The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 37

QTfie fiilabclpfita Inquirer 1 1)1 sam 5 Television rj summit, Colin Powell is the interview of the hour. Gail Shister, C8. Capsule reviews of area flatter productions. C9. Daytime TV Grids C9 Night-Owl TV Grid C9 Prime-Time TV Grid C8 Radio C9 Soap Synopsis C9 Lifestyle Entertainment Monday, April 28, 1997 Philadelphia Online: http:www.phlllynew8.com: On Theater Bono and the band launch the Popmart tour, high-tech and heartfelt.

kBy Clifford A. Ridley "3r CAROL ROSEQQ Felicia Finley and Chuck Cooper in "The Life," a show that offers sunny songs to tell a sordid story. A spate of new musicals, but only one success Among Broadway's three big recent arrivals, just "Steel Pier" is solid. EW YORK They come steaming into town every April, whistles blaring and engines at full throttle. Ji'Ihey're the Broadway season's new musicals, racing for berths on a rapidly filling pier.

-In recent vears. most have been revivals. Auoclattd Preil LENNOX MoLENOON A giant fast-food arch serves as an arch icon as U2 performs in front of a giant video screen at Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas Friday, rCRnt tho 100A.07 cpnenn thniiuh hnrHlv ripf). e(ent in retrofitted vehicles (Chicago, Once Upon a Mattress, Annie, the forth-Coming Candide), is notable for the number of brand-new musicals steaming into U2 is pop-smart lort advance of Wednesday's deadline jtor Tony consideration. Tony Award nomi- win he announced next Monaay.

Already berthed and taking on passen- vgcis cue eany ainvois riuy urti, uic wui By Tom Moon INiJUiRKH MUSIC CRITIC AS VEGAS "The question for us is, can you be transcendent under the trash?" rj f4r Vf I Bono, the lead singer of U2, is explaining the central mington conaDoration, and Dream, a revue celebrating lyricist v'ohnny Mercer. Arriving tonight is Myll Xand Hyde, which has acquired a cult fol--Jbwing during an extensive out-of-town rour. But the big three, which dropped an-chor in the space of four days late last week, are Titanic, The Life, and Steel Pier. All three are by old Broadway hands, yet only Steel Pier succeeds. Seeing the trio back to back, you can't escape the conclusion that it does so because it's the only one that truly understands what it's about, Conceived by Scott Ellis, Susan Stroman 'J-ahd David Thompson, the show has a book Thompson, a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret), direction by Ellis (She Loves Me), and choreography by -Stroman Crazy for You, Show Boat).

These smart people have produced a very 'smart show, a humane, touching evening knows exactly where it's going and This is the only town on the planet where nobody's going to notice a 40-foot lemon." Still, the 38,000 fans, 400 press from across the United States and around the world, and an impressive cross-section of celebrities David Geffen, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Trent Reznor, Dennis Franz, Pete Sampras, Quincy Jones, Michael Stipe, Dr. Dre and others couldn't miss this band's unparalleled knack for using the bells and whistles of current computer-based production to reinforce durable themes like love and trust. It might look gaudy, but Popmart is the opposite of hollow spectacle. It's an affectionate smushing together of media and message, a constant tug of war between irony and reverence, an evening that winks at the sordid but somehow manages to locate great See U2 on C12 You could even see Kurt Cobain there, toward the end, annoyed with the expectations of his own following. So the idea was and is to blast out of that." If nothing else, Popmart does blast the once-righteous U2 into a whole different galaxy, a place where the swizzle sticks stand 100 feet high and a burger chain's arch serves as a talisman.

It's a land of icons and Day-Glo logos that give the concept of "pop" twists even Warhol couldn't have imagined: One cartoon depicts evolution from reptiles through apes, and ends with a man pushing a shopping cart. This is spectacle writ XXL, the kind of show only Las Vegas could claim flashy and neony and seemingly vacant. As Bono marveled between songs Friday: "I slept under a pyramid, looked outside my window and saw the New York skyline. theme of the band's new album Pop and the arch Popmart Tour, which started Friday at Sam Boyd Stadium here. "That's Elvis.

Jimi Hendrix, too," Bono said via telephone last week during final rehearsals for the 14-month world tour, which comes to Philadelphia June 8. "When we started Zoo TV, we'd spent 10 years trying not to be rock stars. So then it was let's have some fun with this in a world of plaid and sneakers, there we were in plastic pants. White rock had gotten into such a ghetto, It was so constricted, down to what you could do, say or wear, mess things up by attempting to be v80mething it isn't. The time is 1933; the place is Atlantic.

where a marathon dance contest is Lead singer Bono: "We put people through hoops with our music." See THEATER on C6 Reviews: Opera AVA's 'Chekhov Trilogy' is an opera with American style Phila. Opera Company stages Verdi's lighthearted 'I- I ft time-out from the action to peek into her inner life. But the style of the music is pure American music theater, The three one-acts, which will run through May 11, are formed around short stories by Chekhov, and if there is an awkwardness anywhere in these works, it is in the juxtaposition of so American a musical style upon so Russian a setting. There is something a little jarring about serfs and samovars mixing with sounds as American as Barber, Copland, or Bernstein, The cultural mixed messages are hardef to ignore here than they are in, say, the Louis Malle film Vanya on 42nd Street, which uses Chekhov's Uncle Vdnya as its jumping-off point. The See CHEKHOV on C7 By IiCHlcy Valdcs INIJUIRER MUSIC CRITIC 11 as there ever been a man so PH improbably in love with his I I body as Falstaff? The character absolutely glories in his belly, as much as he glories in his foolhardy seduction schemes.

But the barrel-bellied boaster has more than bulk to engage us; Sir John Falstaff may be foolish but his very humanity is large. He's compelling. Timothy Noble showed the sweeter sides of the charismatic character when he took the title role in the Opera Company of Philadelphia's Falstajf, which opened Friday at the Academy of Music, But I wish the baritone had displayed more of that bravura arrogance the merry wives of Windsor complain of in the opera Verdi and his librettist Arrigo Boito based on Shakespeare. I wish his singing had projected more potently. It's hard to be compelling when you can't be heard in this large, acoustically dry house.

Not that Noble was alone in that regard: Much of the opening-night singing was intermittently engaging rather than consistently rousing, Verdi's final opera is an absolute frolic. It's hard to imagine music more propelled by laughter: girlish giggles and matronly chuckles from quicksilver flutes and boasting trombones whose Friday evening agm. ties are commended here. If this production is still sorting through it See "FALSTAFF" on C7 i. at a By Peter Dobrin INQUIRER STAFF WRITER If ever there was an argument that the line between opera and music theater is one that is best ignored, Richard Wargo's Chekhov Trilogy 'makes the case beautifully.

The three works, given a reprise Saturday night by the Academy of Vocal Arts with uniformly strong casts, comfortably elude exact definition. They are sung through, the way most are, without any dialogue. And yet they are full of songs. Not arias, but songs, which could be lifted from the work and easily plunked down in any cabaret setting the way songs from musicals often are. When Irena breaks into "I Want to Sing" in The Seduction of a Lady, it is a A) Performing the role of Irena in "The Seduction of a Lady" is Sharon Richards..