Newsday from New York, New York • 97

Blood "turn around," you've guessed that the music, lyrics and much of the book are the work of Jim Steinman, who wrote Meat Loaf's best bat-out-of-hell songs and is writing the score for Tim Burton's "Batman" musical. We cannot know how much of the show is his, and how much came from play-doctor David Ives or from Michael Kunze, author and lyricist of the original German version of the musical based on the cult film and Viennese musical by Roman Polanski. Suffice it to say the romantic songs are generic pop-opera schlock, many of which stick Crawford in more endless music of the night. But the funny ones can be devilishly clever and or adorably stupid. Certainly, the show has a peasant ensemble number about garlic that, except for it being a joke, could be compared in tastelessness with the pig-blood dance from the infamous "Carrie" musical.

There is also "Death is Such an Odd Thing," which sounds a lot like the immortal "Paris Makes Me Horny" from "Victor Victoria." Crawford has a wicked time singing, "A good nightmare comes SO rarely. I'll show you yours if you show me mine." Mandy Gonzalez, as Sarah, has the looks of a Disney princess and the pipes of a good pop screamer. Mark Price is especially demented as Boris, the vampire's slave, and Asa Somers does quality queen business as the obligatory gay footnote. The production is no skimpy afterthought. The design team is from the top of the best lists.

David Gallo gets in plenty of gallow's humor in the village and the gothic castle with candle-lit bleachers to the sky. Ann Hould-Ward's lavish costumes almost make the dream ballet bearable. We do wonder, however, about the modern zippers in Sarah's enchanted boots. Maybe, as the Count warns, "Logic will not help you here." But editing might. Final Quilt entertain a fleeting thought of asking some master quilter to finish what my mother began.

Then I remember her instruction from a dying bed and I wait. When I am at my middle sister's home, I sleep under her quilt, which is much used and in need of repair and especially precious now. "Just the fact that she took the time to do it," Chrystal said. "You remember that pink evening dress she made for you in high school? That's in my quilt. The little polka dots from that dress she made for Tenisha, that's in my quilt.

She took fabrics that were significant, from significant occasions, to put into those quilts." My unfinished quilt is made up of more than and I counted this far 1,548 tiny hexagons. The six-sided shapes are beige, tan, rust, lavender, burgundy and green, mostly solids but with some floral print mixed in. I've no idea of the source of these remnants, and their origins really do not matter. What is important is that the hexagons are two-thirds of the way to completion, stitched together by handheld needle and thread, the old-fashioned way. The deal struck with my mother and hovering still over my head requires that I set aside a right time for finishing what will be our shared handiwork, securing the lining that gives the quilt weight and provides warmth, and sealing each of its open edges.

I figure that I will get there a few stitches at a time. B3 G-Rated Danny 'Adult' role aside, Aiello aspires to Yeats By Blake Green Having made by his own count more than 70 films, STAFF WRITER aybe it's guilt by typecasting, but wouldn't lo, you self a-heart, the just "big who assume low-lifes galoot" specializes somebody and as he in like Mafiosa describes Danny toughs-with- types, him- Aielwould have at least a nodding association with pornography? Not so, maintains the burly actor with the strangely sweet smile. Even the title of his current Off-Broadway play, "Adult Entertainment," makes him wince and launch into a lengthy disavowal of even the most vicarious connection with a dirty movie be too that winds up only a hair short of inspiring Shakespeare. Or at least his line about protesting too much. Shakespeare, in fact, is what Aiello insists he'd like to be playing but back to that later.

First, he says after pleading "don't think I'm prissy" he's in this play, at the Variety Arts Theatre, because of admiration for Elaine May, the playwright, Stanley Donen, the director in the and Julian Schlossberg, one of the producers. "Ordinarily when I get a script with a title like 'Adult I don't even open it," Aiello continues. "But I read it and it's so much more than the title." Specifically, it's about the people in the porn business at a public-access television station (suspiciously like Manhattan's Channel 35) who decide to make a film with literary pretentions. (No, not Shakespeare.) Aiello plays Guy, the director, "a jack-ofall-trades who's the kind of guy you need around." He doesn't take his clothes off; he keeps putting on gold chains. "He's funny," says Aiello, the audiences' laughter an unusual ex- Except that Elaine May wrote it, he perience for an actor who "usually plays dramas." Heavies are "used to silences." It was years, he says, before he was even offered a comedic role: the wimpy boyfriend Cher jilts in 1987's "Moonstruck," the "kinda guy who'd get slapped in the face in my neighborhood.

But I must admit it was good for my career." As someone who backed into show business (he was a bouncer at a comedy club and made his first film in 1973 when he was 39 and his Broadway debut two years later), Aiello considers himself extraordinarily lucky, professionally "the movie offers are always there" and with the women in his life: his mother who raised him in the Bronx and he describes as "popelike," and his wife Sandy, who's been with him 46 years. (They have four children.) Part 2 Aiello has returned to the New York stage for the first time in almost a decade, driving into the city daily from his home in Saddle River, N.J. It's as far from his native New York as he wants to get. "I'm a four seasons kinda guy," he explains his rebuff of permanent residency in movieland. He's a partner in the independent Stapleton Studios on Staten Island.

While he says he's not going to start turning down the blue collar sort of roles the public has come to associate with his talents, he insists "I'm capable of doing Newsday Photo Ari Mintz might not have read "Adult Entertainment," says Danny Aiello. far more" and quotes the observation of Harold Clurman, the late director and critic: "Every character he plays has Shakespearean qualities." Now comes the part about doing the bard: "When I first came on the scene," Aiello says, "I was a man in a hurry and I didn't want to do the classics, I wanted to do things many people came to see. Now I want to do Shakespeare." He also wouldn't mind W.B. Yeats. "Doing five minutes of him would be overwhelming to me." WHEN "Adult Entertainment," a comedy by Elaine May, is in previews and opens Wednesday at the Variety Arts Theatre, 110 Third Manhattan.

For ticket information and performance times, call 212-239-6200. 'AVASMEN AVAS3NI 838W3030 a 2002.