Chasing The Muse.(Xanadu)(The Last Year in the Life of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as Devised by Waterwell: A Rock Operetta)(Theater review)

"Xanadu" (at the Helen Hayes) is so ridiculously brilliant, so lavish and sublime a confection that any set of adjectives you might come up with after a single viewing will more than likely be replaced by another set of ineffectual adjectives once you've seen the show a second or third time. It's probably the most fun you'll have on Broadway this season, one reason being that everything about it is so resolutely anti-Broadway. In its wildness and ecstasy, "Xanadu" is a welcome relief from the synthetic creations that some Broadway producers have been peddling for years. Here you can't count the disco balls fast enough--not to mention the roller skates, the frosted-pink lips, and the glittering spandex that the director, Christopher Ashley, hurls at you like a PCP flashback. "Xanadu" is far sleazier and cheesier than conventional musical theatre, and it points out just how tame most other musicals are.

A bit of background: The current show was inspired by the 1980 movie musical of the same name. The film starred the Australian pop sensation Olivia Newton-John as a Greek muse who materializes out of a mural painted on a wall in Venice, California, and befriends an artist called Sonny. She names herself Kira (as befits a Los Angeles-loving, roller-skating muse), and inspires Sonny to quit his day job as a commercial artist in order to follow his passion. The two join forces with a rich older patron (played in the film by Gene Kelly, and onstage by the always fine Tony Roberts), and open a roller disco called Xanadu. At last, Sonny becomes the man he has always meant to be: a straight guy who loves costumes, disco, and lights.

The film version of "Xanadu" is largely forgettable, and is generally regarded as a nail in the coffin of the American movie musical. But the film's songs--which were written by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, and which Ashley reprises--linger on, especially for those of us who are children of the disco era. Out of the film's wreckage, a number of synthesizer-heavy tracks, laced with Newton-John's breathy vocals, emerged as hits, "Xanadu," "Suddenly," and "Magic" among them. These were the songs you might have listened to on your Walkman while pogo-ing over to your drug dealer's.

When, last year, it was announced that Ashley and Douglas Carter Beane were planning to mount a Broadway version of the movie, potential investors scoffed: why not leave that turkey in the oven? Beane, especially, was considered mad for undertaking the project. He was coming off a bona-fide hit, last year's "The Little Dog Laughed," a somewhat obvious satire about the perils of fame. What could he possibly have to gain from trying to improve "Xanadu" 's hopelessly leaden script?

As it turns out, Beane was the ideal playwright to adapt this work for the stage. In the film, which is slow and trippy, Sonny spends much more time in pursuit of his muse than is good for him, or us. Beane has retained the film's basic plot, but he streamlined its action and transformed its lazy camp into something more intelligently suggestive. (He kept almost no dialogue from the original script.) Everything that made "The Little Dog Laughed" feel strident or too blunt is sharpened in "Xanadu." As Kira, Kerry Butler is a powerhouse, ethereal and daffy at once. She not only imitates, which is to say exaggerates, Newton-John's accent; she stands outside the entire role and shrugs. She's both an ironist and an innocent--a little like a blond Lucille Ball--and an arresting believer in true love.

We trust Butler when she falls for Sonny (the excellent Cheyenne Jackson), even though he's about as deep as a cartoon character. Jackson plays Sonny with a Horatio Alger-like grin, which widens when, near the end of the show, he gets to flaunt his long legs in hot pants. Though the story traffics in purely heterosexual confusion, intimations of a more closeted sexuality abound. Mary Testa and Jackie Hoffman, both exceptional, play Melpomene and Calliope, Kira's fellow-muses and ugly sisters; they are the perfect stand-ins ...