two on the aisle; From high-kicking legends to gloomy Nobel laureates, New York theater, Adam Green discovers, is a great holiday treat.

Byline: Adam Green

December is a wonderful month to go to the theater in New York-the city seems to belong equally to natives and to tourists, and a certain air of bonhomie prevails. But in one's eagerness to get seats to a musical for the in-laws or to see something with the kids or to find something to see to escape the in-laws and the kids, one can lose perspective. So, please, remember these key points: 1) If you don't have them already, you're probably not getting tickets to The Odd Couple, and 2) for those who tend toward seasonal gloom, the show to avoid at all costs is the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. Rockettes dressed as wooden soldiers and elves with five o'clock shadows were depressing back in Holden Caulfield's day, and they're not exactly picker-uppers now.

If you've still got a yen for some high kicks, a few chorus kids, and a little bit of showmanship, though, Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life could be your ticket. In her

55-year career, the legendary Puerto Rican performer has gone from Broadway chorine to Kiss of the Spider woman femme fatale. When I heard that a self-starring musical about her life and career was coming to town, I'll confess, I foresaw a kitsch fest. But the book is by the estimable Terrence McNally, and the production is under the surefooted direction and choreography of Graciela Daniele. The word is that this moving evening, powered by a preternaturally ageless star, could be the sleeper hit of the season.

With a vengeful hero who slits men's throats and has their corpses baked into pies, Stephen Sondheim's blood-spattered Sweeney Todd may not seem, at first glance, a natural holiday pick. But Sondheim's brilliant score will leave you, paradoxically, filled with good cheer. If murder and melodrama are your things, there's the Metropolitan Opera's world premiere of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy, based on the Theodore Dreiser novel that inspired the film A Place in the Sun, in which Montgomery Clift drowned Shelley Winters.

One wishes that Matthew Bourne were staging his take on Tim Burton's goth children's classic Edward Scissorhands in New York instead of in London this month. Still, there are several non-cringe-inducing selections for kids to be found. China's Golden Dragon Acrobats make their New York debut, with enough tumbling, juggling, and contorting to please the whole family, assuming the family goes in for that sort of thing. To me, the words clown and mime sound like boric acid and rusty meat hook, but Slava's Snowshow is hilarious, and its in-your-face

finale is pure wonder. And the puckish former Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby makes her swan song as Peter Pan. I should disclose that my father co-wrote some of the lyrics, but hey-when Captain Hook refers to himself in song as "Mrs. Hook's little baby ...