The lady, without doubt, is one of our very best and wittiest actresses. Those who remember her sparkling performances in modern comedies like As Bees in Honey Drown and Fuddy Mears will know that she possesses a genius for suggesting the wacko without seeming to try. She rings true in everything she does, even in this sputtering, dated stuff from the blunted pen of Elaine May. She can pull off the considerable trick of appearing to be both serious and off-center, like her name. Audiences always embrace her because we're always glad to see her. J. Smith-Cameron, keep going. We love you. What more can I say?

Well, I'm duty bound to say that Ms. May's signature deadpan neurotics of a certain age belong to another era. Which era? References to Zoloft should fool no one. The angst on display in these dispiriting vignettes is circa 1950. Ms. May is, of course, the legend whose improvisations with Mike Nichols during the 50's have passed into comedy folklore. But After the Night and the Music conveys no inspired sense of fizzing improvisation, no daring. With the exception of the short, charming opener-or doodle-it's a static, familiar evening that never lifts off.

The evening opens with "Curtain Raiser," as it's called, which promises fun at least. Its "plot" is best forgotten, and it will be. Lonely singles meet in a dance hall. (Does that happen any more? Do "dance halls" even exist?) Anyway, attractive dyke sits sulkily at the bar. Short, balding, straight nebbish asks her to dance. He used to be a dance instructor, apparently, but nobody wanted to dance with him. They still don't.

"I'm gay," says Gloria (Ms. Smith-Cameron). "I don't dance well. And I can only lead."

"That's O.K.," Keith (the delightful Joel Blum) replies hopefully. "I can follow."

"Hey, give me a break."

They do dance, of course. (To "Dancing in the Dark," if you please). And if they're no Fred and Ginger, their awkwardness and resentment take lovely, romantic flight. It's an odd and appealing sketch. We're actually left beaming at two misfits dancing onstage together the old-fashioned way.

Then comes the downer about depressives in "Giving Up Smoking," with Ms. May's daughter, Jeannie Berlin, playing lonelyheart Joanne. Ms. Berlin possesses a schleppy appeal and weird timing, as if she's constantly surprised by her own state of being, or by life. Joanne has given up smoking (in itself a tired theme) and, like everyone else in the little playlet, she's waiting for the phone to ring. Ms. Berlin only has to say the words "Here's why I'm not depressed" to have us laughing. But the laughs are surprisingly thin. They keep promising to come.

"Parts of me are probably dead from wanting things I never got or got too late," Joanne tells us about herself. "But here's the good news. Who wants those parts? Who wants to want something so much? Isn't it great to think no matter how much you want something, if you wait just five minutes … or five days … or five years … you won't want it anymore. Oh, shit. Now I want a cigarette. The other thing to remember is …. "

And so on, and so on. But look at the moaning monologists in the rest of the piece. There's Joanne's friend Sherman, or Shermie-another lonelyheart-who's a hissy queen sobbing to The Wizard of Oz (oh, please). There's divorced Mel, who plays the guitar because it helps him to get women "over 35." (It does?) And there's Shermie's sad mom, the lonely widower Kathleen (played by the stalwart J. Smith-Cameron). Mom tells us about her metastasized cancer, which just about stops the night dead in its tracks, and she reminisces about her wonderful husband who played the accordion. "He would stroke my hair and say, 'I wish I could give some of this feeling to charity. I have so much of it I can hardly breathe.' Pretty poetic for a man who didn't finish high school."

On the other hand, pretty awful for a man who plays the accordion. It depends how you look at it. Ms. May's choices seem like arbitrary space fillers, mawkishly "poignant" blah. "He called me his beautiful blonde colleen"-colleen?-"right up to the night he died," she goes on. "He would serenade me and we would sing together. He had the best voice, Joe. And we had our song … it's so pretty … I want you to hear this."

Don't.

"Giving Up Smoking" revolves around the busy signal of telephones. The age of text-messaging, or even call waiting, has yet to be invented in Ms. May's universe. Count your blessings. The closing piece, "Swing Time," is from the Stone Age. It's an embarrassing skit about two married couples swapping partners-or "swinging," as they used to say in the age of Viva Zapata mustaches. The action, such as it is, also depends on a phone call. And why not? We're used to it. Ms. Smith-Cameron does all she possibly can as nervy Mitzi. But even she can't save the day.

The point is, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was new 36 years ago. This old hat isn't even within striking distance. It's coy and it's clumsy, and it doesn't go anywhere. It strains in every obvious way to be even mildly amusing. Worse, Daniel Sullivan has staged it mostly in shadowy darkness, lest it frighten the horses and the understandably subdued subscribers of Manhattan Theater Club.

Now, if the director had dared to use a brilliant convention from traditional Japanese Noh theater, we might have been in business. In Noh theater, bright light is used to convey darkness. In other words, we can see everything that's happening.

The sight of people creeping about in the dark when they think they can't be seen is innately funny, and the opportunities for inspired comic invention are a gift. Peter Shaffer used the lighting trick to hilarious effect in his classic one-act farce, Black Comedy. No such luck here.

No, the star role in Amadeus , though unseen, is surely played by God–and what, or who, could be less fashionable? God in theater has been reduced to a walk-on role, a rumor, a broken promise, a nothing, since Waiting for Godot . In England, David Hare brought him on in his Church of England play Secret Rapture as "God, as it were," for nowhere are there more doubters over sin and tonic than within the English clergy. In Angels in America , Tony Kushner argued magnificently with God like an Old Testament figure in search of justice, a sign, salvation. But I cannot think of another contemporary American dramatist who talks to God anymore.

Mr. Shaffer comes from an older English generation that wrestled with the divine as if God were a guest at the dinner party who never quite leaves. For example, to see the movie version of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is to be taken back to a period when carnal desire and religious faith were worthy opponents. Greene, a shaky Catholic convert, once told his Catholic friend Evelyn Waugh that he was thinking of writing God out of his novels. "Oh, I wouldn't," Waugh replied. "It would be like P.G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series."

Amadeus takes the form of a confessional. The decrepit, near-mad Salieri confesses his sins against Mozart (and we, the audience, are his silent confessors). The battle of the protagonists representing ungodly, all-too-human will versus the mysterious power of the divine is a recurring theme within Mr. Shaffer's major plays–the conquistador Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun , the psychiatrist Dysart in Equus , the hack composer Salieri in Amadeus . Mr. Shaffer was a music critic in younger days, and once worked as a humble assistant at the London music publisher of Boosey & Hawkes, which is to music what Turnbull & Asser is to shirts. His awe at the source and inspiration of great music led to Amadeus .

It so happens I'm writing this column with the Mozart Requiem playing on the stereo. It seemed appropriate! But as I struggle to get the words right–to say what I mean to say in the wreckage–the sheer beauty of Mozart is perfection. It is overwhelming, unearthly, absolute. If God didn't write this music, who did?

Well, Mozart–God's messenger on earth, it's said, and the embodiment of his love. What other explanation could there be? Poor virtuous Salieri, who sees a practical joke on humanity in the form of a foul-mouthed genius who could be an idiot savant, a holy fool laughing like a loon. Yet Mozart's talent was blessed. What kind of divine justice is this?

"I was suddenly frightened," says Salieri. "It seemed to me that I heard the voice of God–and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard–and it was the voice of an obscene child."

This is the inspired thing: Mr. Shaffer has given us a tragic hero–Salieri verges on the tragicomic, too–who actually admits to his own mediocrity! Mozart defines it for him. Salieri's talent isn't blessed; his prayers go unanswered; his virtue is unrewarded. "Goodness could not make me a good composer," he confesses. "Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art."

It is everything, incidentally, in the furnace of celebrity. We naïvely want our public figures to be "good." And when we discover they are human, we refuse to believe it. If all great artists were perfect human beings, there would be no art. But Mr. Shaffer's Mozart presents a bigger dilemma. As the tortured Salieri protests, in effect, to an indifferent God: "How could you do this to me? How could you choose him ?"

Mr. Shaffer has cleverly reversed the rules of mediocrity. The irredeemably second-rate of the world rarely admit it. That is how they ploddingly endure and even triumph. But Salieri not only admits to being the patron saint of mediocrities everywhere, he is the only member of the imperial Viennese Court to recognize Mozart's sublime talent.

"Too many notes!" is Emperor Joseph II's judgment of The Abduction From the Seraglio . But Salieri possesses talent enough to recognize far superior gifts. In one of the drama's most effective scenes, he examines Mozart's original manuscripts, sees there are no corrections whatsoever to the score–and faints dead away. Mozart had simply transcribed the music completely finished in his head.

Salieri's argument isn't with Mozart. It's with God, or fate. And God has the last laugh. For though Salieri was widely celebrated in his time, who today could name even one piece of his music?

Peter Hall, the original director of Amadeus with Paul Scofield's Salieri in 1979, has done fine work with this new staging, along with the stylish designs of William Dudley. The ensemble is strong, with a measured, ironic turn from David McCallum as an Emperor Joseph puffed with grandiose ignorance, and–welcome change from the usual flighty Constanze–the touching realism of Cindy Katz as Mozart's wife. But in a reaction against the theatricality of Ian McKellen's renowned 1980 Salieri or the unctuous slime of F. Murray Abraham's film version, David Suchet has underplayed his hand.

The accomplished Mr. Suchet–known here as the meticulous Hercule Poirot on the PBS Mystery series–avoids the purely villainous in favor of an Everyman of the ordinary. He's playing against type, but, for me, a good dollop of villainy never did evil–or Amadeus –any harm. Mr. Shaffer must be the only dramatist to keep rewriting his plays long after they've become successful. He recently rethought Salieri for this production–after 20 years! He has shifted Salieri's character away from the more showily melodramatic toward the fallibly human version that Mr. Suchet plays. But the outcome is a Salieri reduced in size; Salieri now even asks Mozart's forgiveness in a new scene. Our Salieri! It isn't a case of too many notes, but too much conscience.

There are rewards enough, even so–not least the electric Broadway debut of Michael Sheen as Mozart. This young Welsh actor would seem to have it all, including a glorious future. His energy, for one thing, is infectious, quicksilver, giddy–a Mozart manic or possessed. He seizes the territory–the stage–as if it belongs to him. Why not? It belonged to Mozart. He manages to convey the spontaneous exuberance of young unstoppable gifts with the anguish of a horribly spurned talent. You see why great music poured out of Mozart. There was no choice.

Mr. Sheen recently triumphed in London as Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's 1956 Look Back in Anger . Perhaps he can play anything–Hamlet soon, or Buster Keaton. We'll see. He sometimes resembles a white-face clown in Amadeus , playing the innocent whose genius was kissed by God and condemned to an early death.