Correction Appended
THEATER
Jesse Green
Betrayal, estrangement, a miraculous denouement: Terrence McNally's "DEDICATION, OR THE STUFF OF DREAMS" has it all - and that's just backstage. First, the play was rejected as unready by the Manhattan Theater Club, which had commissioned it to inaugurate its Broadway home in 2oo3. Then, when the Second Stage Theater picked it up for its new season, there was the matter of the leading role, a man who runs a children's theater company. The role had NATHAN LANE written all over it, but Mr. Lane would be too busy preparing for the Broadway revival of "The Odd Couple" to take it on. Peter Frechette was hired, then withdrew when he, too, was cast in "The Odd Couple." Behold the deus ex machina: Mr. Lane agreed to step in, cementing his reputation as a kind of thespian Florence Nightingale. The ineffably witty MARIAN SELDES (not Matthew Broderick) plays the mysterious older woman who offers Mr. Lane's character a former vaudeville palace - on one terrible condition. Previews begin Tuesday; opens Aug. 18. Primary Stages, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan, (212) 279-4200.
For 16 years the writer-performers who call themselves THE FIVE LESBIAN BROTHERS (Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron) have turned out hilarious, piercing satires that toy with lesbian stereotypes (suicidal girls'-school matrons, rapacious man-haters) and then mercilessly rip them apart. Their latest, therefore, comes as a shocker: "OEDIPUS AT PALM SPRINGS" is a naturalistic play with very little winking. Two couples - one enjoying a fervid intergenerational romance, the other in the throes of "lesbian bed death" since the birth of a son - spend a weekend at a desert resort where the gnomic caretaker isn't the only thing reminiscent of Greek legend. Traditionalists will be happy to note the gratuitous nudity and references to golf, but it will be fascinating to see what happens when the Lesbians play it straight. Now in previews; opens Aug. 3. New York Theater Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, East Village, (212) 239-6200.
FILM
Stephen Holden
Living high on the hog may be the best revenge. But for everyone else, salivating over the lifestyles of the rich and supercilious, revenge is the pleasure of observing spoiled, glittering ninnies make fools of themselves. Few filmmakers have skewered their wretched excesses with the gleeful satirical eye of the director GREGORY LA CAVA (1892-1952), whose work is the focus of a 25-film MUSEUM OF MODERN ART retrospective. The series, which continues through Aug. 15, spans his career from the silent cartoons he made of popular comic strips to his early-1940's movies starring Irene Dunne. 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, www.moma.org.
A master of screwball comedy, La Cava is best-known for the 1936 film "MY MAN GODFREY" (shown Aug. 1), in which William Powell plays a down-at-the-heels gentleman discovered living in a city dump by dizzy socialites on a scavenger hunt; the last item on the list of things to be brought home is "a forgotten man." Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard), the nicer and zanier of two competing sisters, impulsively hires him to be the family butler and promptly falls in love with him.
Under its surface fun, the film's portrait of the Bullocks and their circle is a needling satire of the idle rich. Frivolous, neurotic and frequently drunk, they haven't a shred of social awareness. The Bullock sisters (Gail Patrick is Cornelia, the nastier one) are as vapid and annoying a pair of overprivileged playgirls as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie playing milkmaids.
The 1939 comedy "FIFTH AVENUE GIRL," which reversed the outsider's gender, starred Ginger Rogers as a homeless woman bribed by a millionaire to pose as a gold digger. Other outstanding movies in the series include "SMART WOMAN" (1931, with Mary Astor), the racy "HALF-NAKED TRUTH" (1932 with Lupe Velez as an exotic dancer), and "STAGE DOOR" (1937, with Katharine Hepburn), the adaptation of the Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play.
TELEVISION
Kate Aurthur
Haters of light summer television, your antidote has arrived. FX begins broadcasting "OVER THERE" this week (Wednesday at 10 p.m.), a scripted grunt's-eye-view of the current Iraq war from the executive producers STEVEN BOCHCO and CHRIS GEROLMO. True to FX's emerging take on contemporary life - as shaped by its other original shows like "The Shield," "Nip/Tuck" and "Rescue Me" - the war scenes on "Over There" are bracing and harshly rendered.
Enough of that - back to airy, late-July programming. Three reality shows make their debuts this week. One is "R U THE GIRL" (on UPN, Wednesday at 8 p.m.), in which the two remaining members of the group TLC, T-BOZ and CHILLI, search for a replacement for LISA LEFT EYE LOPES, who died in a car accident three years ago. "SITUATION: COMEDY" (on BRAVO, Tuesday at 8 p.m.) attempts a resurrection of a different sort: contestants vie to write a funny sitcom in defiance of the current thinking that there is no such thing. And in NBC'S "LAW FIRM" (Thursday at 9 p.m.), 12 lawyers compete for a $250,000 prize by trying real cases. The eight-episode series was created by DAVID E. KELLEY, who formerly condemned reality television.
"LAGUNA BEACH," an unscripted look from MTV at rich teenagers from Orange County, Calif., begins its second season with an hourlong episode (Monday at 10 p.m.). When viewers last saw the sun-kissed crew from Laguna, two-thirds of the show's love triangle, STEPHEN and LC, moved to San Francisco to begin college, leaving the alpha female, KRISTIN, to rule the school during her senior year. In this season premiere, Christmas break brings the antagonistic trio back together.
LOGO will show all 13 "WONDER FALLS," an idiosyncratic series about a post-collegiate slacker, beginning on Thursday at 9 p.m.. Fox canceled the show after four episodes in 2004.
DANCE
John Rockwell
Except for one final performance of Shen Wei Dance Arts tonight at the New York State Theater, the Lincoln Center Festival's final week is dance free. Which leaves the Bolshoi Ballet, in its second and final week at the Metropolitan Opera House, as the terpsichorean big gorilla.
This week's programs offer two very different kinds of rarity. Thursday through Saturday is PIERRE LACOTTE'S reconstruction of an early Petipa ballet, "THE PHARAOH'S DAUGHTER" (related article on Page 22). Monday through Wednesday is "THE BRIGHT STREAM," newly choreographed by the company's young artistic director, ALEKSEI RATMANSKY, although he did it before he got his Bolshoi job. The original dates from 1935, with choreography by Fyodor Lopukhov, one of Balanchine's mentors, and music by Shostakovich. Pravda disapproved of the ballet as frivolous; it disappeared from the stage and Shostakovich never wrote another score for dance. Monday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, (212) 362-6000 or www.metopera.org, $45 to $150.
At JACOB'S PILLOW, that ever-delightful aerie in the Berkshires, the MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP will settle in for a longer-than-usual run, starting on Tuesday rather than Wednesday, which attests to Mr. Morris's popularity. The program is one of his usual upbeat mixed bills, and is part of the company's 25th anniversary (hard to believe for a choreographer still thought of in some circles as an enfant terrible). Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday and next Sunday at 2 p.m. Ted Shawn Theater, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Mass., (413) 243-0745, $55.
Finally, PILOBOLUS will begin the third week of its four-week run at the JOYCE THEATER. Disdained by many dance aficionados as gimmicky and commercial, Pilobolus manages only to please its audiences. Monday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 242-0800 or www.joyce.org, $42.
POP/JAZZ
Ben Sisario
Thirty-eight years ago last month, a scruffy and anarchic garage-rock band in Detroit called the MC5 opened a concert there by the free-jazz magus Sun Ra and his band, the Arkestra. Both bands were proudly raucous and uninhibited - Sun Ra, who died in 1993, famously said he was from Saturn, and his music sometimes sounded as if he was - but the young band learned much from Sun Ra's musical fearlessness. "There is no other band that has affected me to the degree Sun Ra and his Arkestra has," Wayne Kramer, one of the MC5's two guitarists, later said. "They opened the door to the New Music."
They will play together again on Saturday afternoon at Central Park SummerStage, but this time the headliner will be the MC5, which now tours as DKT/MC5, featuring three original members: Mr. Kramer, the bassist Michael Davis and the drummer Dennis Thompson. It will be also an anniversary gig of sorts for the Arkestra, which played at the very first SummerStage concert, in 1986. 3 p.m., Rumsey Playfield, Central Park, midpark at 70th Street, (212) 360-2777; free.
True MC5 believers will probably show up with ringy ears; on Friday night the band, with guests, will perform "Kick Out the Jams," its sacramental proto-punk album from 1969, in its entirety. 9 p.m., Northsix, 66 North Sixth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 599-5103; $25.
For those who don't like their jams kicked out quite so loudly but still like them free and outdoors, Daniel Lanois, who has applied his skills as a producer (of some of U2, Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel's most dreamlike moments) to a number of solo albums, will play a rare show on Wednesday as part of the Hudson River Festival. His new album, "Belladonna" (Anti), is a slow glide through a bluesy swamp, something that sounds nice on a Wednesday night in the city. 7 p.m., Rockefeller Park, Battery Park City, (212) 528-2733; free.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Allan Kozinn
ALARM WILL SOUND, a new-music chamber orchestra that in recent years has given brilliant performances of Minimalist classics by Steve Reich and wacky spatial works by Benedict Mason, has lately turned its attention to electronica, with a twist. On its latest recording, "Acoustica" (Cantaloupe), the group performs works by the techno composer Aphex Twin in arrangements for mostly acoustic instruments, including the normal orchestral ones plus curtain rods, cocktail stirrers and other exotica. These fresh, quirky arrangements are the centerpieces of the ensemble's LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL program, "UNREMIXED." Sunday at 9 p.m., the Allen Room at the Time Warner Center, Columbus Circle, (212) 721-6500.
For fans of more traditional programs, the MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL gets under way on Thursday. LOUIS LANGRÉE has made the freelance festival orchestra into a cohesive unit these last couple of summers, and for the opening concert he has two soloists on hand - the soprano RENÉE FLEMING and the pianist STEPHEN HOUGH. The performance aside, what everyone will be wondering about is whether the new stage arrangement - the orchestra will be on an extension thrust into the audience, and listeners will be seated all around it - will be an acoustical improvement. It had better be: the New York Philharmonic is adopting this configuration next season. Thursday at 8, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, (212) 721-6500.
There are also several inviting performances at the MANNES COLLEGE OF MUSIC, which is offering its annual INTERNATIONAL KEYBOARD INSTITUTE AND FESTIVAL through July 31. LESLIE HOWARD, an incomparable Liszt player, plays to his strengths in a program that includes several of Liszt's opera paraphrases, including a few rarities (Tuesday at 8). And MELVYN TAN, an early-music specialist, plays sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert (Wednesday at 8). 150 West 85th Street, Manhattan, (212) 580-0210, extension 4858.
ART
Grace Glueck
Why work up a sweat doing sports yourself this summer when views of others performing can be enjoyed at galleries and outdoor sites around town? To really cool off, you can watch the former heavyweight boxing champion MUHAMMAD ALI work out under water in the 1960's (when he was still known as CASSIUS CLAY) in a series of photographs shot by FLIP SCHULKE for Life magazine. At the time, Clay, not averse to a bit of self-dramatization for publicity's sake, boasted that practicing his powerful hook and jab under water made him "the fastest heavyweight in the ring." The show, "FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY," is on view at the KEITH DE LELLIS GALLERY, 47 East 68th Street, Manhattan, (212) 327-1482, through Aug. 10.
Equally intense maneuvers in water can be seen in LEROY GRANNIS's surfing photographs from the 60's and 70's - said to be the goldern era of surfing - at the BONNI BENRUBI GALLERY. Armed with only a 35-millimeter single-lens reflex camera and boundless enthusiasm, Mr. Grannis, now in his 80's, began documenting the California surfing scene more than 40 years ago and hasn't stopped yet, while continuing to participate himself. His color pictures here show devotees in various stages of the sport, from wave jockeying to proudly displaying their macho boards on the beach. 41 East 57th Street, Manhattan, (212) 888-6007, through Sept. 17.
At the outdoor SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK in Long Island City, Queens, a team of 12 artists has assembled a show called "SPORT." But it is not as simple as that term sounds, since it ranges from relatively straightforward installations like Anne Thulin's three superscale orange spheres, resembling medicine balls lodged in park trees, to works that use sports imagery as vehicle for larger issues, like Satch Hoyt's "Transparent Goal" with a motion-activated soundscape that conveys something of what the artist perceives as racism in European soccer. 32-01 Vernon Boulevard at Broadway, Long Island City, (718) 956-1819, through Aug. 7.