Vaudeville

For pure, unadulterated comedy and bright, ear-catching music, Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" remains hard to beat. The score alone can make us smile - delectably nasty sound effects coming from the violins as slimy Don Basilio sings about the art of spreading malicious gossip; the slow-motion tune that conveys the characters' confusion during the Act 1 finale; the rolling melody that gets tossed around as everyone tries to bid Don Basilio goodnight in...

As source material for a musical, "The Wild Party" would seem like fairly obscure stuff. Yet the hard-edged, book-length poem by Joseph Moncure March spawned two musicals in New York this season. The Manhattan Theatre Club's off-Broadway production, written by Andrew Lippa, closed April 2. The New York Shakespeare Festival's Broadway rendition, by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe, is vying for a Tony Award tonight, although the show was in danger of closing before the nominations were announced The poem behind all this recent interest was written in 1926 by the man who had been the first managing editor of the New Yorker.

When you combine the old comic master, Moliere, and the New Vaudeville clown, Bill Irwin, you're bound to tickle the funny bone, and the Vagabond Players' production of "Scapin" does just that. Working with playwright Mark O'Donnell, Irwin adapted Moliere's commedia dell'arte-inspired 1671 farce as a vehicle for himself. And though Mark E. Campion proves somewhat stolid in Irwin's role of the scheming servant, Scapin, an Irwin-esque spirit of anarchy surfaces in the looser, more madcap manner of Tony Colavito as his fellow servant, Sylvestre.

IS IT A good idea to spend millions in taxpayers' money to turn Baltimore's old Hippodrome Theater into a 2,200-seat cultural center?Members of the House Appropriations Committee, touring the abandoned Eutaw Street vaudeville house recently, voiced reservations. They worry that the projected $35 million in renovation costs might go much higher. They also wonder whether the rundown neighborhood would scare away potential theater-goers.Their concerns are justified. Yet legislators ought to give free rein to their imagination and examine the Hippodrome project in a wider context.

AT FIRST, the idea sounds preposterous. Who on earth would venture to the old Hippodrome if the once-famous Eutaw Street vaudeville house were renovated and reopened as a state-of-the-art theater for large-scale Broadway productions? Even in the daytime, the area is foreboding.Yet the embryonic plan has merit and promise. A first-rate performing arts center could easily -- and relatively cheaply -- be assembled at the Hippodrome, taking advantage of an adjoining garage, another nearby theater and access to mass transit and interstate highways.

As I watched Talent Machine's "Santa's Frosty Follies" on Saturday night at St. John's College, I was overwhelmed by the numbers.Forty-five young people ages 3 to 19. Two full acts bulging at the seams with 27 production numbers, many of them sporting multiple songs, each requiring its own choreography and staging.Costume changes? Don't ask. I lost count about a third of the way through Act I."Follies," suffice to say, is a Christmas vaudeville show mounted on the largest possible scale.It's bright, pizzazzy, high-kicking stuff.

"Man on the Flying Trapeze," by Simon Louvish. Norton. 56 pages. $27.50.The book's title is that of the author's favorite W.C. Fields film, made in 1935, or, more properly speaking, remade from the 1927 "Running Wild." Louvish produces scripts in Fields's own hand that prove that the characters Fields recycled from vaudeville to film to radio were meticulously reworked and fine-tuned over decades by Fields.He loved Dickens, got to play Micawber in "Great Expectations" but never realized his dream of playing Pickwick.

For a dead art form, there's a lot of life left in vaudeville.A turn-of-the-century theatrical experience that put the emphasis not so much talent as personality, exuberance and speed, vaudeville may have been the ultimate example of giving the people what they want. Singers, dancers, comedians, sword-swallowers, plate-spinners: Everyone was welcome on the vaudeville stage, as long as they could keep the paying customers happy."Vaudeville," an "American Masters" special airing at 8 tonight on PBS, is fleshed out with vintage film clips (many from the silent era)

Coin and currency showDiscover the challenge of coin collecting at the Baltimore Coin & Currency Show at the Convention Center this weekend.More than 600 dealers from all over the country will present their unique, rare and valuable coins and paper money. Buy, sell and trade, sit in on educational programs and learn all about the history of money.The show will run 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday at the Baltimore Convention Center, 1 W. Pratt St. Free. Call (301)

George Burns, the beloved cigar-puffing comedian whose career spanned vaudeville, radio, movies and television, died yesterday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.Mr. Burns, 100, was the foremost comic "straight man" of his time in a partnership with his late wife, the scatterbrained Gracie Allen. He began a new solo career in show business when he was nearly 80.When he was well into his 90s, Mr. Burns announced with his customary brio that he had arranged to celebrate his 100th birthday, on Jan. 20, 1996, with an engagement at the London Palladium.