Miss Saigon

That's a good plan for the Hippodrome, but it's pretty much a "performing arts mall" in the city, isn't it? Drive there, park there, see a Broadway show there, get back in your car there and leave there. It sounds like there's a lot of there there, but I don't think so. There isn't even an upscale, theater-crowd restaurant there.Lou Boulmetis, who makes fine hats across Eutaw Street from what would become the Hippodrome Performing Arts Center, is happy about the plan, but he doesn't see a lot of potential for fedora sales.

William R. Cannon Jr.,81, a United Methodist bishop who served as an adviser to President Jimmy Carter, died Sunday in Atlanta. He was elected a bishop in 1968 after 25 years on the faculty of Emory University's Candler School of Theology, as a professor and later as dean. In 1978, he was President Carter's designee to meet with Prime Minister Menachem Begin in Israel.Marco Ferreri,68, an Italian director whose films examined social morality, died Friday in Paris of a heart attack. His films included "Dillinger Is Dead" (1969)

On the most obvious level, the musical "Miss Saigon" is an updated version of Puccini's "Madame Butterfly," set in Vietnam at the time of the fall of Saigon. On another level, however, the show -- at Washington's Kennedy Center for most of the summer -- is about the tinsel-thinness of the American dream.On that level, the musical succeeds in a way its creators -- composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricists Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr. -- may not have intended. And that's taking into account the glitziest and most sarcastic production number.

NEW YORK -- The show-business trade weekly Variety has reported that a top price of $50 had been set for two scheduled plays, but producers of most new non-musicals opening on Broadway this spring said they would not raise their ticket prices.The two plays, "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death and the Maiden," have both signed star-studded casts for limited runs.Variety also reported that a third play, "Jake's Women" by Neil Simon, would have a $50 ticket, but its producer, Emanuel Azenberg, said the top price will be $47.50.

It's been life in the fast lane for the Wilhelmsen family of Baltimore County this past week. Hans Jr., who is a grad student and manager of his father's (Dr. Hans Wilhelmsen Sr.) lovely Sunnybrook Farm, had some excitement. The farm, where the buffalo really do roam, came to life Monday, when legions of limos filled with members of Motown recording groups pulled into the driveway and helicopters with security people hovered above.The groups, managed by Michael Bivins, are at Sheffield Studios this week cutting a record for the Motown label.

Surprise may be a key element in live theater, but there were few surprises among this year's Tony Award nominations, announced in New York yesterday."

THE WILL Rogers Follies," a corn-fed, all-American extravaganza complete with rope tricks, a dog act and long-legged Ziegfeld chorines, marched off last night with six Tony Awards, including best musical of the 1990-91 Broadway season."Lost in Yonkers," Neil Simon's Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy-drama about family problems in a New York suburb during World War II, won four, including the Tony as best play. (''Lost in Yonkers'' is scheduled to play the Morris Mechanic Theatre in the coming season.

SINGERS FOR SUPPER: Maryland's premiere professional chamber orchestra and vocal ensemble, the Concert Artists of Baltimore, are working hard to make sure its benefit scheduled for Friday, Nov. 22, is a bravura performance. It's a black tie concert, auction and dinner. The dinner will be prepared by Chef Fred Lewis, who has come to the Engineering Society from the Center Club. Jon Levinson will auction an array of neat items and WMAR-TV's Beverly Burke will emcee. Tickets for the benefit are $85)

Poor Miss Saigon, now tattered, now old news, Uncle Sam is just about finished with her. ''Vietnam,'' wrote Charles Krauthammer, ''will be retired as the defining American experience of this age.'' Having found a new romance in the Arabian sand, will America finally put my homeland on a shelf?Vietnam as America's metaphor for defeat and lost innocence will be retired to the cemetery where all useless metaphors go to die. It will be replaced by ''The Lesson of Iraq,'' the new metaphor, we hope, for victory over evil, for a renewed sense of manifest destiny.

New York-- Right now, it's about even: the British, 4, the Americans, 4.The British are responsible for four big musicals, ''Cats,'' ''Les Miserables,'' ''Miss Saigon'' and ''Phantom of the Opera.'' The Americans have ''City of Angels,'' ''Grand Hotel,'' ''The Secret Garden'' and ''The Will Rogers Follies.'' We can't count '' Gypsy.'' It's a revival.''Miss Saigon'' deserves all the hype it has gotten. It is spectacular entertainment. Its chief distraction may be the fact that it is a downer, which is no surprise.

In the national touring production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang currently running at the Hippodrome Theatre, a car takes the final bow. And that's fitting. Though the production is based on the beloved 1968 film and features a cheery, family-friendly plot, an insistently catchy score and a cast with unusually strong voices, the show's true star is the auto that floats and flies. Grumble all you want about how chandeliers that plunge from the ceiling (as in Phantom of the Opera) and helicopters landing on stage (a la Miss Saigon)

Tomorrow, Toby's Dinner Theatre, which has been in Columbia for the past 27 years, will open a second location, in Baltimore at the newly remodeled Best Western Hotel and Conference Center in Canton. Featuring a four-course buffet and live orchestra, Toby's Baltimore plans to inaugurate its state-of the art performance space with an 11-week run of Walt Disney's Beauty and The Beast, directed by owner Toby Orenstein. The production, which comes off a six-month engagement at the original Toby's, has been revamped to suit the 300-seat auditorium built in conjunction with the renovation of the hotel.

When it comes to mounting a show, dinner theaters tend to concern themselves with what's functional rather than what's spectacular. But Toby's isn't like most dinner theaters, which explains why spectacle has become rather a way of life at the Columbia dinner theater on Symphony Woods Road. Last season, Toby Orenstein, the theater's director and proprietor, used every nook and cranny of her space to weave the grand tapestry of turn-of-the-century America that is the gripping musical Ragtime.

I'm sort of the Benedict Arnold of the American musical theater," Richard Maltby Jr. kids. The New York-based lyricist and director is referring to his role as the American collaborator on two musicals imported to Broadway during what came to be known as "the British invasion."

Miss Saigon never made it to Baltimore during its decade on Broadway because the production was too big to fit in the local theaters. But now a newer, smaller and, in most respects, improved version has arrived at the Lyric Opera House. Theatergoers who thought this show was all about a helicopter may find the touring production disappointing. But theatergoers who favor musicals about human emotions over musicals about machinery may actually prefer this sleeker Saigon. Created by the Les Miserables team of composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boublil, working with American lyricist Richard Maltby Jr., Miss Saigon is a loose adaptation of the Madame Butterfly story, updated to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

This much, Kym Purling has been told: He was abandoned outside Saigon in the fall of 1972. He was 2 or 3 days old, suffering from a severe case of chicken pox and in danger of dying. This much he can guess: His birth parents were of different nationalities. In 30-year-old Purling, Asian features mix with those of some larger-boned race. Night after night, when Purling sits down at the piano and plays the chords for the song that opens the second act of Miss Saigon, he wonders if the song's title - Bui-Doi - refers to him. The dust of life.

Take a walk with the Wanderers Start off the new year on a good foot by taking a walk with the Freestate Happy Wanderers. You have your choice of a 10K (6.2 miles) or a 5K (3.1 miles) on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. Both begin at the Owen Brown Community Center, 6800 Cradlerock Way in Columbia. Start anytime between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. and finish by 4 p.m. Along the way, take a Harry Potter trivia quiz, if you're so inclined. After the trek, return to the center for refreshments, including homemade soup, bratwurst, hot dogs and beverages.

The new theater season marks milestone anniversaries for two Baltimore theaters. Center Stage turns 40, and Arena Players, billed as "the nation's oldest continuously operating African-American theater," turns 50. The fare at both is eclectic, and, indeed, variety is a keynote at most of the area's theaters for 2002-2003. At Center Stage, variety comes in the form of a blend of old and new, starting with the season opener - artistic director Irene Lewis' new take on J.M. Barrie's classic, Peter Pan, starring Jefferson Mays as the boy who refuses to grow up. Other highlights include the theater's first-ever co-production with Washington's Arena Stage, a revival of the Fats Waller revue Ain't Misbehavin' and two premieres that originated as Center Stage commissions, Warren Leight's No Foreigners Beyond This Point and Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel.

The 2002-2003 season at the Lyric Opera House will be a trip down memory lane, featuring return engagements of a number of Baltimore favorites, spiced up with a few newcomers to town, including Miss Saigon and Some Like It Hot, starring Tony Curtis. "Miss Saigon makes it certainly the most exciting season we've presented," said Nicholas A. Litrenta, president of Performing Arts Productions, which books the series. "I'm equally as excited about Some Like It Hot. It is a completely new musical featuring one of America's favorite stars.

NEW YORK -- They are not people, only pictures of people, and so may barely rate mention as collateral damage in the wreckage that has claimed so many lives. But in an office building crushed last week by the collapsing 7 World Trade Center lie some 35,000 photographs capturing some great moments on the American stage. The archive, inaccessible and probably ruined, was one of the largest collections of photographs of Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off Broadway and regional theater. It was in the offices of Broadway Digital Entertainment, a company that had been preserving videotapes of historic theatrical productions that appeared on television, at 30 West Broadway, a block away from 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed after the Sept.