissection of romantic Irish myths and the tragedy of fate.

True, the famously precocious playwright skirts patronizing the Irish as picaresque drunks and dim, adorably backward sods For Export Only (to the Promised Land of the West End and Broadway). What else is new? It’s what postmodern chroniclers of Ireland like Martin McDonagh do. But nobody does it with more uncompromisingly macabre glee.

He’s a tall-story specialist at stony heart. Though the play’s character known as Robert Flaherty is based—very loosely based—on the real-life Robert Flaherty, the pioneering documentary filmmaker who made Man of Aran (1934), about “primitive” Irish life, Mr. McDonagh’s eccentric cast of characters are more like their own inventions. They’re storytellers, in effect, of their own desperate lives.

A 1998 production of The Cripple of Inishmaan at the Public Theatre was sadly botched. Garry Hynes’s first-rate staging redeems its reputation, with Aaron Monaghan superb as Billy.

jheilpern@observer.com

And everyone should've won the Tony pool if you took his advice on voting for the "heavily favored" South Pacific in all categories. The Broadway revival took home seven Tonys, including best Revival-Musical, best actor in a musical for Paul Szot and best directing, which will surely make 90-year-old Gypsy director Arthur Laurents. According to Mr. Heilpern, "Mr. Laurents ... has complained with others that nonprofit theater productions like Lincoln Center’s lavish South Pacific are at an unfair advantage and should in any case be barred from competing in the commercial arena at the Tonys." Mr. Laurents might have a point, but that's the Tonys for ya.

Of course, August: Osage County deservedly won best play. In the showdown between art-rock autobiography Passing Strange and Latin-infused In the Heights, hip-hop (so hot right now) rose to the top. The director was a hometown favorite with 13 nominations and picked up four awards. Stew's journey of self-discovery only got one out of seven nominations.

All in all, there weren't too many surprises at this year's Tony awards. Liza Minnelli showed up to present an award but, whatever. A short highlight was John Waters introducing a production number of Cry-Baby. "I'm not here to talk about 'August: Osage County,' although I do have a warm spot for dysfunctional pill poppers," he said, referring to Tracy Letts' Tony winning play about a bickering family. In introducing what he called a "rockabilly prison number," Mr. Waters added, "One wonders if there are actual prisoners who are watching the Tony show tonight. Talk about a new minority. Well, if so, I imagine they're a little upset, and so are we."

Here's the complete list of winners, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Complete list of winners for the 62nd annual Tony Awards:

Play (and playwrights): "August: Osage County" (Tracy Letts).

Musical: "In the Heights."

Book-Musical: "Passing Strange" (Stew).

Original Score (music and/or lyrics): "In the Heights" (Music & Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda).

Revival-Play: "Boeing-Boeing."

Revival-Musical: "South Pacific."

Actor-Play: Mark Rylance, "Boeing-Boeing."

Actress-Play: Deanna Dunagan, "August: Osage County."

Actor-Musical: Paulo Szot, "South Pacific."

Actress-Musical: Patti LuPone, "Gypsy."

Featured Actor-Play: Jim Norton, "The Seafarer."

Featured Actress-Play: Rondi Reed, "August: Osage County."

Featured Actor-Musical: Boyd Gaines, "Gypsy."

Featured Actress-Musical: Laura Benanti, "Gypsy."

Direction-Play: Anna D. Shapiro, "August: Osage County."

Direction-Musical: Bartlett Sher, "South Pacific."

Choreography: Andy Blankenbuehler, "In the Heights."

Orchestrations: Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman, "In the Heights."

Scenic Design-Play: Todd Rosenthal, "August: Osage County."

Scenic Design-Musical: Michael Yeargen, "South Pacific."

Costume Design-Play: Katrina Lindsay, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses."

Costume Design-Musical: Catherine Zuber, "South Pacific."

Lighting Design-Play: Kevin Adams, "The 39 Steps."

Lighting Design-Musical: Donald Holder, "South Pacific."

Sound Design-Play: Mic Pool, "The 39 Steps."

Sound Design-Musical: Scott Lehrer, "South Pacific."

___

Previously announced:

Regional Theater Tony Award: Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Special Tony Award: Robert Russell Bennett.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Stephen Sondheim.

He’s like a museum keeper with the only set of keys. When Sam Mendes directed the revisionist Gypsy with Bernadette Peters on Broadway five years ago, traditionalists took offense (including, reportedly, Mr. Laurents). Don’t mess with Mama Rose! (Or else.) Gypsy, the musical for people who hate their mothers, arouses intense feelings.

Even among Ms. LuPone’s ardent fans—known as “LuPonistas”—responses to her galvanizing performance as Rose vary wildly. Let me burn my bridges at the start and declare that it takes a diva to play a diva and that Ms. LuPone is the most authentic Rose we’re likely to see.

Ethel Merman—“Saint Ethel” to you—created the role of the monstrous showbiz “pioneer woman without a frontier” and made it legend. But she was no great shakes as an actress. Angela Lansbury made a memorable Rose in 1974 because she’s a great actress who can sing. Ideally, Gypsy needs a belter-actress, and though I have a few qualms about Ms. LuPone, she fits the bill perfectly.

MR. LAURENTS STICKS closely to tradition—replicating much of Jerome Robbins’ original direction and choreography. The creators of Gypsy—Mr. Laurents, the genius Robbins and the prodigy Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics—had just invented West Side Story (with music by Leonard Bernstein). Mr. Sondheim badly wanted to compose the score for Gypsy, but he was thought too inexperienced, and so Jule Styne, the Broadway legend of the old school (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Peter Pan, Funny Girl) wrote the ageless music.

Michael Bennett (whose A Chorus Line continued Gypsy’s love affair with showbiz 15 years later) once told me that his idea of bliss at the theater was to sit back in his seat and hear the opening chords to Gypsy’s overture. (Those were the days when there were overtures; A Chorus Line was the first musical not to have one). The Jule Styne overture is, quite simply, unbeatable—a promise of the optimistic buoyancy and romance of old Broadway to come (“Some People,” “Small World”); and jazzy low things (“You Gotta Have a Gimmick”), and iconic show-stoppers (“Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “Rose’s Turn”).

There’s one lapse in the score—the Styne-Sondheim deliberate mistake for the shamelessly sentimental, “Little Lamb.” I say baaah humbug, shoot the lamb! Jerome Robbins actually dropped Baby Louise’s awesomely sweet ballad about little lambs, little bears and little cats from his original production for one night without telling anyone. (But they found out.) Mr. Laurents has replaced the traditional live lamb with a stuffed one. It lacks vitality.

THE UNUSUAL ONE-OFF creative partnership of Styne-Sondheim accounts for Gypsy’s emotional pull and weird appeal. What other musical sends us home with the memory of its near-deranged heroine having a nervous breakdown onstage? (“Everything’s coming up roses/ This time for me!/ For me/ For me/ For me/ For me/ For me/ For me!”) Gypsy—which premiered the same year as The Sound of Music—is rooted both in Broadway’s past and the Sondheimian future.

On the one hand, according to Mr. Sondheim, it’s “the last good” show that’s still rooted in the Rodgers and Hammerstein form (Mr. Sondheim was Hammerstein’s protégé). In that retro sense, it’s a backstage story—a love letter to showbiz and the dying days of vaudeville. And it’s a family saga that triumphs as a quintessentially American musical about the feverish pursuit of success: “I promised my girl she’d be a star and she will be!”

On the other hand, Gypsy breaks all the rules of conventional musicals. Mr. Sondheim, together with his librettist Mr. Laurents, turned its backstage saga into a full-blown psychodrama. The outcome is an uncompromisingly modern musical about clingy parents living their lives proudly and pathetically through their children.

Mama Rose—the scary archetypal showbiz mother—makes no one happy (least of all herself). She’s a sentimental tyrant who’s abandoned by everyone (including her two daughters, her three ex-husbands and her doormat of a fiancé, Herbie). At her dark, narcissistic center, the nightmarish “beloved” Mama Rose is an extraordinary creation.

Remember, the first words of the show are “Mothers—shut up! All mothers—out!” Rose’s first glorious song, “Some People”—which Ms. LuPone swoops on as if delighted to be here, singing it—is Rose’s defining song of herself:

Some people sit on their butts

Got the dream—yeah, but not the guts!

That’s living for some people,

For some humdrum people,

I suppose.

Well, they can sit and rot

But not

Rose!

The phenomenal pace and attack of Ms. LuPone throughout the show is something to behold. The lady ain’t some people, either—and she wants us to know it. Nothing the 58-year-old Patti LuPone does in musicals has ever been small: the gleeful murder’s accomplice, Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd; Eva Peron in Evita; Norma Desmond in the London production of Sunset Boulevard (before the evil Andrew Lloyd Webber notoriously fired her in New York—an event compared by “LuPonistas” to the assassination of J.F.K.).

Mama Rose is the role for her. Neither she nor Rose takes any prisoners; both crave the spotlight; both are survivors. The Act I closer “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and Act II’s ferocious closing aria and primal scream, “Rose’s Turn,” are the twin peaks of the show and its ultimate challenge. Ms. LuPone, pacing the stage and claiming the territory, nails them both.

MY QUIBBLES? FOR all her confidence and wit, Ms. LuPone isn’t the warmest of performers. (But then, neither is the monster Mama Rose.) Her formidable technique shows in the lighter numbers: the remote, peculiar bonhomie of her “You’ll Never Get Away From Me” with Herbie (Boyd Gaines, playing charmingly but a shade older than he need be); or the faux happy family of Ms. LuPone’s “Together Wherever We Go” with Mr. Gaines, the excellent Laura Benanti as meek Louise (later to transform marvelously into the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee) and the gifted Leigh Ann Larkin giving the somewhat underwritten role of June subtext and bite.

There’s much else to admire: Tony Yazbeck as the ingénue Tulsa in Robbins’ thrillingly choreographed “All You Need Is the Girl”; the hysterical strippers’ anthem, “You Gotta Have A Gimmick,” with Marilyn Caskey as a catatonic Electra (“I’m electrifying/ And not even trying”).

There’s a whiff of summer stock about James Youmans’ sets (though it’s appropriate for the cheesy vaudevillian scenes), and the costumes of Martin Pakledinaz look a bit pinched even for the Depression setting. This isn’t an expensive revival; it’s a loving one. Its veteran director surprisingly keeps the 25-piece orchestra onstage, however, a holdover from the staged concert of Gypsy during last summer’s Encores! series at New York City Center. Baby June’s time-honored request to the pit to segue into “May We Entertain You”—“Mr. Conductor, if you please!”—doesn’t play well with the onstage orchestra hidden behind a scrim.

Mr. Laurents has a weakness for showdowns, and he pitches them broadly here: “I want a wife,” Herbie shouts, banging the table, as he leaves Rose in the dust at last. “I’m going to be a man if it kills me!”

“Nobody laughs at me—because I laugh first! At me!” is the defiant scream of born-again Louise, her mother’s daughter in more ways than one. “Me—from Seattle; me—with no education; me with no talent—as you kept reminding me my whole life. Well, look at me: a star!”

For me! For me! For me …

And, when all’s said and done about Gypsy, for me.

The Golden Globe winner is just one of the stars of the big and small screens who will join resident New York stage actors this spring in a theater season ripe with old-timey musical revivals and edgier newcomers.

In the Heights, a Latin and hip-hop musical (we’re envisioning an amalgam of those Step Up dance movies and West Side Story), has already garnered Broadway buzz in previews. Lin-Manuel Miranda, 28, a Washington Heights native, created and composed the musical about outsiders and young love when he was a Wesleyan University student. With its young, bright-eyed cast and crew (the book writer, Quiara Alegría Hudes, is 29, and the director, Thomas Kail, just turned 30), In the Heights is sure to bring a much-needed under-40 crowd to the theater. (March 9, Richard Rodgers Theater)

Conversations in Tusculum at the Public brings a leading-man triple threat: Brian Dennehy, who has won two best-lead-actor Tony awards; Aidan Quinn, the dreamy Irish actor who we’ll always see as Dez from Desperately Seeking Susan, and David Strathairn, a Pinter stage veteran who channeled Edward R. Murrow for his Oscar-nominated role in 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck. They’ll play leads in Richard Nelson’s new historical play about a small town outside Rome during Julius Caesar’s era. They’ll ask themselves: When a misguided and manipulative leader endangers his own country, should citizens bury their heads in the sand or take action? Hmmm … sounds relevant! (March 11, the Public Theater)

Get ready for “Some Enchanted Evening,” because Light in the Piazza’s Bartlett Sher will bring Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific back to Broadway for the first time in almost 60 years. Two-time Tony nom Kelli O’Hara will play World War II Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, who falls in love with a middle-aged French plantation mogul, Emile de Becque, played by Brazilian opera singer Paulo Szot. (April 3, Vivian Beaumont Theater at the Lincoln Center)

Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy will get its Broadway run this year, with director (and book writer) Arthur Laurents returning to helm the production (last year’s Encores! City Center production received great reviews). Patti LuPone will also reprise her role as Mamma Rose, “the ultimate show business mother,” to sultry striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. Laura Benanti (who can be spotted in the new ABC comedy Eli Stone) will play Gypsy, and Boyd Gaines will play the agent, Herbie. (March 27, St. James Theater)

John Waters’ 90’s cult classic Cry-Baby will makes its way from the La Jolla Playhouse in California to the Marquis Theater stage this spring. James Snyder, playing a blond version of Johnny Depp’s bad-boy Wade Walker, will get a little crush on square Allison (played by Elizabeth Stanley) while the rest of 1950’s Baltimore sings and dances their dissent. Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, the fellas who penned the last Waters musical, Hairspray, wrote the book for the musical. Mr. Waters himself receives a “creative consultant” credit for the production, so we have high hopes! (April 24, Marquis Theater)

In more star-studded productions, don’t miss powerhouse Frances McDormand playing Georgie Elgin, a lovable lady whose long years of devotion to her actor husband, Frank (played by Morgan Freeman), have almost obliterated her own personality, in the Clifford Odets play The Country Girl. (April 27, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater)

Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis and director Philip Seymour Hoffman coaxed Ellen Burstyn to the stage for The Little Flower of East Orange, a ghost story set in a Manhattan charity hospital. (April 6, Public Theater)

Speaking of Mr. Hoffman, his lovely co-star in The Savages, Laura Linney, will star with Brit Ben Daniels as friends with benefits in a new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Rufus Norris. Can’t wait to see those cuties get feisty. Talk about spring fever … we’re burning up! (May 1, American Airlines Theater)

Like a lot of people I know, I used to love going to movies, until I simply couldn’t take people pigging out around me any longer. The constant crunch, munch and slurp—the junk, the smell, the noise, the talk, the charming fuck-you mentality that goes with it all—ruined movie-going for me.

The writing is now on the wall for our theaters, where, until only recently, eating and drinking at your seat were forbidden. Now even those ritual warnings about unwrapping candy and cough drops before the curtain goes up are out-of-date. “This let-them-eat-snacks philosophy,” The New York Times reported on Jan. 5, “has been embraced at the Helen Hayes, Hilton, New Amsterdam, Eugene O’Neill and Walter Kerr Theaters, as well as all nine houses owned by the Nederlander Organization.”

The Nederlander, Disney, Jujamcyn and Clear Channel theater owners are the ones involved in this latest unacceptable example of greed. “This is part of a broader attempt to enhance the audience experience,” rationalized Jim Boese, Nederlander’s vice president.

Mr. Boese, a word in your ear: Imagine you’ve paid $200 for you and your guest to see a revival of Death of a Salesman at one of your lovely Broadway houses. You’re sitting there wishing there were more legroom at these prices—but let’s not go into that now. The excellent new production is about to begin when the couple nearest you start to dig into a giant bucket of buttered popcorn, to be washed down with Coke and ice rattling through Act I in Arthur Miller commemorative plastic cups. In front of you, another couple is enjoying hot dogs with onions and beer, while someone behind you is saying, “Pass the soy sauce, sweetheart.”

Tell us, Mr. Boese—how come none of this distracts you in any way from what’s happening onstage, but somehow “enhances” your theater-going “experience”? Am I exaggerating? With all grudging respect, Mr. Boese, please resist responding that you don’t sell hot dogs in your theaters.

You will. Popcorn today; wraps, salads and dogs tomorrow. Why not? It happened at the movies.

Why can’t America stop eating for two hours? The Times theater story was ignited by a stunned Patti LuPone telling us that when she was playing Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd last season she found herself distracted by a couple in the front row wrestling over the remains of a bag of popcorn. The Times went on to report, however: “All the theater owners whose houses serve food said they were investigating packaging that would reduce wrapper noise.”

Thank God for that. It’s certainly comforting to think that Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn, and his fellow Broadway producers have hired a crack team of Nobel Laureate research scientists to solve the mystery of wrapper noise. Coming soon to a theater near you: the world’s first silent bag of potato chips! But how will the world’s finest minds solve the problem of eating the chips silently … ?

“Broadway is about a theatrical experience. It’s not about pulling out Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie and a Sterno,” Patti LuPone argued. “Would you go to church and pull out a ham sandwich? I don’t think so. Then why would you do it at the theater?”

I demur only in that the theater isn’t a church: It’s our refuge and respite from the clamor of the world, and the unholy place where we might better understand and enjoy the world. It’s our sanctuary and home where eternal stories are told, words are heard, and music and poetry are cherished in the two-hour traffic of the stage. But our faith in theater is a secular religion, and Broadway has always been a rough-and-tumble hybrid of art and commerce.

As was Shakespeare’s theater. When the remains of the 16th-century, open-air Rose theater were discovered buried in Bankside, London, in 1989, among the artifacts excavated were various coins and peanut shells.

“To be or not to be”—“Get your peanuts!”—“That is the question”—“Peanuts here!”

Theater has never been pure, and the masks of the tragedian and the clown are its two-faced Janus. Which came first in today’s newly guzzling Broadway: audience members who now want to eat and drink during a show, or opportunistic theater owners who saw the potential for more bottom-line profit?

It’s been quite a while since our established Broadway power-brokers led public taste. All praise, then, to Gerald Schoenfeld, the chairman of the Shubert Organization, for refusing to jump on the gravy train. Mr. Schoenfeld acknowledges that allowing eating and drinking during shows annoys many patrons as well as the performers. The Shubert’s 16 Broadway houses will continue to restrict the food to the lobby.

It may not be much in this cockeyed caravan, but we can thus defect from all the annoying Broadway theaters and patronize the Shubert houses only. We can also hope that the performers themselves will stand up to be counted.

During a now-renowned performance of The History Boys last season, a cell phone rang three times in the audience, upsetting its star actor, Richard Griffiths, who was in mid-scene. Mr. Griffiths stepped forward to the footlights and announced in no uncertain terms that if a cell phone rang again, he would stop the performance and wouldn’t appear again that night. No cell phone rang again. None dared.

Next time Patti LuPone is disturbed by two pigs in the audience fighting over the last handful of popcorn as she’s busting her chops onstage, she might consider stopping the show, as Mr. Griffiths did. She could tell the chomping culprits in so many sweet words, “You’re ruining the show for us and everyone around you. Either you stop or I do. You’re not in a movie theater. It’s live!”

Unless the star performers themselves protest, I fear the worst. The good Gerald Schoenfeld is 82 years old, and his long reign at the Shuberts cannot last forever. It’s conceivable there will soon come a time when every Broadway theater functions like a movie house. And our big nonprofit theaters on Broadway—the Roundabout at the American Airlines Theatre, the Manhattan Theatre Club at the Biltmore, Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont—will surely follow.

The Disney, Nederlander and Jujamcyn organizations et al. must reverse their grasping bottom-line foolishness and follow the lead of the Shuberts. Those who want to eat and slurp during a show should go to a supper club. All we are saying is let the curtain go up in food-free peace. Let the real theatergoers enjoy the show.

After her delectable and hilarious turn as Clarice in Silence! The Musical, Jenn Harris joins Bebe Neuwirth in Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos ... Or, What Am I Doing Here? Just how odd is this Roger Rosenblatt entertainment? The preface, which calls the work “almost a play,” reads: “This is a play made up of separate pieces that taken together represent an amused and anxious mind.” Yikes! Ashley Montana, by the way, for those who remember the model on the Sports Illustrated cover from which the title of the play is taken, is alive and well, thank you for asking. (Flea Theater, previews begin Oct. 6, opens Oct. 20th, through Nov. 19.)

The London-based playwright Sarah Kane, the Ian Curtis of the theater world—which is to say, immensely talented and dead by her own hand—will (or will not, depending on how you feel about the afterlife) surely enjoy her greatest production to date. Isabelle Huppert, that cream-limbed French siren, takes on the dark hours before the dawn in Ms. Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis. (Does all this sound familiar? Last year, the Royal Court brought 4:48 Psychosis to St. Ann’s for its American premiere.) But really: Don’t bring the kids, Ms. Huppert. (B.A.M.’s Harvey Theater, Oct. 19 through 30.)

Sure, it won a Pulitzer in 1975, and the original production starred that naughty Frank Langella—but it only ran for 70 shows. (No, not Anna Karenina: The Musical. Blech!) Now Edward Albee’s Seascape, the story of two strolling seaside couples—one human, one sea-based and reptilian—is back, baby, and it’s scalier than ever! With the begenius Frances Sternhagen, also known as the evil Bunny MacDougal, Kyle MacLachlan’s scheming super-WASP mother. (Booth Theater, previews begin Oct. 28; official opening, Nov. 21.)

Michael Cerveris, Stephen Sondheim’s big, bald, hunky baby, goes all out this fall in a production of Sweeney Todd. It’s set in a mental hospital, which makes one wonder. (Marat/Sade/Sweeney Todd? Hey, it’s euphonic!) Mr. Cerveris will be accompanying himself on guitar throughout the production, apparently. Yes, you may have missed Mr. Cerveris’ secondary career as an instrumental musician as well (get the album on his Web site!), but, more importantly, press materials claim that Mr. Cerveris’ co-star, one Patti LuPone, will be playing the tuba onstage. We’re so there. The stakes have been raised! Let’s see you work a tuba, Kristin Chenoweth! (Eugene O’Neill Theater, previews begin Oct. 3, opens Nov. 3rd.)

Look, she’s nuts—but that just makes Jennifer Jason Leigh a better match for a Scott Elliott direction of a Mike Leigh play. Gives the nice lady something to sink her teeth into! The New Group—which began its life 10 years ago with a Mike Leigh play, also directed by Scott Elliot—brings the 70’s London-suburbanite satirical pain of Abigail’s Party. (Acorn Theater at Theater Row, previews begin Nov. 14, opens Dec. 1.)

Rabies! Perhaps poor dead Snoopy, the dog of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, however, turned out the best of all the Peanuts gang. Poor Lucy is, after all, coughing up that “five cents, please” for her own therapy now. The bizarre Breakfast Club-esque borrowing of the Charles Schulz characters by Bert V. Royal made big waves in New York at the 2004 Fringe Festival; finally, the gang has migrated into a theater. (Century Center, previews begin Nov. 28, opens Dec. 15.)

After her delectable and hilarious turn as Clarice in Silence! The Musical, Jenn Harris joins Bebe Neuwirth in Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos ... Or, What Am I Doing Here? Just how odd is this Roger Rosenblatt entertainment? The preface, which calls the work “almost a play,” reads: “This is a play made up of separate pieces that taken together represent an amused and anxious mind.” Yikes! Ashley Montana, by the way, for those who remember the model on the Sports Illustrated cover from which the title of the play is taken, is alive and well, thank you for asking. (Flea Theater, previews begin Oct. 6, opens Oct. 20th, through Nov. 19.)

The London-based playwright Sarah Kane, the Ian Curtis of the theater world—which is to say, immensely talented and dead by her own hand—will (or will not, depending on how you feel about the afterlife) surely enjoy her greatest production to date. Isabelle Huppert, that cream-limbed French siren, takes on the dark hours before the dawn in Ms. Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis. (Does all this sound familiar? Last year, the Royal Court brought 4:48 Psychosis to St. Ann’s for its American premiere.) But really: Don’t bring the kids, Ms. Huppert. (B.A.M.’s Harvey Theater, Oct. 19 through 30.)

Sure, it won a Pulitzer in 1975, and the original production starred that naughty Frank Langella—but it only ran for 70 shows. (No, not Anna Karenina: The Musical. Blech!) Now Edward Albee’s Seascape, the story of two strolling seaside couples—one human, one sea-based and reptilian—is back, baby, and it’s scalier than ever! With the begenius Frances Sternhagen, also known as the evil Bunny MacDougal, Kyle MacLachlan’s scheming super-WASP mother. (Booth Theater, previews begin Oct. 28; official opening, Nov. 21.)

Michael Cerveris, Stephen Sondheim’s big, bald, hunky baby, goes all out this fall in a production of Sweeney Todd. It’s set in a mental hospital, which makes one wonder. (Marat/Sade/Sweeney Todd? Hey, it’s euphonic!) Mr. Cerveris will be accompanying himself on guitar throughout the production, apparently. Yes, you may have missed Mr. Cerveris’ secondary career as an instrumental musician as well (get the album on his Web site!), but, more importantly, press materials claim that Mr. Cerveris’ co-star, one Patti LuPone, will be playing the tuba onstage. We’re so there. The stakes have been raised! Let’s see you work a tuba, Kristin Chenoweth! (Eugene O’Neill Theater, previews begin Oct. 3, opens Nov. 3rd.)

Look, she’s nuts—but that just makes Jennifer Jason Leigh a better match for a Scott Elliott direction of a Mike Leigh play. Gives the nice lady something to sink her teeth into! The New Group—which began its life 10 years ago with a Mike Leigh play, also directed by Scott Elliot—brings the 70’s London-suburbanite satirical pain of Abigail’s Party. (Acorn Theater at Theater Row, previews begin Nov. 14, opens Dec. 1.)

Rabies! Perhaps poor dead Snoopy, the dog of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, however, turned out the best of all the Peanuts gang. Poor Lucy is, after all, coughing up that “five cents, please” for her own therapy now. The bizarre Breakfast Club-esque borrowing of the Charles Schulz characters by Bert V. Royal made big waves in New York at the 2004 Fringe Festival; finally, the gang has migrated into a theater. (Century Center, previews begin Nov. 28, opens Dec. 15.)

Maria Friedman is what you might call the Bernadette Peters of London-an award-winning musical-comedy veteran of many West End shows, three by Stephen Sondheim. When I saw her at the National Theatre's corny revival of Lady in the Dark , I didn't much care for her or the show. (She was no Gertrude Lawrence.) But seeing and hearing her in the intimacy of the Café Carlyle is another story. Elegant, versatile and a wizard of understatement, she fits into the American cabaret idiom (which does not exist in England) with the greatest of ease. She admits she doesn't know what a New York "cabaret act" really is, and proves what a blessed respite this is from the usual plethora of overstaged mini-revues with overworked "themes" we've grown so weary of on the nightclub scene. Mercifully, there doesn't seem to be any thematic purpose to this five-week engagement, except to allow jaded New Yorkers to spend some quality time with a lady of charm and talent who is new to these shores. It's a very pleasant visit indeed.

A button-tiny blonde with a creamy glow from the Goldie Hawn–Christine Ebersole Tweety Pie school, and coiffed like Peter Pan, Ms. Friedman's tastefully gowned in black with a wisp of lavender chiffon to grace the neck, and accompanied by two standup pianos instead of one. She's a stranger to the usual cabaret cliché, but that doesn't mean her show is devoid of all zits. The two opening numbers are both from that ill-fated Lady in the Dark where I first discovered her. Obviously, this is a score that does not serve her well. The marvelous Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin classic, "One Life to Live," is sung in an impossible minor key with too many arty and unflattering tempo changes. The Comden and Green lyrics for "If" are too much of a tongue-twisting gym workout for comfort. A long medley of 50 songs by her two accompanists, Michael Haslam and Chris Walker, mixed up Bach, Sondheim, "Hernando's Hideaway," Mancini and "Oh Susannah!" with redundant and unnecessary intrusiveness. (Excuse me, but we came to hear Ms. Friedman, fellas!) And then there was the world premiere of a new song by Andrew Lloyd Webber from the forthcoming musical of the Gothic mystery The Woman in White , which will star Ms. Friedman next season on the London stage. I'm sorry, but Andrew Lloyd Webber songs all sound alike to me, and this one sounds like all the rest of them put together. There was also some odd patter the audience didn't quite fathom, about growing up as a cellist and following her family around to hotel rooms in the provinces, before she discovered her true vocation as a singer. A lot of talk, and too much of it. But these are small caveats compared to the numerous joys to be found in the bulk of this program.

Just as I was asking myself, "Why don't these ladies just sing pretty songs, simply and straight from the heart?", that's exactly what she did. Her rueful approach to Noël Coward's "If Love Were All" was as sophisticated as a reserved English lass can get. Her unique and totally revolutionary spin on Sondheim's "Broadway Baby" was an acting lesson no aspiring cabaret performer should be allowed to miss. She examined the cynical wit of Sheldon Harnick, the passion of Sondheim and the dreamy harmony of Jerome Kern, with the life experience in her voice and in her acting to understand them all. But, surprisingly, the highlight of the show was "Springtime," a heartbreaking Yiddish theater song from the Lithuanian ghetto in World War II, in which a woman sees the sun and hears the birds on the other side of the barbed wire, then wonders what good is the warmth of the sky "when all seasons are the same and tomorrow is as bleak as today." The song is as beautiful as it is chilling, and Ms. Friedman sings it with so much measured emotion that her delicacy reduces the audience to tears. Few classically trained sopranos ever move me on a cabaret stage surrounded by waiters serving cosmopolitans. Fewer still have a take on the emotional subtext of a song. Maria Friedman evokes so many voices and moods that she can dazzle you with the sound of her voice and interpret lyrics with sensitivity at the same time. In an overworked cabaret world overcrowded with kids, Maria Friedman at the Carlyle (through May 1) may not be a conventional musical act, but it's definitely a welcome-and badly needed-musical experience for grownups.

Spring Tonic

Years ago, when I first reviewed Karen Akers, I remember writing that she reminded me of one of those lacquered, sharp-featured feline predators from 40's film noirs with smoldering tonsils (Lisabeth Scott) and peekaboo bangs (Veronica Lake), who walked into a club, leaned wearily against a Doric column, wounded the heart of either Robert Mitchum or Alan Ladd, then retired for the night after only one song. In her current gig at the Algonquin's famed Oak Room (through May 15), Ms. Akers stays onstage a great deal longer. Long enough, in fact, to sing all or part of at least 19 songs, most of them standards from Broadway, Hollywood and the Great American Songbook. This is a good thing, and about time. Ms. Akers has devoted so much of her career to refurbishing wrist-slashing dirges in French and German that she's only now beginning to discover the far superior works of art produced right here at home. The blend of her sultry baritone, Prince Valiant bangs and statuesque form draped in a clinging gown the color of seasoned merlot makes for an arresting hour. She's more relaxed and humorous than I've ever seen her, and singing better than ever. Well, why not? Singing timeless material by such royalty as Ogden Nash, Vernon Duke, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Sammy Cahn, Duke Ellington, Kurt Weill and Cole Porter inspires her, for reasons too obvious to mention. All of which gives Ms. Akers a melting warmth of dimension that is rare for a stylist too often accused of cool and aloof indifference. I think she's really been listening, stretching and growing as an artist.

There are a few really ghastly mistakes: at least one of those boring Edith Piaf anthems for which she still displays a salient weakness, and would you believe the whining "Unchained Melody" theme from an old Warner Bros. flick about a prison chain gang, sung in Italian? (Huh?) For the most part, though, the nucleus of this engaging hour narrows the focus to the classics. Accompanied by the excellent pianist-arranger Don Rebic, Ms. Akers' mood moves from plaintive ("How Long Has This Been Going On?" with Ira Gershwin's ravishing, seldom-heard verse sung by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face ), to frisky (Frank Loesser's bouncy "If I Were a Bell" from Guys and Dolls ), to world-weary (Bart Howard's "You Are Not My First Love," which used to be a staple in the treasured repertoire of the legendary Mabel Mercer). My happiest personal revelation: "Just One of Those Things" sung in a rare ballad tempo so sensuous that it provides a whole new way of looking at, listening to and thinking about this Cole Porter evergreen. "A trip to the moon on gossamer wings, one of those things …. " I've never heard it phrased like that. It's the kind of acting in meter that the late, great Mabel was famous for. When you can take a song that has been sung by everyone who ever held a microphone since it was written in 1935, and find something new to do with it that still respects the integrity of the song, I really call that creative. The new respect I have for Karen Akers is downright restorative.

Clueless LuPone

Maria Friedman is a soprano. Karen Akers is a baritone. Patti LuPone is just … loud. The hype injected into the P.R. for "The Lady with the Torch," her current invasion of Feinstein's at the Regency (through April 24), calls it her first appearance in a New York club in 25 years. No wonder. She turns torch songs into dangerous weapons. Maybe she's been counted among the missing because she's been busy. But I secretly suspect nobody can afford to keep replacing all those crystal glasses she breaks with the kind of caterwauling better suited to a hog farm than a Park Avenue supper club. O.K., I admit it. Except for her effective work in the long-ago Evita , I've never been a fan of her particular brand of vocal violence. With her phony enunciation, she was the worst Annie Oakley I have ever seen, and her sexless grimaces and blast-furnace pyrotechnics massacred the Lincoln Center revival of Anything Goes . She was so campy when I saw her in the London production of Sunset Boulevard that she was replaced by the much better Elaine Page. And let me tell you, when you get fired by Andrew Lloyd Webber, it's time for a career re-think. Only recently, when the voice matched perfectly with the role of the busty old proprietor of a Paris speakeasy in the "Encores!" revival of Can-Can , did my cynicism begin to soften. Under the guidance of a firm director, she sang two Cole Porter show-stoppers and earned the deserving applause that followed. No doubt the success of that brief staged concert inspired the current cabaret show at the Regency. No doubt the same success went to her head faster than a dozen martinis. She reprises two songs from Can-Can with panache, but otherwise she's once again up to her old tricks and bad habits, killing off songs like she was swatting bugs. Some music lover should make a citizen's arrest. She is committing musical homicide.

Torch songs are best left to song stylists with husky, throaty chops, exquisite phrasing techniques and a fearlessness about showing their own emotional vulnerability. Even for opera singers who long to cross over from classics to pop and jazz, the first requisite is sensitivity to the material. (The late Eileen Farrell was good at this; Dame Kiri Ti Kanawa is not.) Torch songs are anathema to belters. Ethel Merman could be heard on the gold fillings of soldiers in Bastogne, but she could not sing a torch song. Merman may be the rocket-launching mentor Patti LuPone most wants to emulate. It's a fatal mistake. She lumbers onstage like a Hummer and turns the Dietz-Schwartz standard "By Myself" into a one-man crash course in how to destroy a classic. The lyrics mean nothing. The phrasing is jabberwocky. Moving on to "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry": If he could hear her rambling autopsy on this jazz aria, the late composer Jule Styne would undoubtedly stalk up to the stage and smack her right across the face. For a belter with a curled lip, a surly persona and a minimal awareness of how to tell any kind of story through lyrics, Ms. LuPone has the audacity to twist June Christy's signature masterpiece "Something Cool" into something like a discourse on a hooker's downfall. Billy Barnes' famous lyrics were so distorted beyond meaning that she had the audience laughing nervously in the wrong places. Willard Robison's "A Cottage for Sale" was described in a pathetic attempt at humor as "the most painful part of the end of a love affair-the real estate." The dark purple pensiveness of "Ill Wind" made Harold Arlen sound like a goatherd yodeling on the Matterhorn. "Frankie and Johnny," an ossified artifact that nobody I have ever known ever wants to hear again, was screamed in a Stepin Fetchit imitation like a satire on a blackface minstrel show. "Other Woman," the best-performed song in the act, was a merciful and miraculous exception. It's the thoughtful confession of a wounded lover whose relationship has been ruptured by another woman who does everything right but who, in the end, will end up alone. Ms. LuPone sang it poignantly, mercifully dropping the nasal, theatrical showoff vulgarity that marred the rest of the show. Then, unable to resist pandering to her fans, she ended the song on a delicate note but punctured the mood she had just created by spitting out "Fuck her!" Her deluded fans, who had only mildly applauded the song, suddenly went wild. This woman is a juggernaut on a course of self-destruction, while her claque tirelessly eggs her on. The louder she screeches, the louder they whistle, yell and stomp their approval. Her followers are like the enablers who distance substance abusers from A.A. meetings. I don't get it. But I didn't get Liberace and Tiny Tim, and they had fans, too.

It's not that Patti LuPone has no talent; it's just that she is clueless about what to do to improve and enhance the talent she already has. She's been getting away with murder too long. It's time to cut out the sophomoric mannerisms and learn how to serve a song properly. Compressing the essence of all that outsized noise and unleashing it on a small stage the size of a treadmill can do permanent damage to the eardrums. This act is pure torture. At Feinstein's, where torch songs require contact, intimacy, a $60 cover and a two-drink minimum, only the last two are anywhere in evidence.

The nonexistent plot reworks Harold Ramis' 1993 movie Groundhog Day , in which Bill Murray played a cynical weatherman doomed to relive the events of Feb. 2 over and over until he learned to become more empathetic toward the Punxsutawney rodent looking for its shadow. If his character was stuck in purgatory, Drew Barrymore's character, Lucy, is condemned to limbo. A medical phenomenon who lives only in fractured time, she's an arts teacher who suffered a head injury in a car accident. Now she loses her short-term memory every night and wakes each morning believing it's the day of the accident all over again, which is also her father's birthday. For reasons you don't want to know, her hateful dad (Blake Clark), steroid-pumped brother (Sean Astin) and various native hula dancers (did I neglect to mention it all takes place in Hawaii?) go along with the gag, even watching a nightly rerun of The Sixth Sense and feigning shock and surprise every time Bruce Willis turns out to be a ghost. When the delusion therapy bores, Mr. Sandler enters as a marine veterinarian and conqueror of lady tourists named Henry. He falls for Lucy the minute he spots her in a diner, making a house out of a stack of waffles. She likes to sniff his fingers because they smell like mackerel. That's just the nauseating clean part. The nauseating dirty parts assault what's left of your own brain faster than you can say "Farrelly Brothers."

In every Adam Sandler movie, fun is poked at gays, senior citizens, paraplegics, people in loony bins and wheelchairs. But isn't it curious that the only person who looks damaged and sub-mental in all of these movies is Adam Sandler himself? In the obnoxious 50 First Dates , his deficiencies seem even deadlier than they did in the numbingly pretentious Punch-Drunk Love . While the lame script by George Wing pads itself to an unendurable feature length of 95 minutes with a series of never-ending dates in which Lucy thinks she's meeting Henry for the first time, the repetitive kiss-and-cuddle scenes are offset by director Peter Segal's commitment to gross-out overkill. At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses into so much scatology and puerile adolescence that it seems to have been directed by Mr. Segal with a finger down his throat. Mr. Segal is the man responsible for Anger Management and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps , among other imbecilic disgraces, so nobody is likely to enter this crypt in search of subtlety, freshness or style.

But even by Hollywood standards, what kind of mind slam-dunks you with a combination of this much toilet humor and physical abuse at the same time? Prepare yourself for gruesome kindergarten bits about bruised testicles, a walrus that vomits profusely and a near-hermaphrodite. (Wouldn't one or the other have sufficed?) Lucy's father cruelly imitates and mocks his son's speech impediment. (Aren't the young man's exaggerated pecs enough?) We're all encouraged to laugh uproariously at a brain-damaged mental patient, and a sick joke about Gary Busey's near-fatal real-life motorcycle accident falls as flat as elephant dung. Then there's the hammy, overwrought performance by perpetual Sandler repertory sidekick Rob Schneider, as a Hawaiian dope addict with dark skin and pidgin English who keeps finding new ways to tear open the wounds on his stomach from a shark bite.

Stupid, coarse and abysmally unfunny, this is the kind of movie that makes you pray a real live tiger-tooth would show up in the middle of a scene and do some permanent damage of its own. Now there's a cruel joke that would really leave me in stitches.

Oversexed Trio

For all of the hype and controversy surrounding its kinky sex and full-frontal male nudity, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers is a movie that sweats to command-but fails to hold-attention. It's ponderous and irksomely unsexy. Intoxicated by cinema and the Kama Sutra , Bertolucci has, in his last few films, abandoned the hormones with which he drove Marlon Brando, in Last Tango in Paris , to demonstrate the only use for butter that never occurred to Julia Child. But in The Dreamers , set in Paris during the turbulent spring of 1968, Mr. Bertolucci returns in his dotage to his three favorite subjects-sex, movies and politics. All three were in full throttle then, fueling the revolutions of the chaotic 60's. The year was a time of strikes, student protests, political scandals and furious, chain-smoking hedonism, when Henri Langlois was ousted from the halcyon halls of the Cinematheque Française in Paris and mobs of rioting cinema buffs chained themselves to the gates with New Wave icons like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Simone Signoret. Newcomer Bertolucci, a former assistant of Pier Paolo Pasolini's who joined the sacred ranks after his first film in 1962, was there, and the adrenaline of memory is obviously still surging through his brain. It's the last time enough people were so influenced by the philosophy they encountered onscreen that they were willing to storm the barricades and battle police wielding clubs and tear gas to defend the films of Nicholas Ray.

Adapted by Gilbert Adair from his novel, The Dreamers chronicles the experiences of Matthew (Michael Pitt), a lonely, naïve American student and insatiable cinephile who hangs out at the Cinematheque night and day. With a touch of brandy and a twist of fate, he meets Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrel), exotic French twins whose eccentric parents have gone on an extended holiday and left the siblings alone in the cluttered, spacious and slightly screwy family apartment. Within two days, the brother and sister move Matthew's things out of his hotel and into their flat, where they flirt, fascinate, romance and seduce him into a ménage à trois that changes his entire life. Here is a polite, soft-spoken, clean-cut American from San Diego with a background of green lawns, station wagons and Brooks Brothers button-downs, whose sexual propriety is gradually diminished by an incestuous brother-sister act eager to initiate him into the bohemian games of their own unconventional sexual revolution. It's as much a film about film as it is about copulation. Since the oversexed trio's references to life's experiences are all restricted to scenes from movies they've seen on the screen, Bertolucci cuts to film clips of Chaplin, Garbo in Queen Christina , Fred and Ginger and, of course, every American's indelible first impression of Paris-Jean Seberg selling the International Herald Tribune on the Rue l'Opera in Breathless . Matthew wafts into a secular existence of incestuous decadence, giving himself over to every sexual experiment with total surrender, until the adventures in the riot-torn streets outside overtake the awakenings in the beds inside, and the road to maturity and self-discovery ends in separation. Matthew realizes at last that there is more to life than nonspecific gender orgasms. The question posed is: What about a sequel, where he puts his horny transformation to the test back under the palms of San Diego?

There's plenty of sex, but most of it is tenuous and none of it is very pulsating. The actors are almost red with a rash of embarrassment, and with the exception of Eva Green-who moans with simulated lust like a porno queen-nobody seems to be very turned on. Mr. Pitt, an intensely awkward actor from Brooklyn with wheat-colored hair and swollen lips, bares his butt and his johnson, but he's too scrawny and prissy-mouthed to work up much of a fever. The baroque Paris atelier where youth acts out its fantasies gives the film a lovely, muted quality that rarely ventures into daylight, but this is a myopic subject that Bertolucci is not entirely successful in extending beyond his own personal vision. The French political climate of 1968 is not a subject that many people are curious about in 2004, and the sex is no more erotic than Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. It's a film about youth and passion that seems old and passionless.

Can-Can Can!

Can-Can , the first "Encores!" production of 2004, dispelled the myth that this popular series of staged concert versions of old Broadway musicals has outlived its usefulness and popularity. You wouldn't know it from the screams of approval bouncing off the balcony beams of the City Center. One question nags, however. The original purpose of "Encores!" 10 years ago was to reprise shows that nobody had seen for years, mounted without sets or costumes, with the entire cast carrying books and librettos in their hands and performing neglected, often-forgotten scores worthy of a second look. Does Cole Porter's frothy but vacuous Can-Can qualify? Maybe it hasn't been seen much since it opened in 1953 to decidedly mixed reviews, with a cast that included Lilo, Peter Cookson, Gwen Verdon and Hans Conried, but it ran for two years and won Tony Awards for Gwen Verdon and the choreography by Michael Kidd, so who would call it obscure? And we can go to our respective corners of the ring right now and come out fighting over whether or not it is "worthy" of ever being staged again. Abe Burrows' book was always flat, but in 50 years it has grown hair. And despite their time-resistant durability, hit songs like "I Love Paris," "C'est Magnifique" and "It's All Right with Me" have always been among my least favorite entries in the Cole Porter catalog. On top of that, I find Michael Nouri a lox made of cypress, and I have always been completely allergic to the screeching of Patti LuPone.

Having said all that, I must now bite into a large slice of humble pie and admit that I had a perfectly fine time at Can-Can . The one-dimensional plot about a battle that turns into a love affair between an uptight judge named Aristide, who vows to uphold the censorship laws of 1893 by banning all suggestive public dance exhibitions that might encourage or nurture the base instincts of naughty Parisians, and the saucy La Mome Pistache, owner of the notorious Bal du Paradis cabaret in Montmartre, where the illegal can-can is a nightly draw, is as disposable as ever. Everything leads up to the trial, where in the courtroom, only one thing will change the law, sway the jury and melt the icy hearts of the judges: Bring on the can-can! It's corny beyond description, with an intrusive quadrille, "Garden of Eden" ballet and torchy apache dance that were all merely perfunctory. But there were also a few undeniable pleasures: The second-banana plot about Boris, a pompous, starving Bulgarian artist, and his long-suffering girlfriend Claudine, a can-can dancer, was hugely enhanced by the raffishly charming Reg Rogers and the libidinous, long-legged Charlotte d'Amboise. And as the buxom Pistache, Patti LuPone finally found a role that filled her voice and her corset. She was the worst Annie Oakley I have ever seen, and as an ill-fated Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes , I couldn't understand a word she said (or sang). But in Can-Can she was a belle époque cupcake who owned the stage. Her singing soared without being brassy or flat, her salty acting convinced without being edgy or sharp. Whenever she was waiting in the wings, you could hear the audience losing attention. When she returned, striding but not strident, everyone came to full attention, ready to salute. This is a cut-and-paste production, professionally directed by Lonny Price, of a show that I can easily advise, in the lyrics of Cole Porter, to allez-vous-en . I never want to see or hear Can-Can again, but as a rare showcase to spotlight the best qualities of Patti LuPone, the song title "C'est Magnifique" came startlingly true.