Reviving The Past.(Brief Article)

Nostalgia blooms quickly in summer. Under the influence of long days, warm nights and soft ice cream, the mind naturally reels backward to earlier such seasons. This annual return to simpler times happens not just in the heart, but on stages across Europe. In the region's theaters, on festival lawns and in amphitheaters, big names are playing old favorites. The essayist Angela Carter once archly observed that "soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe." A look at this summer's theater and festival offerings suggests she was right.

Cynics point out that summer is the time producers trot out tried-and- true favorites, with an eye toward pleasing crowds rather than critics. Very occasionally, though, mass appeal doesn't mean banality. In London, the smash hit of the summer is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a stage adaptation of the 1968 children's movie about the adventures of a magnificent flying car. In Adrian Noble's $9 million production, Chitty hovers above the stalls, the terrifying Child Catcher of the fascistic kingdom of Vulgaria draws boos and the songs are as smooth as the staging. The result: a slick revamp of a classic British children's book. Ian Fleming, creator of Chitty as well as James Bond, would have approved.

Nostalgia of a different sort will be on show in Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, Bombay Dreams. The show--the first Bollywood extravaganza ever to appear in London's West End--is essentially about what Nabokov called "nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land." A love story set against Bombay's film industry, the show explores those age-old themes of ambition and tinsel, reality and fantasy. With music by India's master songwriter A. R. Rahman, direction by Shekhar Kapur (of "Bandit Queen" and "Elizabeth") and a script by the multitalented comedienne Meera Syal, the show promises glitz on a subcontinental scale.

Exotic nostalgia will also be on display across the Channel in France. Among the offerings at Avignon's 56th annual theater festival in July will be a stage adaptation of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the purple-prosed tome of love among decadent expats in 1940s Egypt. And recasting a slightly older story set on the Mediterranean, the Argentine author Rodrigo Garcia has adapted the ancient myth of Prometheus into a stage play, Prometeo. The production uses Mozart's music to emphasize the brutality, violence and tenderness of the story about the Titan who stole fire from the gods.

Not surprisingly, Greek classics also feature at the Hellenic Festival, Greece's annual international celebration of dance, opera, theater and music. This year the Herodian, a 1,800-year-old open marble theater at the foot of the Acropolis, in Athens, will be the site of a staging of Medea. Staged by the Spanish troupe Rosa de Otono and directed by Greece's Michael Cacoyannis, Euripides' chilling tale of a mother who murders her children will be performed on June 30. The Herodian will also host the Bolshoi Ballet, dancing Spartacus and Giselle, as well as the Strasbourg Harmonic Orchestra. At the fourth-century outdoor amphitheater of Epidaurus, Greek and foreign theater troupes will present 13 ancient tragedies, including Oedipus Rex, Antigone and ...