WHITE ON WHITE.(The Woman in White)(Hamlet)(Theater Review)

Years ago, an outrageous young man-about-town used to attend all sorts of parties, both high and low. And some of the more popular gatherings were theme-based. Generally, these were hosted by young men who had an almost fanatical interest in the camp elements to be found in films like "Showgirls" and in nearly any musical written by the English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. Indeed, many of the parties were built around Webber's wildly popular musicals "Cats" and "Sunset Boulevard." Besides playing the shows' cast recordings--loudly--on a CD player, guests would arrive dressed like Glenn Close as Norma Desmond in the latter show, or like Betty Buckley in the former. Webber's latest offering, "The Woman in White" (at the Marquis), should bring similar hours of pleasure to such an audience, largely because the score and the lyrics (by David Zippel) are so over-the-top dramatic that it's impossible to have anything approaching real feeling for any of the characters, let alone their situations. And, since camp is the denial of feeling, "The Woman in White" is a perfect camp object: all hysterical action, with artifice as its heart.

Although the show is said to be "freely adapted" from Wilkie Collins's creepy nineteenth-century novel about doubling--in the book, the characters don't know it at first, but they are all related in one way or another--it's difficult to discern whether it was Charlotte Jones, who adapted the novel to the stage, or Webber, or the director, Trevor Nunn, who dispensed with Collins's Grand Guignol sense of things. Whoever it was, Collins's Victorian interest in depth of character has been replaced by ominous-sounding music, fog machines, and a gothic set. What we are left with is characters straight out of Edward Gorey, but without Gorey's customary elegance or his delight in revealing the smiler with the knife.

Curtain up: a thin, pale, ginger-haired young woman dressed in white and named Anne Catherick (Angela Christian) is wandering about near the grounds of a great estate, Limmeridge House, in Cumberland, England. Is she real, or a ghost? The artist and drawing teacher Walter Hartright (Adam Brazier) is not quite sure. Nevertheless, he's spooked. But Hartright's stalwart hunkiness wins out after he meets his students, the lively Marian (Maria Friedman, who is by far the best thing in the show) and her half sister, Laura (Jill Paice), who live at Limmeridge with Laura's rich, infirm uncle, Mr. Fairlie (Walter Charles). Love ensues: Walter and Laura are swept up by the force of desire. But wait. Laura has promised her father on his deathbed that she will marry the smarmy, evil Sir Percival Glyde (Ron Bohmer). And Marian insists on this union, in part because she's slightly jealous of Walter's admiration for Laura, and their subsequent duet. Laura bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman in white, an apparition or mad creature who is never far from the gloom that dampens the characters' operatic flounces and furbelows. Before long, Laura is wearing a white dress of her own: she's a bride, but an unhappy one. Sir Percival, along with his cohort the freeloading Count Fosco (Michael Ball), beats her and then commits her to an insane asylum. The two have designs on her fortune. As it turns out, the institution where Laura is meant to rot is the same asylum that Anne was sent to many years ago--by Sir Percival. After she fell in love with him, she had his child, which he drowned. Oh, and Anne, by the way, is Laura's half sister. They had the same father--facts that no one ever mentions until the second half of the show, when Laura is rescued from the asylum by Marian and Walter, who has never got over her.

It's not easy to judge the actors, the play, or Webber's score, because they're all of a piece: early Gilbert and George with a little Rasputina and Vegas thrown in for good measure. And none of these elements are especially memorable. Webber's music feels like a film score written in support of the show's real star: the lighting (by Paul Pyant) and the video images (designed by William Dudley and the team of Dick Straker and Sven Ortel, at Mesmer). Nunn relies on these three-dimensional projections of hills and dales and ...