<I>Dreamgirls</I> is the quintessential show about black singing groups in the Motown era, but the composer, Henry Krieger, is white and Jewish. He doesn't apologize for that: <BR>"You know, the Middle East and Israel are right next to Africa," he jokes. "As a Jewish boy in Ossining and Harrison and White Plains, New York, I grew up listening to Aretha and the Drifters and other black singers. Lots of white people were buying Motown records. We're from the same tribe.

Curtain up, light the lights, wrote Stephen Sondheim in Gypsy's showstopping "Everything's Coming Up Roses." "You got nothing to hit but the heights." In fact, in theater, the journey to the heights is fraught with trials, tribulations and reversals of fortune.

The National Arts Club Fourth Annual masked Red Ball last week honored stage, screen and concert legend Kitty Carlisle Hart. On hand to pay tribute in song were Tammy Grimes, Lee Roy Reams, K.T. Sullivan, Mary Bond Davis (Hairspray), Marni Nixon and cabaret artist Anna Bergman.

The indefatigable Miss Hart is 95 and a legendary star of operetta, stage and film ("A Night At the Opera") and a New York society doyenne. She's the widow of prodigious Broadway producer/director, playwright and best-selling author Moss Hart, who died in 1961.

A teacher came to a small town in Kansas where there was no theater. She read some prose and poetry written by an Afro-Asian girl, not yet a teenager, and who has never seen or read a play. "You should write a play. Your style is quite visual," she tell the teen.

For 19 years, Bernard Havard has been the top gun -- Producing Artistic Director -- at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater, the oldest continually-operating theater in the United States. He took this venerable house and turned it into a producing organization with the largest subscription base of any theater in the country. In a tight economy, his company has been prospering. Other regional companies envy the Walnut's scope and affluence. (This is a company that even has its own branded Platinum Plus credit card.)

When Wilson Jermaine Heredia auditioned for Jonathan Larson's Rent, 1996's Tony-winning Best Musical, he was a seasoned modern dancer with parts in two Off-Broadway shows.  When he got the role of his lifetime, being a cross-country runner since high school prepared him for the demanding physical exertion.  However, nothing prepared him for his Broadway debut in the season's hottest property, or the acclaim for his portrayal of Angel, the street musician and drag queen dying of AIDS.

I first met and talked with Jerry Herman when a revival of his most personal musical, La Cage Aux Folles, opened at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater in 2000. We did a question-and-answer feature for City Paper then, and I've continued talking with him, developing this longer piece for TotalTheater.

Riccardo Hernandez hates scenery. Even the mere utterance of the word makes his flesh crawl.  There is just one catch: He is a Tony-nominated set designer (Parade) who has made a successful living at it since his 1992 graduation from the industry-venerated Yale School of Drama. Paradox or perversity? Not according to the 33-year old Argentinean-born Hernandez, who has transmuted his aversion into a style that has brought him a legion of assignments (Bring in `Da Noise, Bring in `Da Funk, The Tempest with Patrick Stewart) other designers would pulverize a million flats for.

Michael John LaChiusa is the first songwriter of our era to have two of his shows debut on Broadway in the same season.

<I>George W. Bush ou le Triste Cow-Boy de Dieu,</I> ("George W. Bush, or God's Sad Cowboy") an improvised satire by director Attilio Maggiuli, is back on stage at his Comedie italienne in Paris: No thanks to two unknown thugs who beat him into unconsciousness Sunday morning, May 4, 2003, four days after the opening. Thanks, however, to moral support as well as the appearance and promise of protection by such artists as Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean-Jacques Beineix, Maggilui reversed his decision to shelve the production.

Nearly everybody knows that Kurt Weill's last name is pronounced vial -- nearly everyone except Weill himself.  He pronounced it with a W -- after he came to America, that is. In 1935 he decided never again to speak German.  He put aside the Deutsche where w's are pronounced as v's, and he told people his name was wile.  Similarly, he abandoned the German music hall idiom that made him famous and started composing in a Broadway style.

While many 88 year-old women are living through their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and kvetching about their bursitis and arthritis, Lu Mitchell is far too busy rehearsing with her band, Catch-23, for one of the 75-plus gigs she does each year at such diverse venues as Pocket Sandwich Theater, Uncle Calvin's Coffee House, Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the Fiddler's Green Festival in Ireland, or the Temple Emanu-El Couples Club. She also performed recently at Richland College and will be the keynote performer in August at Eastfield College's Senior Fest.

Lypsinka is, briefly, back in New York, and beginning January 27, 2000, for two weekends (six performances only), she revives her spoof of a classic Lana Turner four-hankie in <I>Imitation of Imitation of Life</I> at Westbeth Theater Center (151 Bank Street, between Washington and West Streets).

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas is the slogan used by the fast-growing Nevada city. It implies sin and secrecy as it brings ever-increasing numbers of visitors. This report will violate the town slogan and tell what actually happens in Vegas. To East Coast Americans, some of it is surprising. <P>Gambling is the big draw, of course, followed by the hotels and restaurants. What's a real shocker, however, is the extent to which theater has become dominant in Vegas.