Their Peter and the Starcatcher, a prequel to Peter Pan based on the 2004 children's novel by Dave Barry (yes, that Dave Barry) and Ridley Pearson, is a cleverly mounted, humorously written and exuberantly performed tale of how a now well-known orphan boy met a girl, gained special powers, learned to fly and became a legend. It is being staged without any high-tech gimmickry, with no injured performers and on a budget that presumably wouldn't cover Spider-Man's physical-therapy bills. When this hero takes flight, he's simply lifted by the rest of the cast.

Mr. Elice's script has its problems, but they're nothing compared to those facing the arthropod uptown. Here, it's the first act that's a bit troubled, taking a while to untangle itself and get moving. (Cleverness, like accents, can be tough to decipher until you're acclimated; cleverness plus accents even more so.)

But it quickly develops into something straightforward: Two boats leave a Victorian and Dickensian England bound for the remote, tropical kingdom of Rundoon. One carries a nobleman guarding an important shipment; the other carries three orphans to be sold into slavery there (and also the nobleman's precocious daughter and her beloved, blowsy nanny). There be pirates, a shipwreck, a marauding crocodile and a swallowed kitchen timer, and a magical substance that just might make a boy fly. By the ending, that orphan boy has been dubbed Peter Pan, his friends have become the lost boys and the pirate captain has lost his hand. Over to you, J.M. Barrie.

In broad outline, Peter and the Starcatcher is an obvious descendent of Wicked, that great and powerful cash cow of a Wizard of Oz prequel. But while Wicked is a predictably over-the-top Mackintosh-style production whose best attribute is its unexpectedly rich script--forget the squealing bubblegum tweens for a moment and remember that it's actually a subversive argument against prom queen Glinda--Peter's story is its least interesting attribute, with the resolution of each plot development telegraphed from its first appearance. A charismatic orphan? He'll be Peter. A pirate who hates him? We're waiting for him to lose his hand. A ship named the Neverland? Of course.

But who cares if the story is obvious when the storytelling is this spectacular? Mr. Rees and Mr. Timbers have created a theatrical world that's so high-spirited, so inventive, so smart--Mr. Elice, who is Mr. Rees' partner and who wrote the book for Jersey Boys and cowrote The Addams Family, loads this simple tale with innumerable gags, puns, one-liners and loads of alliteration--that the play's plot is almost irrelevant.

Mr. Timbers (full disclosure: He's a friendly acquaintance) wrote and directed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and there's a similar knowingly smartass rambunctiousness to this production, full of meta-theatrical commentary and cheerfully mugging actors, all placed within the charmingly ramshackle sets by Donyale Werle. (What appears to be carved woodworking on the Victorian-style proscenium built for the production is on closer inspection plastic forks and what I'm pretty sure are coffee-cup lids glued to the arch.) It all has a cheerful, let's-put-on-a-show affect--no doubt a diligently and artfully manufactured one--that brings the audience in on the fun.

The immensely likable and talented cast contributes to the general air of happy good cheer. Adam Chanler-Berat, broodingly heroic as the stoner boyfriend in Next to Normal, this time wears his brooding heroism more lightly but no less convincingly as the boy who would be Pan. Christian Borle, last seen as Prior Walter in Angels in America, slowly dying of AIDS, is here the live-wire Black Stache, the pirate who'll become Hook. His over-the-top enthusiasm is the perfect engine for this over-the-top production.

Unlike Bloody Bloody (and Wicked and the Broadway version of Peter Pan), Peter and the Starcatcher is not a musical, but it does have some songs, written by Marco Paguia. There's also some dancing, some fighting, some drag and a bit of Black Watch-style theatrical acrobatics.

There's a lot going on, but still, Peter and the Starcatcher is at its heart a little show, in a little space. It knows what it is, and it's doing all those little things in the best ways. It's goofy, it's immature--it won't grow up!--and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

editorial@observer.com

Long-legged and lean of jaw, in tight, worn-out jeans, dusty boots and a battered Stetson, Mr. Norton plays Harlan Carruthers, a drifter with no goals or ambitions who grifts and hikes his way from South Dakota to Hollywood and invades the life of a suburban family, with tragic consequences. The “valley” in the title is not Death, but San Fernando—which is, in this case, the same thing. Pumping gas to pay for a seedy motel room, Harlan meets a feisty, 18-year-old Valley Girl named Tobe (the enchanting Evan Rachel Wood, in the latest entry in her portrait gallery of bored, provocative Lolitas), chucks his job on the spot and follows her to the beach. The sexually charged romance that ensues intrigues Tobe’s timid, backward kid brother (Rory Culkin), who follows Harlan around like a stray mutt from the animal shelter, but enrages Tobe’s father (the always terrific David Morse), a hard-boiled cop and cynical war veteran who doesn’t buy a word of the cowboy’s “golly-gosh-darn” drawl, demeanor or personality—or his claim to be a ranch hand from South Dakota.

Father knows best. It soon becomes clear, from Harlan’s fantasies as a movie gunslinger shooting holes in the walls of his creepy motel room, and from the minute he steals a horse to show off his skills in the saddle, that Harlan is not the polite, soft-spoken cowpoke he appears to be. He is, in fact, an ex-con who has problems separating fact from fiction, reality from illusion, saying “Holy smoke!” while living on pawnshop cash for stolen goods. Tensions build, leading to inevitable violence, kidnapping and death—plus some major surprises.

Aided by sun-bleached camera-work, Down in the Valley is slight but tight, directed and written by David Jacobson, who proved his affinity for dysfunctional outsiders dancing dangerously on the parameters of “normal” society with the creepy films Criminal and Dahmer. This time he juxtaposes the delusions of a lost gunslinger on his way to a bad end with the restlessness of latchkey children whose lack of parental supervision leads to a troubled future. Mr. Jacobson’s focus on explaining the psychological disorders of nonconformists is aided immeasurably by the rangy, skillful Mr. Norton, who delves and probes with astonishing sensitivity into the tormented psyche of a man-boy weaned on movie lore but lost in the landscape of a vanishing West that has been replaced by shopping malls and theme parks. His body language is mesmerizing. The prodigious talents of the nubile Ms. Wood are not wasted, either. She’s both juicy and vulnerable, a seductive mix of Carroll Baker in Baby Doll and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed. Down in the Valley bogs down occasionally, and the plight of star-crossed lovers is nothing original. But the pleasure of watching two superb talents meld their ages, gifts and sex appeal long enough to hold an audience captive for two hours is no small feat.

True Horror

America loves its ghost stories, and the dark tale of the “Bell Witch” haunting still causes chills around a campfire at midnight. Based on true events in the country village of Red River, Tenn., that have been validated by eyewitnesses and officially designated as the only case in U.S. history where a spirit or phantom caused the actual death of a human being, the horror story has found its way into 20 books and is now resuscitated on film in An American Haunting. Like all haunted-house folklore, the whole thing works better in the fertile imagination of the mind. Translated to the literal blood and gore of a Technicolor movie, it didn’t send shivers down my spine. Call it The Exorcist Meets Poltergeist, and head for the shelves at Blockbuster, where it will undoubtedly turn up soon.

As the story goes, a respectable landowner named John Bell (Donald Sutherland) is accused of a land swindle in 1817 and found guilty of breaking church law by the elders that ruled his community. The neighbor who accuses him is believed to be a witch who places a curse on the Bell family. Strange things commence—noises in the attic, creaking floorboards, the howling of a wolf—and the house is beset by a demon. Most severely affected is John’s teenage daughter Betsy, who is repeatedly slapped awake, dragged from her bed and suspended in midair, while her mother (Sissy Spacek) keeps a diary to chronicle the horrors befalling the family.

As the terror progresses, the spirit shifts its rage from one family member to the next, giving all of the actors a chance to get knocked around and fall down with bumps on their heads and bruises on their bodies. It’s all rudimentary potboiler stuff, and up to a point the mystery sustains interest. But producer-writer-director Courtney Solomon (Dungeons & Dragons) devotes too much time to probing the fears of the house’s inhabitants with circular camera movements that flash from color to black and white, and not enough time explaining the phenomena that overtake them. The mother’s diary, discovered 135 years later, threatens the new modern owners of the house that in spite of their iPods and cell phones, the ghost will return.

“Just what is going on here?” is a question I found myself asking repeatedly, to no avail. When teenage Betsy is found with her legs spread open and blood soaking the spot in her white nightgown where her privates are, you think, “Aha! It’s Rosemary’s Baby time!” But nothing comes of that red herring. Satan does not make her pregnant. No Demon Seed arrives. An assumption is made that she invented the whole thing to protect herself. Against what? Although the film purports to be true, none of it is rooted in the kind of logic that would make it believable. And although I would happily watch Sissy Spacek read aloud from a National Guard recruiting bulletin, she has little more to do than rock her daughter, feed her husband cough syrup and scream. Tennessee is played by Romania; the woods belong to a farm area near Budapest. Sounds like an excuse for a paid vacation to me.

I like a good thrill, but nothing in this upscale Blair Witch Project with boarding passes and travel per diems works convincingly. I’ve had bigger scares from my tax accountant.

Dixie Pride

In Crazy Like a Fox, the excellent British actor Roger Rees (Nicholas Nickleby) has a raucous and randy field day playing Nat Banks, a sensitive, intelligent country codger (he reads Chekhov for pleasure!) whose 700-acre Virginia farm has fallen to ruin after years of neglect. It’s a pre-Revolution manse where George Washington once stopped on his way to the Delaware, but now seems more like a place Ma and Pa Kettle would call home. Still, since it’s been in his family for seven generations, this old coot, oblivious to realities such as taxes, insurance premiums, polluted swamp water, crop failures and bankruptcy, refuses to acknowledge a cruel little fact called bank foreclosure.

Along comes a pair of crooked lawyers from Washington, D.C., whose promise to restore the house to its original splendor masks a secret plan to tear it down and develop a housing project. Mr. Rees reluctantly signs the deed of sale, and sure enough, the city slickers hand him an eviction notice. The rest of the movie is about what happens when Nat establishes squatters’ rights and refuses to vacate. It’s a movie that is more fun to watch than you might expect.

Secretly overjoyed to get rid of the old albatross, his wife Amy (Mary McDonnell) moves their two children to town, while Nat drags down his ancestors’ old Civil War uniforms from the attic and declares war. Skinny-dipping in his creek, cooking beans over a campfire, living in an abandoned cave, hunting squirrels with a bow and arrow, Nat attracts the attention of neighbors who long to get back to nature, and revives a loving relationship with his own son. Everyone is on his side—from the local cops to the loyal servants who are descendants of the property’s original slaves—all upholding the values and traditions of the Old South.

How it all turns out is for you to discover, but I promise a hardy, zestful time. Bearded and bony, Roger Rees reminded me of the mad but harmless cousin charging down the stairs dressed like Teddy Roosevelt in Arsenic and Old Lace. It’s nice to just sit back and enjoy a movie for a change, and there is enjoyment to spare in this pleasant story about where perseverance can lead a man with blinders on. From the sure-footed comic acting to the chlorophyll-green redolence of Virginia, there is much to savor here. Engagingly helmed by first-time director Richard Squires (a critic, no less!) Crazy Like a Fox is sure-fire stuff, guaranteed to generate good will and do no perceivable harm.

On
opening night, Mr. Rees, an accomplished actor-director who has always been on
the flashier side of the footlights, found himself sweating out the perusal of
board members, big spenders and the reviewing press, bowing to the shakers and
shapers who finance the landmark W.T.F. scholarship, endowment, training,
apprentice and free theater programs, while trying to coordinate a two-month
season of professional productions that will (hopefully) meet the increasingly
critical demands of a paying audience that has come to expect the best, all of
whom arrive annually to unfairly judge this one summer festival by Broadway
standards. Mr. Rees might be the man who can please them all at the same time.
There is no more talented or versatile actor than this amiable veteran of the
Royal Shakespeare Company, best known to theatergoers as the star of the famous
eight-hour Broadway marathon version of Nicholas
Nickleby and to TV addicts as a regular on Cheers. A few seasons ago at W.T.F., he directed and starred (with
Bebe Neuwirth) in the best Taming of the
Shrew I've ever seen. This is the good news.

The
bad news is that Mr. Rees didn't direct the season opener himself, instead just
overseeing it from his office window. The production of Lady Windermere's Fan with Moisés Kaufman at the helm is a dreary,
plodding and sometimes inaudible disappointment. At the moment, the only thing
worth applauding is the new stage it appears on, and that has its detractors,
too. Gone are the graceful and inviting white columns at the end of a verdant
lawn where the Main Stage used to be. The exterior of the new ultra-modern
structure is an architectural monolith of glass and steel—an ugly and jarring
contrast to the traditional elegance and beauty of the Williams College campus
that surrounds it. The smaller, experimental Nikos stage, where new plays are
tried out each summer by such esteemed playwrights as Terence McNally, John
Guare, A.R. Gurney and Warren Leight, was demolished and moved into the
expanded space where the old Main Stage used to be, increased in size to seat
173 customers instead of the old 96. But while the exteriors look more like a
cold and academic geology auditorium, the interiors are an improvement in terms
of comfort, acoustics and playing space, which is large yet intimate, with rows
of boxes and two tiers of balconies.

In
the process of all this change, gone is the summer “family” of accomplished
actors, directors and set designers that had established squatters' rights on
the Williams campus and made W.T.F. legendary. Blythe Danner, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Hope Davis, Campbell Scott, Marsha Mason, Olympia Dukakis, Joanne Woodward,
Paul Newman, Ethan Hawke and Marian Seldes are among the members of the world's
most illustrious repertory company that lured audiences and kept critics
raving. They have all left the building, along with directors like Scott Ellis
and Nicholas Martin and set designers like John Lee Beatty (for this season, at
least). The season, reduced to four productions instead of the traditional
five, features casts I've never heard of, mostly comprising the sort of TV
performers who might lure a younger crowd. This isn't necessarily a bad thing,
but it's clear that the audience of seasoned fans who have put W.T.F. on the
map might fall away and a new audience will have to be cultivated. The grousing
on opening night was audible on every level, although I did overhear repeated
rave reviews for the new ladies' room. 

In
the long haul, all that really matters is quality. Sadly, there isn't much of
it in Lady Windermere's Fan. Moisés
Kaufman, who scored with the successful Off Broadway production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar
Wilde, would appear on the surface to be an ideal choice to direct the
first play written by his literary idol. Alas, this production is merely
competent. Where is the bitchy humor with which Oscar Wilde plunged a needle
into the puritanism of Victorian society and then soothed it over with the
salve of moral redemption? Mr. Kaufman directs it like it was Hedda Gabler. Written prior to The Importance of Being Earnest ,
the writer's most celebrated
work, it tells the tedious story of two women whose lives intersect
serendipitously: Lady Windermere, a naïve young newlywed, falls prey to London
gossip about her husband's relationship with an older woman of dubious
character named Mrs. Erlynne and determines to destroy her rival's social
ambitions. Discovering entries in her husband's account book that look
suspiciously like blackmail payoffs, Lady Windermere is mortified when her
distinguished husband invites the hussy to their home for a party. In one of
the play's best scenes, she threatens to insult the intruder by slapping her
across the face with her elaborate heirloom lace fan. Arriving at the flat of a
flirtatious knave to engage in some sin of her own, Lady Windermere is saved
from the foolishness of her impulses by Mrs. Erlynne and escapes, but it's too
late. The men arrive, inebriated and accompanied by Lord Windermere, and find
that the lady has left her heirloom fan behind. Now it's up to the older woman
to save the young wife's reputation from a scandal by claiming that she thought
the fan was her own. Lady Windermere owes her future happiness to Mrs. Erlynne,
never learning that she's the mother who abandoned her 20 years earlier. And so
we have a drawing-room comedy about a daughter who lives by her ideals and a
mother who lives by her instinct for survival, clashing head-on in what passes
for a stuffy wholesale romp. It's not Wilde's greatest play, but it is the one
that harvested a cornucopia of the wit and wisdom that have turned, through the
years, into clichés. “Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.” “We are all
in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” “In this world, there
are only two tragedies: one is not getting what one wants ... and the other is
getting it.” You heard 'em here first.

Alas,
the bubbly impact never fizzes. The actors in this production are all playing
it on one low-beam level in what often sounds like a hum. Jean Smart, the only
member of this cast I've ever heard of, has developed an impressive dramatic
range since she appeared on the hit TV sitcom Designing Women, but even she was so subdued on opening night that
her Mrs. Erlynne couldn't be heard beyond the third row. (Dixie Carter is
currently playing the same role to glowing notices in Washington, D.C., and one
can only imagine what chemistry Blythe Danner would have created in the role, with
Gwyneth Paltrow as Lady Windermere.) Nobody else in the production has either
the necessary style or demeanor to bring Oscar Wilde to life with dash and
assurance; the sets are starkly garish (vases of red roses against an odd
expanse of royal blue draperies and chandeliers bobbing up and down on curious
ropes); and though the costumes are elegant, there isn't one actor onstage who
wore them with any flourish. No matter. One wishes Roger Rees every supportive
good wish in his efforts to continue and enhance the exemplary artistry and
celebratory sense of expectation and excitement the world has come to expect in
Williamstown. He has new productions by Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard and
William Inge on the way. Things will pick up. But right now, the summer is off
to a hopeful, well-intentioned but tedious start—something Oscar Wilde himself
would find difficult to cheer.

Another War

At
the movies, nothing is happening to improve the lousiest summer in history. But
The Beautiful Country, sincerely
directed by Norway's Hans Petter Moland and beautifully shot by Jane Campion's
cinematographer, Stuart Dryburgh, in Hanoi, Manhattan and Texas, is certainly a
worthwhile attention-grabber. A young man named Binh (Damien Nguyen) lives a
life of shame and ridicule as a social outcast called bui doi—a derogatory term
meaning “less than dust,” which is applied to Vietnamese children with American
fathers. After a life of intolerable servitude at the breaking point where
misery meets suicide, Binh escapes with his younger half-brother Tam in a
crowded fishing boat across the China Sea and, for 125 minutes and thousands of
miles, endures the tortures of the damned, knowing that if he gets through the
ordeal alive and finally reaches Texas, his father will be Nick Nolte. To countless
numbers of people I know, this would be a good reason to turn back.

But
Binh is undaunted, running from the police for the accidental death of his
mother's harsh employer, beaten and bloodied by the cruel captain of the boat
people (Tim Roth), befriended by a prostitute named Ling (played by lovely Bai
Ling, who captivated critics as Richard Gere's co-star in Jon Avnet's thriller Red Corner), and captured by Snakehead
(Temuera Morrison), the villainous leader of a gang of modern flesh-peddling
slave traders trafficking in illegal human refugees. While disease and
starvation and a diet of rotting rice claims the life of little Tam, Binh and
Ling survive this harrowing journey. By the time they finally land on U.S.
soil, they find America is not “the beautiful country” of their dreams
nourished by travel magazines and Hollywood movies. When they wade at last into
New York in the middle of the night, Ling fades into the neon as a Times Square
hooker, but Binh plunges on, hitchhiking all the way to a ranch in the Texas
Panhandle, where—surprise, surprise—the grizzled old, blind war veteran in
boots nailing together the cattle fences and bunking in an abandoned trailer in
the cactus just waiting for a roommate turns out to be … oh, never mind.

This
movie has small ambitions and big emotions, a lean but honest and detailed
script by Sabina Murray, and marvelous performances by everyone involved,
whether they speak English or Vietnamese. I especially liked Mr. Nguyen, a
Vietnamese actor who, like Binh, left Vietnam in a small boat and made it to a
detention camp in the Philippines in 1974, later settling in Southern
California. The authenticity and experience he brings to this role are
invaluable. One small problem is the time frame: The film takes place in 1990,
but the war ended in 1975, and the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act made it
unnecessary for children born in Southeast Asia with American G.I. fathers to
ever suffer the humiliation and violence of “boat people” status again. So the
horrors that Binh goes through seem to exist solely for the sake of narrative
fury. Though the brutal catalog of postwar experiences endured by the innocent
war victims that America plundered and then left behind serves as a sort of
left-wing emotional shorthand, the movie pricks the conscience in powerful ways
that reminded me of The Killing Fields,
and the integrity and moving effect of The
Beautiful Country is never in doubt.

There are indications that some people are seeking ways of relating that are not defined by the war, or the war over the war.

I'm thinking of a lovely evening I spent last Tuesday discussing Jane Austen films with a full house of smart Janeites at the Williams Club. It reminded me of that Rudyard Kipling story ("The Janeites") where soldiers in the World War I trenches take a pause in the savagery to exchange views on Lady Catherine De Bourgh. The only savagery that night was the scorn my fellow panelist, Nora Nachumi, and I directed at the Miramax version of Mansfield Park .

And then today, for instance, I ran into a woman in my apartment complex, someone I hardly knew except through a mutual friend, and she started talking in a lovely, gentle way of her son, who died of cancer two years ago. She took out her wallet and showed me the picture of him she carries with her always. Told me how much our mutual friend had been a help in getting her through her grief. Somehow, I don't think we would have had that conversation in other circumstances.

Saturday, March 29. Ovid and conspiracy theory: Some versions of metamorphosis at the Small Press Book Fair.

Before getting too deeply entangled in the dark thread of conspiracy theory that one could find in some of the books on display at the Small Press Book Fair, let me pay tribute to another instance of this subcurrent of gentleness that runs like a hidden stream beneath the city. While wandering through the three floors of idiosyncratic offerings by book-loving publishers-people "crazy-fond o' books," as Kipling puts it in "The Janeites"-I was surprised to come upon the self-published works of an old friend I hadn't seen in years, Susanna Cuyler.

I'd first known Susanna as the daughter of the landlord of one of the most intriguing places I'd ever lived in, in the city: an ancient wood and stone house in Little Italy, originally an 18th-century farmhouse, I think, next to that funeral home on Spring Street. When I moved into the upper attic floor with a girlfriend, it was Susanna who thrilled us with tales of how the house was sometimes visited by the legendary "Spring Street Ghost," the spirit of a drowned woman who supposedly haunted the now-underground spring that gave the street its name.

Susanna had always followed her own path, spinning her web in her pre-Nolita storefront shop called B. Rugged, which featured her own woven creations. Now married to a brilliant mathematician, she has been publishing a series of unique books and pamphlets (members.aol.com/brugged/), something I was completely unaware of until one of them caught my eye at the Small Press exposition: Susanna's translations of selections from The Metamorphoses , Ovid's poetic accounts of mythical tales of transformation.

This was particularly exciting to me, since I'd just been reading the 1567 Golding translation of The Metamorphoses , said by most scholars to be the one Shakespeare read and heavily relied on.

One of the attractions of Susanna's selections from The Metamorphoses is that, while she charmingly declares that her version of Ovid's opening invocation is "best," she offers a spectrum of other translators' versions of the opening lines.

I found myself struck by Allen Mandelbaum's 1993 " … o gods, you were the source of these / bodies becoming other bodies, breathe / your breath into my book of changes …. "

"Bodies becoming other bodies" beautifully captures the Ovidian erotic subtext of The Metamorphoses . Other translations more literally give us bodies becoming "things," "other things" or "other shapes."

And then there's a line in David Slavitt's version of Ovid's plea to the gods: " … let me glimpse the secret / and sing, better than I know how …. " We all want to glimpse the secret, don't we: whatever it is behind the mystery of the way things work.

That love of secret things, somehow numinously at work, may be at the heart of some of the classics of conspiracy theory I was able to pick up at some of the other publishers' tables at the book fair.

Classic 9/11 conspiracy theories, for instance. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the famous French nutso Grand Theory of 9/11 is now available in English and I've got it. Recall, not so long ago, that, as L'Effroyable Imposture , it was the No. 1 best-seller in France-the one that claimed the Pentagon plane crash "never happened." Now, at last, it's available for aficionados from Carnot Books. Actually, there are now two books: The original, now called 9/11: The Big Lie , argues for "the existence of a plot within the US armed forces to perpetrate the September 11 attacks." And then its supplement, Pentagate , further develops the argument that no plane hit the Pentagon, that it was actually a cruise missile fired by the military, all for the purpose of, um, well, real bad conspiratorial stuff. The inconvenient disappearance of the plane and passengers that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon is not explained in great detail.

There's a serious side to such books, no matter how silly they seem: Who knows how much such conspiracy theory may have poisoned French public opinion (and the politicians who follow it) against America? Soviet archives now show that the K.G.B. helped stir up J.F.K. conspiracy theory. Were sinister intelligence agencies behind 9/11 conspiracy theories? (Hey, a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory.)

Here's another thought prompted by these books: conspiracy theory as metamorphosis. Doesn't conspiracy theory do something similar to that which Ovid's tales do? It's about transformation from the familiar to the strange and sinister, about identity change, about turning the familiar objects and theories of causality into something "rich and strange," as Shakespeare put it in the metamorphosis lyric in The Tempest . Isn't it possible to conceive that conspiracy theory shares in the same primal myth-making urge for connectedness that-unsatisfied with the banality of chance and accident that incoherently conspire to shape history-metamorphosizes mundane facts into rich and strange patterns?

Anyway, the high point of my experience at the Small Press Book Fair was coming upon the Barricade Books reprint of one of the all-time classics of conspiracy literature: The Control of Candy Jones . Originally published in 1976, one gets the feeling that this was the real inspiration for Chuck Barris' piece of triction, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind .

But to me, the most important aspect of The Control of Candy Jones is the central involvement of one of the great under-recognized shapers and creators of American alt.culture, the Ovid of American weirdness: Long John Nebel. He was the husband and "deprogrammer" of former model Candy Jones, a beauty queen and charm-school operator who, in the early 70's, married Long John, then a famous all-night syndicated-radio personality.

"All-night syndicated-radio personality": The phrase doesn't begin to capture who or what Long John represented to me, a bored suburban kid who'd stay up all night to hear his extraordinary array of guests: dissidents, crackpots, bee-venom arthritis-cure vendors, flying-saucer contactees, J.F.K. conspiracy theorists, precious bodily-fluid preservers. The midnight-till-dawn Long John show was my link to an underground, unconventional America seething with fantastic theories and weird conjectures not otherwise accessible in my Long Island suburb.

Perhaps Long John's true immortality will reside in the fact that he and his show are clearly the model for Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show , which I regard as one of the great American novels of the 20th century. (I've said it before, but nothing matches the insanely brilliant metaphysical hilarity of the "Dr. Behr-Bleibtrau" episode in The Dick Gibson Show . Prove me wrong; tell me what surpasses it. And check out the charm-school operator who appears in it.)

Anyway, it was Long John's fate to be, in effect, hoist by his own conspiracy-theory petard: Shortly after he married Candy Jones and began to use hypnotism to help her sleep, strange things-things of the sort that had barely been conjectured about on the wilder fringes of his show-began to happen to him and Candy Jones. Under hypnosis, she began to produce buried "memories" that as "a covert operative of the CIA [she was] harassed, badgered, and even tortured … [turned into] a human guinea pig in a secret CIA scientific project in which mind control was the goal … an unwilling and unknowing laboratory subject for 12 years, and only her chance marriage to John Nebel saved her from the final stage of her adventure … her own suicide as choreographed by [her CIA controller]."

Maybe it's all true-after all, the C.I.A. did engage in mind control experiments-but what was remarkable to me was that Long John, who was the epitome of pointed skepticism to the nuttier guests on his show ("Sir, you're telling me the saucer people spoke English ?"), would be so willing to believe it was all fact, not hypnotic fantasy. But such are the seductions of conspiracy theory: They make one feel that one is singing of "secret things," adventures unknown to the ordinary prole that make one's life metamorphose into a secret big-budget thriller. Turn one into a star.

Somehow I see The Control of Candy Jones as different from the pernicious 9/11 conspiracy theories, a folie à deux that was the product of a genuine love story. Thinking about it, and the strange world it brought back to life, made me wish that I could go to sleep again to the sound of Long John Nebel, rather than Wolf Blitzer in the war zone.

Monday, March 31. Another moment of that gentleness and connectedness-this time at a Shakespeare Guild evening at the National Arts Club. These are monthly conversations between John F. Andrews, the distinguished scholar and former editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly , and various Shakespearean actors and directors, this time with one of my all-time favorite Shakespearean actors, Roger Rees.

One of the emotional peaks of my life-one of the few that was emotional and literary and spiritual-was seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nicholas Nickleby , that legendary eight-and-a-half-hour, bare-stage tour de force in which Mr. Rees played the title role. (I recently had occasion to rewatch, on tape, that portion of Nickleby in which Mr. Rees as Nicholas played the lead in the comically inept Crummles Theatrical Company version of Romeo and Juliet . It was just, if I may use a scholarly term, friggin' brilliant, a metamorphosis that turned Shakespeare's tragedy-particularly the final scene in the tomb-into the hilarious "Pyramus and Thisbe" comedy embedded within it.)

Then, more recently, I was privileged to attend a remarkable tribute to Claire Bloom put on by the Shakespeare Society, one for which Mr. Rees served as host and charming interlocutor to Ms. Bloom. In the conversation with John Andrews tonight, he was informative, funny and intellectually engaged with the issues of acting-particularly the way one finds Shakespeare's "stage directions" embedded in the language.

Finally, toward the end of the question period, Mr. Rees somehow segued into Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 and began reciting it from memory:

Like as the waves make towards the

pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their

end,

Each changing place with that

which goes before ….

And then Mr. Rees did something unusual: He had the audience recite those lines in unison. And after it had been done, he noted the way the sound made by the multitude of voices imitated the sound made by the muted rush of the waves on the "pebbled shore," rose and fell like the waves "changing places" with each other (a subtle metamorphosis). He pointed out how the word "place," when drawn out by the voices in chorus, seemed to capture the sound of a wave spilling onto the pebbled shore. Particle and wave: The sonnet goes on to play with the place that individuality has in the eternal wave form of time-at least in the pre-Botox era:

Time doth transfix the flourish set

on youth,

And delves the parallels in beauty's

brow,

Feeds on the rarities of nature's

truth ….

"The rarities of nature's truth …. " What a line. The entire experience was a kind of rarity; the voices in unison became almost a spiritual experience of unity. A gentle connectedness. I'm glad I got out of the house to see it.

Tuesday, April 1. I'm not going out of the house anymore. Not for a while. For some reason, I've stopped shaving, trying to decide whether to grow a beard again. I've now reached the point of maximum seediness, where you look unshaven rather than consciously bearded. The seedy look has now been compounded by a minor accident in which, as I was racing to get a cup of coffee and get back to the war news, I hit my head on a kitchen cabinet, leaving a wound in the middle of my forehead. (Talk about "delving a parallel [in the] brow.") With my unshaven face and fresh head wound, I now had the complete Skid Row look.

Fortunately, there are rewards to staying inside and resuming 24/7 war-watching. One is watching Jon Stewart's The Daily Show , which is kicking everybody's ass, finding a way to be sharp and funny in war circumstances by making war on the rest of TV, satirizing war coverage with its "Stars of the Network Battle" feature.

Today, a friend told me a story about a spiritual person, a man of the "peace" movement. His first reaction, when apprised of early optimistic reports of Iraqi surrenders (which seemed to portend a quick, minimal-casualty outcome of the war), was to exclaim in anguish, "Oh, no, this is going to help Bush!" Better many, many people should die than that . He caught himself, ashamed of the implication, but it was there for a moment, a pathological obsession with the devil, Bush, that blinded him.

I know that most people in the peace movement are gentle souls, so I'll try to be gentle about this, but perhaps one of the consequences of the war is that at least some on the Left will ask themselves if they've been blinded by Bush hatred, Bush fever. Will ask themselves how did I, a leftist dissident, end up defending in effect, the survival of a fascist regime in Iraq that tortures and murders dissidents by the tens of thousands? Is that what the Left is supposed to be about? Is that what their spiritual forefathers fought in Spain for? If you recall, back in the 30's, until the shameful Hitler-Stalin pact, most of the Left was not a peace movement, but an anti-fascist movement. Put it this way: If F.D.R. had decided to send troops to stop fascism in Spain-to, yes, pre-empt the advance of fascism in Europe-would the Left be on the streets demonstrating against that? Take to the streets for "peace" instead of fighting fascism? Bemoan the way our "unilateral" acts might upset fascist-friendly European diplomats? As the editor of the venerable left quarterly Dissent recently put it in a forum on the war: "I am anti-fascist before I am anti-war … I am anti-fascist before I am anti-Bush." Paul Berman makes a similar point in his thoughtful and provocative new book, Terror and Liberalism, about the Western roots of fascism in the Middle East.

Thursday, April 3. But wait-an amazing development. For some, the case is apparently not closed on what is fascism and what is not. I almost choked on my coffee this morning at breakfast, reading an absolutely astonishing item in Page Six about the forthcoming CBS prime-time May sweeps Hitler miniseries. As readers of my last "Life During Wartime" column may recall (see the March 26 Observer ), I made a plea to CBS to change the provisional subtitle of the docudrama, which was called Hitler: Origins of Evil , so it wouldn't be confused in any way with my book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil . Whether or not my plea had anything to do with it, the CBS docudrama has now been retitled Hitler: The Rise of Evil . Thank God. Because-get this-according to Page Six, the executive producer of the film "tells the upcoming TV Guide that he, [actress Julianna] Margulies and director Christian Duguay believe it's a good idea to look at the Bush White House through the prism of [Hitler]. A fearful American public's cooperation with Bush's policies, [the executive producer] tells TV Guide's Mark Lasswell, is 'absolutely' similar to post-World War I Germany's acceptance of Hitler's extremism. 'I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now.'" According to the Page Six item, CBS president Les Moonves "disavows the filmmaker's highly paranoid views and says he doesn't subscribe to the Bush-Hitler parallel."

I got in touch with Mark Lasswell, the TV Guide writer, who confirmed that the executive producer was dead-serious about these sentiments. Mr. Lasswell also told me something quite interesting about the subtitle change. It was only last week, just as his story was about to go to press, that he checked back with CBS and discovered the title had been changed from Hitler: Origins of Evil to Hitler: The Rise of Evil . Which suggests the possibility that the change had been prompted by my column. (This column gets results?)

Friday, April 4: I just heard the unbearable bad news about the death of Michael Kelly, one of the gentlest souls and sharpest minds in all of journalism.

War is a tragedy for innocents on both sides. I didn't know him well, but I did know him as a colleague and I'd written for him as an editor, and I had enormous respect for him as a writer. I knew him enough, in other words, to feel the loss more personally.

This afternoon, after I heard the news, I went back and read some of Mike's recent war dispatches and came upon a remarkable paragraph he wrote from Kuwait before the war started. He talked about the Kuwaiti victims of Iraqi torture after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait (remember, Saddam started this war; we didn't), and wrote about the way today's Iraqis might feel about their liberation from torturers and death squads:

"I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti, or Iraqi) is something to be desired …. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?"

Mike died when the infantry battalion he was with came under fire while racing toward the Baghdad airport. By that time, it was clear to Saddam-or whatever Saddamite was in charge-that the game was up. Surrender by then might have saved many thousands more lives. But the torturers wouldn't admit their day of the boot was over. And to my mind, we lost Mike Kelly-and countless others-because the war was over and the Saddamites wouldn't admit it.

Never forgive them for that.

With all of his plays and particularly Uncle Vanya , tears and laughter are always close and inseparable. It is within his Russianness that life can be so laughable and tragic. The distinguished critic Charles Marowitz shrewdly pointed out that the secret to Chekhov is that he was a doctor as well as an artist. His medical side gave him his compassionate objectivity about people. His masterpieces are humanely impartial, as if he were saying to us, quite simply and with utter lack of pretension: This is how we are. This man Vanya is a wasted child; she is a vapid beauty; this one a disillusioned idealist; he's an intellectual buffoon; and she believes with all her heart that we shall all find peace.

"In the world beyond the grave we shall say that we wept and suffered, that our lot was harsh and bitter, and God will have pity on us," Sonya says in the moving climactic moments of Uncle Vanya . "And you and I, Uncle dear, shall behold a life which is bright and beautiful and splendid. We shall rejoice and look back on our present misfortunes with feelings of tenderness, with a smile. And we shall find peace. We shall, Uncle, I believe it with all my heart and soul. We shall find peace."

But if you are careless with Chekhov, you are sunk. His great naturalistic plays hover between the apparently mundane and the poetic, between an everyday life of tedium and self-deception and one eternally striving for understanding and happiness. But this delicate balance that has challenged and foxed generations of directors and actors is easily misunderstood, easily wrecked. It's sad to report, then, that the new production of Uncle Vanya at the Brooks Atkinson, starring Derek Jacobi, is the careless outcome of an unintentional wreckers' ball.

The prestigious production itself was meant to inaugurate the Roundabout Theatre Company's newly named home on Broadway, The American Airlines Theater. But the building work hasn't been completed on time. (They apologize for the unavoidable delay. Regular flights will resume shortly.) It's arguable that the choice of Uncle Vanya for the inauguration wasn't too adventurous. It's a pretty safe choice on the face of it, solid fare for the loyal subscribers. But to import Sir Derek Jacobi to show us all how to do it isn't a healthy sign of the Roundabout's maturity. Good though it is to see Mr. Jacobi, of course, there are also two other leading British actors in the cast, Roger Rees and Brian Murray. (They both live here.) But if an important British company were inaugurating a major theater in London with three American actors playing leading roles, there would be uproar. It is not a case of facile nationalism, but of cultural confidence. The War of Independence has long since been won everywhere, except in the anglophile American theater.

You don't have to be British to play Chekhov. You have to be bloody good. But only Amy Ryan's moving Sonya, future spinster and domestic slave, shines with quiet integrity here. All the renowned talent and experience of Messrs. Jacobi, Rees and Murray are no use in this otherwise botched Uncle Vanya , particularly as all three of them are hamming it up as if appearing in a touring company in colonial Singapore. The fatally expert, invariably booming, showily external, l9th-century English acting style isn't terribly Russian. It's terrible Chekhov.

The director Michael Mayer lists no previous Chekhov productions in his biography. (His last outing was You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. ) His inexperience with Chekhov needn't matter, however. To the contrary, he might have brought a refreshing attack to the Chekhovian clichés of lassitude and ennui, and revealed what's really at stake–not petulance or boredom with life, but the desperate desire to truly live. Yet there's no sense of a real ensemble at work here–not even a hint of it. Nothing could be more crucial to Chekhov, yet the different acting styles and accents are permitted to come and go with slovenly indifference. Hey-ho. Plummy British accents collide with American, and Mr. Jacobi's fruity Englishness as Vanya shares the same house with an Ilya Telegin who verges on a Woody Allen whine.

Where are we? Not in Russia, anyway; nowhere we recognize, except for, alas, the stagy pseudoreality of a rudderless cut-rate Chekhov. Uncle Vanya is a deceptively easy play to stage, but a near impossible one to fulfill. I'm inclined to agree with Ken Tynan that Chekhov created one of the most improbable and least playable heroes in dramatic literature. After all, Vanya fails to shoot his despised former brother-in-law, Serebryakov, the intellectual old fraud he once worshipped, not once, but twice. To miss once is understandable; twice looks like low comedy. Vanya has wasted his life running the estate for his brother-in-law; he's hopelessly in love with the wrong woman; he moans about everything, but does nothing; he's probably a mommy's boy in middle age; and he believes ludicrously that he "might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky." On the surface, he's a clown. Yet, as Tynan said, if we don't take Vanya seriously, the play collapses.

Mr. Jacobi's Vanya is too blustery in his loud, indignant rhetoric. Too much the petulant fool, too little the tragic hero. It is said that Vanya is a child in a middle-aged body, but Mr. Jacobi overdoes it. You cannot take a man seriously who looks as if he's in desperate need of a sticky bun. Small wonder the beautiful, indolent Yelena (played by a so-so Laura Linney) sends this Vanya packing. Mr. Jacobi conveys Vanya's rage and self-loathing, of course, but this is a Vanya without dignity. As an actor of the Olivier school, he resists few temptations in his theatricality, including cradling his head on Astrov's shoulder like an overgrown schoolboy in need of a hug (and our indulgent sympathy vote). Astrov isn't the type to give him a hug, but let it pass. We see him acting, and perhaps we're meant to. But Vanya the bitter, thwarted intellectual, is absent. So, too, is anything emotionally inward in restrained naturalism, except for the ultimate scene of desolation when Mr. Jacobi's Vanya sits in silent tears of mourning for his life.

Roger Rees first played Astrov to Michael Gambon's Vanya in Michael Blakemore's l988 London production. One can almost smell Mr. Gambon's otherworldly Vanya with those doleful, hooded eyes of his. But I regret that the accomplished Mr. Rees doesn't appeal to me, though he does to many. It is his habitual twitchiness onstage, his sudden nervy lurches in different directions as if searching the set for fleas, that irritates. His damaged idealist, Astrov, enjoys the spotlight too much. Even the simple act of drinking a glass of vodka is a production number for Mr. Rees. He knocks it back as if his neck were in plaster, pauses for effect, then bangs his chest for extra effect. Astrov's a drinker. It ought to come naturally. But then, this is an actor whose Astrov checks himself in a distant mirror while wooing Yelena like a vain English colonel. His troubled wrecked conservationist Doctor Astrov, on the precipice of self-hatred, likes himself too much.

And by now, should one of my favorite actors, Brian Murray, be reading this, he will no doubt be stoically awaiting his turn for the headmaster's caning. I once wrote of Mr. Murray that he is an actor who will never give a bad performance, only a good or excellent one. This only goes to prove that there's an exception to everything. Mr. Murray must have taken one look at the goings-on around him, and decided it's every man for himself. He's playing the gouty old professor Serebryakov like the Wicked Uncle in pantomime.

What else can I complain about? The Brooks Atkinson stage is as intimate as a canyon; Tony Walton's opening scene doesn't convey a garden; Rita Gam's Maria Vasilyevna is costumed inappropriately like a grand duchess; the storm scene–crucial to the simmering, claustrophobic mood of the piece–begins, and ends, with a big bang. Chekhovian storms rumble; other storms bang. Finally, to have Vanya shoot at Serebryakov, and miss, is only right; but to have the bullet hit a portrait hanging on the wall that wobbles and clonks absurdly to the floor reduces Uncle Vanya to The Three Stooges.

G.B.S. was born old, wise from the cradle, as it were. He was never modest, believing himself to be a genius, and many have believed him. But even his early comedy Arms and the Man , revived by the Roundabout Theater Company, strikes me as the posturing of a prematurely worldly dramatist of exhausting frivolity. The antiwar drama in the guise of social comedy is Shaw's way of reducing mighty ideas to his brand of middlebrow silliness. Hence the importance of chocolate in Arms and the Man or of Shavian wit.

Captain Bluntschli–a comic name for a comic kind of guy–is a Swiss officer in the Serbian army during the Balkan wars who loves chocolate. I expect it's Lindt. Shaw's jokes about the Balkans lose their charm today, incidentally. A flighty line such as, "You do not feel our national animosities as we do. We still hate the Serbs," casts a chill over the comic timing. But let it pass. The heavy-breathing Bluntschli, fleeing some Ruritanian army or other, bursts into the bedchamber of an impressionably young Bulgarian lady named Raina. Romance is in the smoke-filled air from the start, particularly when the ravenously hungry captain feasts off her chocolate bonbons.

It turns out that Bluntschli carries chocolate into battle. "What use are cartridges?" he muses. "I always carry chocolate instead." He must have eaten it on the battlefield, thus disarming himself. The smitten Raina–daughter of Major Petkoff and engaged to Major Sergius Saranoff, an oaf–christens Bluntschli her chocolate-cream soldier. And so Shaw's whimsical satire about the nature of war, courage, class and romantic love begins, and never seems to end, I regret to say.

From where I sit, on my high horse, it's difficult to see the intended profundity within the ever-popular Arms and the Man , though Shaw boasted about its heartbreaking depths beneath the light comedy. He's the only dramatist to have critiqued his own plays, lest there be any misunderstanding about their brilliance. (He was a fine drama critic, too.) But even if my view of Arms and the Man is jaundiced, and it certainly looks that way, this terribly misguided production directed by Roger Rees does Shaw no favors at all.

Arms and the Man famously became Oscar Straus' operetta The Chocolate Soldier , and Mr. Rees' most serious blunder is to direct the play as if it were an operetta. And a mannered, unjolly, Victorian-touring-company version of one to boot. Mr. Rees is well known as an actor, of course (though not for his comedy). As a director, he has a ways to go. In broadening the piece to the breaking point of boisterous caricature, he deadens its comedy and bypasses its seriousness.

This is also the most shouted production I can recall, as if Mr. Rees believes that loud is comedy (and quiet is therefore tragedy). Nor is a trill shrill. The shouting and shrieking give new meaning to the theater adage: "Speak up and don't bump into the furniture." Little wonder the wheezing hearing aid of the poor gentleman seated next to me went on the fritz. It was suffering from serious decibel overload. We all were.

As an actor, Mr. Rees has been known to lapse into a twitchy, quivering earnestness, and so it is with much of the overacting here. Let me not name the cast one by one, like ducks in a row. They all speak with exaggerated British accents–Mr. Rees is British–except for the accomplished Henry Czerny's Swiss captain, who's Canadian. No one reveals an innate flair for light comedy, I'm afraid. They have been misdirected, and so has old G.B.S.

Sondheim the Ingenue

The principal interest of Saturday Night , the 1955 musical at the Second Stage Theater, is in Stephen Sondheim before he became Stephen Sondheim. My hopes were higher than academe going in. There's always pleasure and excitement in a rediscovered musical gem, and Saturday Night has been directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, the gifted choreographer of Kiss Me, Kate and the artistic director of the Encores! musical concert series at City Center. If anyone can breathe new and witty life into a long-forgotten musical and send us home happy, Ms. Marshall sure can.

But yet … (or, as Shakespeare's Cleopatra warns the messenger who brings bad news: "I do not like but yet .") Ms. Marshall has only partially succeeded in rescuing Saturday Night from the shadows. It was Mr. Sondheim's first complete score and lyrics for a Broadway show. He was then in his mid-20's and clearly destined for bigger things. But the wacky musical comedy about a group of middle-class kids from Brooklyn coming of age, with a book by Julius J. Epstein of Casablanca , was never produced. The score became Mr. Sondheim's calling card. He played it for Leonard Bernstein, who invited him to write the lyrics for West Side Story .

The new production is therefore Saturday Night 's New York premiere after a 45-year delay. It has quite recently received two college productions in London and Chicago, but that's all. We can see why it hasn't been risked here before. Even by madcap musical-comedy standards, its book is too dopey to be believed. It must have failed to ignite in its day. The book is clumsy and dated–and not too witty–and Ms. Marshall had a daunting task in trying to save the unfixable.

She has played Saturday Night straight instead–a move that's full of integrity in resisting the easier option of camp. She is charmingly faithful to the show's ace–its score–by treating the young Sondheim with deft, understated refinement. Jonathan Tunick's orchestrations and Rob Fisher's musical direction are unshowily, modestly first-rate. But the tone of sweet melodic restraint lacks the kind of musical comedy wallop that makes pulses race and keeps the stage intoxicatingly hot. Ms. Marshall even ropes in her own choreography. Again, I wish so much that she had freed Derek McLane's set of its confining, cramped steps and danced .

It's as if everyone–including the young, fresh-faced cast–is on best behavior. All is therefore quite pleasant and sometimes quite tepid. But the evening cannot soar. And Mr. Sondheim's precocious score? The boy had class, there can be no doubt. And, after all, Bernstein spotted it. A certain Sondheimian wistfulness is already there in the making. "If it's Saturday night/ And you are single/ You sit with a paper and fight/ The urge to mingle …"

His talent for pastiche, verbal polish and word games are confidently revealed in the crooner's "Love's a Bond." "When put to the test, I like to invest, but I won't be a/ Great financier …" or there's the innocent fun of the faux lady-killer in "Exhibit A" (marvelously performed by Christopher Fitzgerald): "Every little pillow has its use/ Take it from a connoissoor/ I'm the boy who coined the word 'seduce'/ Not a lousy amachoor." But the young Sondheim was still rooted in the traditional romance of musical comedy: "So many people in the world/ Don't know what they've missed/ They'd never believe/ Such joy could exist!"

"Connoissoors" of the hallowed Sondheim oeuvre will appreciate Saturday Night best, and that the existential poet of urban angst belonged to the alienated future.

The production itself, directed by Barry Edelstein, the artistic director of New York's Classic Stage Company who last season directed Uma Thurman in her first Molière, suggests more time was spent on the sets than the actors. Still, there is nothing boring or conventional about an As You Like It that includes bright green Granny Smith apples falling in a navy blue orchard, characters making entrances from trapdoors in the floor and ladders from the ceiling, music performed in the style of Dave Brubeck by an on-stage progressive jazz quartet, ballroom dancing in the Forest of Arden to Louis Armstrong's hit song "What a Wonderful World," and Lea DeLaria as a goatherd. I don't know what the Bard from Stratford-on-Avon would think, but he wouldn't yawn.

He might pray for a little less spin and a bit more substance, not to mention a leading lady with more stage experience and a wider range. Rosalind-feisty, lovesick, strong-willed and wise-is one of Shakespeare's riskiest cross-dressers, but in or out of drag, she needs more than a pretty face and a boyish physique. How can we forget the famous photos of Katharine Hepburn in the role, looking like Peter Pan and inspiring Dorothy Parker's oft-quoted laceration: "She ran the gamut-from A to B."

Ms. Paltrow plays it mainly for charm and swagger. As the distraught daughter of a deposed duke living off the hospitality of the wicked uncle who drove her father into exile, Ms. Paltrow makes her first entrance at court looking very much the way she did when she won the Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love , radiant in panels of billowing red satin. Every inch the movie star, she is greeted with applause for bringing glamour to the Berkshires that is loud and understandable. The test is yet to come.

Claiming her independence, disguising herself as a shepherd named Ganymede, and heading for the Forest of Arden in search of romance, freedom, justice and her long-lost father with her cousin Celia in tow, the transition is as abrupt as it is unsurprising. Ms. Paltrow is so flat-chested, the gender change seems effortless, but in knickers, suspenders and workboots, with a trendy baseball cap worn backward, she looks more like a character in the Peanuts comics.

With Shakespeare's comedy of sibling rivalries and mistaken identities now in full throttle, Rosalind falls for Orlando (Alessandro Nivola), who wears a windbreaker and khakis while plastering love poems on tree trunks with Post-Its, Celia (Megan Dodds) goes for Orlando's venomous older brother Oliver (Stephen Barker Turner), and Touchstone the court jester (Mark Linn-Baker) pursues the bovine goatherd played by Lea DeLaria in a vulgar burlesque camp that bludgeons the audience with 400 crude vaudeville sight gags when a more carefully chosen half-dozen would do. Amid the ham, some genuine caviar is provided by the excellent Michael Cumptsy's melancholy Jaques, lord of the forest, and by the gifted and versatile Angelina Phillips as the confused, baby-voiced peasant Phoebe.

Before they all sort out their tangled sexual deceits and find true love, the "All the world's a stage" speech has been delivered from a horizontal position and the "Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly" lament has been curiously sung as a jaunty jazz tune. When Orlando practices lovemaking on Ganymede, unaware that he is really Rosalind in disguise, there is no requisite sense of apprehension that he might be falling for the wrong sex. The villains pursue the innocents in black tuxedos with fuchsia shirts and vests, perpetually dressed for a Mafia ball. The Forest of Arden looks like a vacant lot in Canarsie. Under these flawed circumstances, I was grateful for Ms. Paltrow's charm, but Rosalind is so close to the role she played in Shakespeare in Love and her performance is in so much the same vein, full of bounce and posturing, there isn't much of a stretch to observe. I admire her for wanting to polish her craft like her mother (Blythe Danner is a Williamstown regular) but I wish she had chosen a fresher vehicle with a different kind of challenge.

As You Like It may be a financial blockbuster, but it can't hold a candle to the brilliant, inspired production earlier in the summer of The Taming of the Shrew . This randy romp, directed by and starring Roger Rees, was a rare example of revisionist Shakespeare with passion, purpose and synergy to spare. Mr. Rees' libidinous Petruchio crashed through the startled audience as a drunken intruder, raising so much hell the emergency exits were opened and the police summoned before order was restored. Bebe Neuwirth, as a tough lady cop brandishing a phallic nightstick, subdued him and forced him to watch the play, reappearing as Petruchio in his orange soccer shirt, backpack and track shoes in a breakneck series of tableaux in the style of a Vittorio De Sica film starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Think Marriage Italian-Style with Fellini crowd scenes, sets designed as blowups of pasta boxes and imported cans of Italian tomato sauces, Bianca singing a song by the Carpenters,

bits of Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate ad-libbed freely, and a factory of Petruchio's employees dressed like World War I aviators out of a Monty Python movie.

Bebe Neuwirth was a revelation as the fiery Kate, a lioness even when tamed, always letting you know the play could never happen in the 1990's. In the end, when she returned as the lady motorcycle cop, Mr. Rees' drunken spectator was so overwhelmed by what he'd just seen that he vowed to go home and tame his own wife, prompting Ms. Neuwirth to bring down the house with the evening's final line: "In your dreams, buster." This, for sure, was a vibrant, streamlined production ready for Broadway.

While long lines of eager theatergoers attuned to the artistic standards of achievement synonymous with Williamstown crowded into the 520-seat main theater this summer to see revivals of Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, the sold-out 96-seat Nikos Stage in an adjoining building has unveiled new, experimental premieres by John Guare, Irish playwright Frank McGuinness and Warren Leight, winner of this year's Tony Award for Side Man . Mr. Leight's new play Glimmer Brothers is in some ways better than Side Man , continuing and expanding the theme of relationships among jazz musicians from the big band era and how they affect the lives of their children 40 years later.

David Schwimmer, a popular television icon from the sitcom Friends who has never impressed me, starred with great conviction and honesty as a New York trombone player who has devoted much of his adult life to caring for an elderly trumpet player who was a colleague of his father's. When the elderly musician is diagnosed with a terminal illness, the young man is forced to reunite the older man with a twin brother from whom he has been estranged for four decades, discovering in the process dark secrets that unlock the mysteries of his own twisted legacy. The ghosts of the past once again encroach on the lives of a younger generation as a riveting play engulfs the viewer with richly detailed characters and shocking revelations. Mr. Schwimmer triumphed as a lonely-boy-lost who is trying to cope in the body of a grown man. The play needs tightening, but it has already been scheduled for a New York production this season at the Roundabout.

The summer began with a gutsy, profound and colorful Camino Real under the juicy direction of Nicholas Martin, with screen star Ethan Hawke giving a tender, lyrical and utterly heartbreaking performance as Kilroy, Tennessee Williams' all-American boy in hell, and a superb cast that included Blair Brown, Hope Davis and Richard Easton. The first revival of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun starred Gloria Foster and Kimberly Elise, the incandescent young actress who played Oprah Winfrey's daughter in the ill-fated film Beloved .

And it's not over yet. You can still see Arthur Miller's The Price , directed by James Naughton, from Aug. 18 to Aug. 29, and the world premiere of The Waverly Gallery , directed by Scott Ellis, which runs Aug. 11 to Aug. 22. This is the new play by Kenneth Lonergan, who took New York by storm with This Is Our Youth . His latest stars the great Eileen Heckart as the spirited owner of a Washington Square art gallery who is hellbent on leaving this world with a bang despite her rapid and inconvenient disintegration from Alzheimer's. You can expect this one on a New York stage soon, but you may have to get up to Williamstown to see the remarkable Eileen Heckart in it.

No wonder this 11-week summer marathon has become a magnet for the most illustrious actors, directors and designers in the American theater. Since I have been driving up to the ivy-covered campus I've seen Julie Harris, Christopher Reeve, Richard Thomas, Tammy Grimes, Stockard Channing, Cherry Jones, Joanne Woodward, John Sayles (in an acting role, yet), Kate Burton, Marian Seldes, Olympia Dukakis, Christopher Walken, Sigourney Weaver, Campbell Scott, Stephen Collins, Karen Allen-the list goes on. They use the stages and rehearsal halls as a gym working for less than scale, living in college dorms, polishing their craft. What began 45 years ago as "chic summer stock" has evolved into the East Coast's leading bastion of civilized theatrical culture. Under the creative guidance of Michael Ritchie, show business glitter has also arrived this year. (I've spotted Paul Newman, Meryl Streep and Brooke Shields, and they were just in the audience!) But this is as it should be: the natural result of so many talented, celebrated people pooling their resources to accomplish so much with so little. The annual budget for 10 full-scale productions is only $2 million, sets are assigned for $5,000 and the highest-priced tickets sell for $37. It's pretty much a goddamn miracle, if you ask me.