Lancelot

The first thing to love or hate about "First Knight" is its audacity. In retelling the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, it takes the sacred canon of Arthurian legend and says cheekily, "No thank you." In this Camelot, they make up a lot and they forget a lot.Among the forgotten: England, Mordred, the Lady in the Lake, Merlin (Merlin!), Lancelot's knighthood, the Sword in the Stone, Excalibur, and any awareness that the story owes an allegiance to tradition. Instead, with the blase insouciance that Hollywood used to treat the classics (famous Hollywood credit line: "A Midsummer's Night Dream," by William Shakespeare; additional dialogue by Sam Katz)

A place where the seasons and weather are forever fixed and unchangeable would probably be pretty dull, but that's the way things are in Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot." It also describes the placid feel of the touring production starring Robert Goulet at the Lyric Opera House.King Arthur's wise teacher, Merlyn, was said to be able to "remember the future," so he probably could have predicted that Goulet, who made his Broadway debut in the role of Lancelot in 1960, would return to the now-classic musical more than three decades later as older-but-wiser King Arthur.

JASON OLIVER C. Smith, a big dumb guy who was tan, died March 30 of lung cancer and old age. He was 13 years old and lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the back section of the minivan, behind the kids' seat.He was the son of somebody or other, but it was probably somebody with a name like Champion Snowfall's Big Brown Bear or Lancelot Smith of Sunnybrook. No one knew what the C. stood for, although there was speculation that, like Harry S. Truman's middle initial, it was an attempt to seem more dignified than he really was.He was called Mr. Smith only when he was reprimanded for eating the coffee cake off the kitchen counter, and when he went to Washington.