Excitement is mounting for the movie version of Hairspray, which opens July 20.

I know several people who have seen early screenings of the movie and they LOVE it, so push all thoughts of lousy Broadway-to-movie musicals aside (hit the skids Rent, back to the basement Phantom, off to summer stock Producers).

First up is a clip of Zac Efron as Link Larkin singing a song written for the movie, “Ladies’ Choice.”

And here’s the movie trailer:

Here’s the official “Hairspray” movie site: www.hairspraymovie.com

REPORT FROM LAS VEGAS

Calling Las Vegas the Broadway of the West is really pushing it.

Sure, Mama Mia! has blossomed into a hit, and it looks like Spamalot and The Phantom of the Opera have a chance of success of long runs in the hot desert, but Chicago, Avenue Q and Hairspray didn’t live up to expectations.

The lesson from those shows is that Vegas – like the American public at large – is fickle and can’t always be bothered with something as tiresome as a plot.

Cirque du Soleil has achieved near-religious status in Vegas because it offers up grandiose spectacle that dazzles and overwhelms (almost to a fault), but except for Ka, there are no plots. There are barely even characters.

So what’s a poor little Broadway musical to do in the face of the Cirque juggernaut?

If you’re Spamalot (above), you roll ‘em in the aisles. During my three years in Vegas last week, I saw a lot of empty spectacle, so the stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the Wynn Las Vegas was like an oasis of authenticity.

There’s nothing authentic about the show, of course. As adapted by Pythoner Eric Idle, it’s pure silliness, but the laughs are real and hearty.

John O’Hurley (best known as J. Peterman on “Seinfeld’’ and as the “Dancing with the Stars’’ champion) plays King Arthur, and he’s every bit as good as Tim Curry was on Broadway. In fact the whole cast, which includes Harry Bouvy, Justin Brill, J. Anthony Crane, Randal Keith, Edward Staudenmayer, Steven Strafford and Nikki Crawford, is fantastic.

This is a 90-minute, intermissionless version of the show, and that’s just fine. Brevity is the soul of comedy, and director Mike Nichols has trimmed the show appropriately.

Crawford’s Lady of the Lake is a showstopper, and her second-half number, “The Diva’s Lament,’’ has had to be re-written because the Knights of the Round Table no longer search for shrubbery. The song also mentions Jennifer Hudson and gets off a quick “And I Am Telling You’’ riff.

Mel Brooks’ The Producers at the Paris Las Vegas also gets its share of honest laughs, though this is a show whose time has come — and gone.

This abbreviated Vegas version loses at least five songs (including “Der Guten Tag Hop Clop,’’ “That Face,’’ “You Never Say Good Luck on Opening Night,’’ “Where Did We Go Right?’’ and “Betrayed’’) and doesn’t bother with the Act 2 white washing of the set.

But all the good parts — “Little Old Lady Land’’ with its tap-dancing walkers and, of course, the sublimely silly “Springtime for Hitler’’ – are still present and accounted for. There just seems to be something deflated about the comedy.

Lee Roy Reams (replacing David Hasselhoff) is hamming it up something fierce as Roger DeBris, the worst director in New York, and Bill Nolte is nearly stealing the show as Franz Liebkind, the author of the worst play ever written. Brad Oscar (an original Broadway cast member) is a reliable Max Bialystock and Larry Raben is a worthy Leo Bloom.

The audience seems to have a good time with the show (which even though it feels somewhat empty is still far superior to the lame movie version of the musical), but I was uncomfortable with some of the gay and ethnic humor, like the laughs were more “at’’ than “with.’’

Which brings us to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular, which is the official name of the dead, soulless heap of stagecraft playing at the Venetian.

The $40 million spent to create a Phantom theater and produce a 95-minute version of the 20-year-old show is certainly visible, but when the best part of a show is the crowd of 80 Belgian-made mannequins (above) that sit in the “opera boxes’’ lining the theater, you know there’s a problem.

In trimming the score, Lloyd Webber has done the show a favor. It seems less bloated and self-important now. But the speed of Harold Prince’s new staging turns the show into what it has always threatened to become: a theme park ride.

In the face of Cirque du Soleil’s O and Love, seeing stage smoke and candles come up from under the stage is not that impressive.

The Vegas chandelier begins the show in multiple pieces, and when they fly into place, it looks like the theater is being overrun by UFOs. When the chandelier falls, the effect is truly impressive: it drops at great speed directly down toward the audience. You can actually feel the whoosh of its drop. But that’s the only thrill here.

Broadway veterans Brent Barrett and Anthony Crivello are sharing the role of the Phantom. I saw the Tony Award-winning Crivello, and he made absolutely no impression at all other than a certain proficiency at hitting his marks. The less said about Christine (Elizabeth Loyacano at my performance) and Raoul (Tim Martin Gleason) the better. I’ll just say the beautifully costumed mannequins gave more believable performances.

I feel about Phantom the way I feel about Las Vegas: I hope the last time was the last time.

And now, one last dip into the Vegas waters. Some 25 years ago, Donn Arden, a master of the Vegas spectacular, crafted Jubilee! in the style to which Vegas had become accustomed, which meant topless showgirls, G-stringed showboys, state-of-the-art special effects circa 1981 (Oooh, fire! Oooh, water!) and thousands of glittery, feathery costumes.

Now that’s the kind of Vegas I’m talking about. I loved every super-cheesy, old-school minute of Jubilee! from the opening Ziegfeld-like number to the ridiculous, nearly nude story of “Samson and Delilah.’’ When you fill a glittery stage with 85 performers high stepping to a mostly pre-recorded soundtrack, never mind the nudity: The spirit of 1970s variety shows lives!

But nothing rivals the sinking of the Titanic (following a ridiculous parade of dancing and Bob Mackie costumes that recall a finale from “The Carol Burnett Show’’). After we see the ship sink amid hulking icebergs, the stage goes black. Within seconds, the cast returns, outfitted in red-white-and-blue to sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.’’

The mind fairly reels. From tragedy to patriotism in the blink of a false eyelashed eye.

Today’s Vegas looks like an otherworldly circus and smells like air freshener working overtime to cover up cigarette smoke, greed and desperation. Old Vegas smells like smoke, vice and rhinestones and looks like Jubilee! Now, if only Frank, Sammy and Elvis would return, I might actually think about liking Las Vegas.

It ahd to happen: the battle of the Dreamgirls JHs — Jennifer Holliday (Broadway’s original Effie) and Jennifer Hudson (Hollywood’s Oscar-winning Effie). It’s from the BET Awards earlier this week.

REPORT FROM LAS VEGAS

The celebrated Montreal-based circus re-inventors Cirque du Soleil currently has five shows in Vegas (with two more on the way — one, an Elvis-themed show, the other built around magician Criss Angel).

The only Cirque show I missed this trip was Mystere, the first one (at Treasure Island), but I saw it years ago when I said I’d never be back in Vegas.

Mystere is probably the most similar to the touring shows we see here in the Bay Area. It’s a basic Cirque experience, but the company has expanded its horizons with each successive production.

Still the best all-around show is O (above) continues to be a transcendent experience. The theme is water, and the stage is a 1.5 million-gallon pool with the ability to create a dry stage or a pool deep enough for high-divers to make your heart stop when they leap from their lofty perch.

Nearly 10 years old, O is not showing its age at all and is, in fact, the most graceful and transporting show on the Strip.

The other big Cirque show is Love, which opened earlier this year amid great hoopla. Instead of the weird, New Age-y pop music found in most Cirque shows, this one uses a soundtrack by a rock quartet from Liverpool.

If you’re going to break tradition by using recordings instead of a live band, it’s probably a good thing your band is the Beatles.

It’s also a good thing to get original Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his son Gilles to come in with bounteous material from the Beatles vaults and then remaster, remix and just generally fiddle with the original recordings.

The result is a captivating sound montage that incorporates 29 Beatles tunes almost in their entirety along with bits and pieces of dozens more combined with dialogue by John, Paul, George and Ringo from recording sessions, movies and a variety of sources.

The show — at the Mirage, where Siegfried and Roy used to be before Roy was nearly killed by a tiger — has been described by its creators as a visual rock ‘n’ roll poem, and that’s exactly what it is.

Images of the ’60s, both groovy and violent, get a surreal twist as we tumble through the Beatles songbook played through a sound system that has been designed to make us feel like we’re actually inside the songs.

Two speakers in each seat’s headrest combined with a surround-sound speaker in front of each seat create a very personal sound bubble, and it would almost be worth the ticket price ($69-$150) just to sit and listen to the soundtrack in the dark.

But this is more than an incredible aural experience. Even though you’ll probably remember the songs more than the images, creators Guy Laliberte, Dominic Champagne, Gilles Ste-Croix and Chantal Tremblay have outdone themselves crafting a dazzling blend of dancing, video projections and circus acrobatics.

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” gets a fairly literal translation, with ladies soaring over the theater (a complete 360-degree space) with strings of lights creating a trippy version of deep space.

“Blackbird” uses the two permanent video screens (attached to the wall) and the four moving screens to project images of white blackbirds against a blue sky.

The best circus stunt — the acts here feel less showy and more like fancy choreography than in other Cirque shows — comes during “Revolution”/“Back in the USSR” as hippies and gas-mask-wearing policemen use trampolines to leap over a giant British phone booth.

For those of us not on drugs, the trippy “Octopus’s Garden” number, complete with outlandish creatures from the fictional deep, sure makes us feel otherworldly.

Equally mind-bending are the two enormous, wraith-like paper puppets that soar through “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

My favorite moment of the show isn’t musical. Shadow figures of the Beatles appear projected on an almost invisible curtain. On the ground at the lads’ feet is the famous Abbey Road crosswalk. The dialogue — patched together from various audio sources — is like a comedy routine from the quartet, ending in the crossing of the street made famous on the “Abbey Road” album cover.

Of course the evening ends with “All You Need Is Love,” and if you need a surefire show in Vegas and have already seen O, all you need is Love.

The most troubled Cirque show in Vegas is Zumanity at the New York-New York hotel and casino. The company was charged with creating an adult show that really pushed the envelope of Vegas shows. So that’s what it delivered, but it was apparently too much. Apparently as many people walked out of the Zumanity as stayed, so changes were made, and it was altered.

Based on what I saw, I’m not sure I’d want to see the really dirty version. This is an enjoyably adult show that, though it has certain Cirque trademarks, is a very different experience.

There’s nudity, foul language, same-sex kissing, pretend S&M, a chaste orgy (complete with two audience volunteers) and two really terrific clowns: Shannan Calcutt and Nicky Dewhurst (above) as a freewheeling couple who do funny things with sex toys, bananas and audience members. Calcutt also does a solo bit involving her bare chest, two plastic bags and a bottle of scotch. I can’t really tell you more, but it’s hilarious, and she’s a treasure.

Cirque’s Ka at the MGM Grand was supposed to be the show that redefined the company. This one had a story (in the folksy, fantasy Lord of the Rings realm) and an extraordinary stage that seemingly existed outside the bounds of gravity.

The show is technically extraordinary, and just being in the theater (beautifully themed to look like an otherworldly oil rig or something equally as mechanical and complex) is exciting.
The story, told without words (except for some ponderous opening narration), is reasonably interesting, though many in the critics’ group found it difficult to follow.

I enjoyed Ka, though I would say it falls behind O and Love and, for sheer entertainment value, even Zumanity, which is sort of perceived to be the unloved Cirque stepchild.

Next post: Broadway West? Reviewing Las Vegas’ Phantom, Spamalot and The Producers, not to mention some well-aged Vegas cheese, Jubilee.

Ah, Las Vegas, where even the excess is excessively excessive. Sound redundant and overblown? Welcome to Sin City, baby.

I spent last week in the overheated climes of Southern Nevada for the annual American Theatre Critics Association conference. We saw 10 shows in five days, walked through every towering casino/resort/mall complex, and, while strolling the jammed sidewalks along Las Vegas Boulevard, saw the dancing fountains, watched the volcano spew and tried to ignore the rock ‘n’ roll pirates.

I have come to one conclusion: Las Vegas is a great place…to leave.

That movie Leaving Las Vegas got it exactly right.

It’s a fascinating place, and I enjoyed seeing what it has to offer, but I’m done — at least until the next mega-show opens at the next mega-casino, and I just can’t resist the siren’s blaring song to rejoin the Vegas throngs (and boy, do I mean throngs).

Here’s me overall impression of Las Vegas: bellies. I have never seen so many big bellies in my life. Not even at a theme park. Also, I have never seen so many packs of dudes — you know, guys who look like they need to get back to the frat house before something really bad happens (that movie Very Bad Things also seems to have gotten it right).

Las Vegas, in case you hadn’t heard, has changed. This is no longer the desert oasis envisioned by gangster Bugsy Siegel when he opened the Flamingo in the mid-1940s.
When, in 1989, Steve Wynn opened the Mirage — a much more sophisticated casino resort than Tacky Town was used to — Vegas entered a new era.

Part of that era, it turns out, is entertainment well beyond the level of showroom staples (sorry, Wayne Newton, Tom Jones and Englebert).

With the Mirage came magicians (and hairdos) Siegfried and Roy along with their cast of singers/dancers and white tigers.

Then came Cirque du Soleil.

Next post: All the Cirque do Soleil you can eat.

The big yellow-and-blue-striped tent — the Grand Chapiteau — is heading back to the Bay Area.
Cirque du Soleil’s latest touring show, KOOZA, will have its U.S. premiere Nov. 16 in the parking lot behind San Francisco’s AT&T Park. The show then moves to San Jose Jan. 31.

You can never tell with the quirky Cirque, but this show sounds pretty straightforward — a return to a more traditional circus tradition of acrobats and clowns. The director is David Shiner, a clown well known to Bay Area audiences for his work with Bill Irwin in Fool Moon and for his performance in the early Cirque show Nouvelle Experience.

KOOZA, currently on tour in Canada, centers on a character called The Innocent, a “melancholy loner in search of his place in the world.” Creators promise “bold slapstick humor” as The Innocent encounters The Trickster, The Pickpocket and, most intriguingly, The Bad Dog.

Tickets are $55 to $90 and go on sale to Cirque Club members June 28 and to the rest of us in July.

Visit www.cirquedusoleil.com or call (800) 678-5440.

Theater Dogs is off to the desert.

I’ll be in Las Vegas for a week with the American Theatre Critics Association conference seeing all the shows (Spamalot, Phantom and all the Cirque du Soleils).

If the opportunities arise, I’ll blog from Sin City, but check back in about a week for a full report on the Las Veags experience.

In the meantime, enjoy this little treasure from “The Merv Griffin Show.”

Not for the squeamish or the easily offended.

ACT’s Imaginary Invalid suffers comedy ills
Two stars Broken funny bone

There was abundant laughter in the house when American Conservatory Theater opened a new adaptation of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid. Unfortunately for me, the laughs were not mine.

This kind of period comedy – part 17th-century commedia, part contemporary romp – has become an ACT hallmark. Think of the company’s Tartuffe or The Gamester, both hugely enjoyable, hilarious productions.

The trouble with this Invalid (such an appropriate name) is the play itself. Written in 1673, this was Moliere’s last play, and there’s a sense of exhaustion in it. The comedy, involving a rich hypochondriac trying to marry his beautiful daughter off to a doctor, is tame, and the satire of the medical profession fairly dull.

Director Ron Lagomarsino (who did such wonderful things with The Gamester) is working with a new translation/adaptation by Constance Congdon, who really has done the play no favors by thinning its roster of characters to the bare essentials and stuffing it full of anachronistic dialogue that never melds with the classical structure.

Even at two hours, the play feels padded and – here’s the real comedy killer – forced.

The idea is to jump into this frothy French world and just enjoy the zaniness and various plot tangles. And though there are certainly things to enjoy here, the frothiness feels weighted and the zaniness comes across more as annoyance.

John Apicella is the titular invalid, Argan, a typically misanthropic, miserly Moliere leading man whose character is defined by his psychosis, which, in this case, is his obsession with his pulse, his liver, his spleen and, most importantly, his flatulence.

Scatological humor plays a big part in these proceedings. One character’s last name, de Aria, is pronounced “diarrhea,’’ and a swift insult comes in the form of: “a consummate dumb ass with poop for brains.’’

When poop and fart jokes aren’t actually funny, there’s a problem.

What we have here is a beautiful production of a mediocre play. Erik Flatmo’s set tilts to one side, a common design device to convey a world askew. And Beaver Bauer’s gorgeous costumes are often a whole lot funnier than the characters themselves.

In fact, by the time ACT core company members Gregory Wallace and Steven Anthony Jones show up as a doctor and his strange son, the comedy boat has pretty much sailed, and we’re left to admire their costumes and especially their towering wigs. But by the time Wallace (whose nerdy character looks like a cross between Urkel and Lena Horne) is squawking like a chicken, we realize these fine actors have had better stage opportunities.

Anthony Fusco plays two characters – a money-grubbing notary and an enema specialist – and though his performance is perfectly fine, he’s not nearly as funny as his costumes, wigs and props (you don’t even want to know about the green slime that comes out of his giant enema device).

Apicella’s Argan is more enervating than funny. His hypochondriacal paranoia is perhaps a little too real, and his sudden transformation at the end beyond the realm of believability, even for a slight comedy.

What pleasures there are come from Jud Williford’s sturdy turn as Cleante, a vigorous suitor for the hand of Argan’s daughter, Angelique, played with twitterpated beauty by Allison Jean White (coming to the end of her year-long stint as a core company member).

Williford and White have the right comic attitude, and their interactions buoy the proceedings considerably, especially their improvised opera in Act 2. Williford is an especially adept physical comedian, so he seems to inhabit a much livelier world than the other characters.

Core company member Rene Augesen has moments as evil stepmother Beline, but it’s a one-note mercenary character that quickly grows tiresome.

Nancy Dussault plays Toinette, the beleaguered maid. She’s adorable in her bouncy red wig, and she’s a peppy presence onstage, often garnering more laughs than her compatriots. But what is supposed to be a show-stopping tour de force in Act 2 when she plays two characters at once, fell surprisingly flat on opening night.

There’s a half-hearted attempt to add original songs (Fabian Obispo provides music, Congdon the lyrics), but if these actors can actually sing, they have been prevented from doing so by misguided direction. The songs are along the lines of sing-talking Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche, but they aren’t quite the spoonful of sugar needed to make this comic medicine go down.

For information about ACT’s The Imaginary Invalid, visit www.act-sf.org.

The musical gods are smiling on the Bay Area.

It was announced today that the national tour of Spring Awakening – winner of eight 2007 Tony Awards including best musical — will indeed launch in San Francisco as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway 2007-2008 season.

“When I saw Spring Awakening, I was instantly struck by what a vital leap forward this work represents for the American musical,” said SHN founder Carole Shorenstein Hays in a statement. “The show resonates with audiences young and old and touches everyone. Since this is the kind of work SHN is committed to presenting, there was no doubt we would partner with the Spring Awakening creative team to launch the national tour in San Francisco.”

This means that in a little more than a year, Tony-winners Duncan Sheik (score, orchestrations), Steven Sater (book, lyrics), Michael Mayer (direction) and Bill T. Jones (choreography) among others, will be running around San Francisco whipping a whole new cast of youngsters into shape to tell the story of German teens going through adolescent angst.

“Carole Shorenstein Hays is an incredibly passionate producer who is committed to presenting new bodies of work,” Mayer said in a statement. “I couldn’t imagine a better guardian to launch the national tour of Spring Awakening in San Francisco.”

For information visit www.shnsf.com.