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Arts & Entertainment Preview - July 1997 B Y   A U S T I N   B A E R   &   N A N C Y   D A L V A Much Ado About Broadway You want Broadway to be a mob scene at showtime, and it is, especially now. As of late April thirty-four shows were running, setting a record for the past ten years. My best-everything vote goes to A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen's pitiless anatomy of a marriage, imported from London for a limited run ending July 26.   Janet McTeer in A Doll's House In photographs the revival would no doubt look like a scrupulous period recreation. In the theater what registers is a quality of truthfulness, a sense that the drama is being not interpreted but rather revealed. For noble reasons, Nora Helmer has forged a signature on a loan document. As the curtain rises, she is dancing as fast as she can, keeping current with her payments and maintaining, at incalculable personal cost, a façade of giddy domestic bliss. There are other ways to approach the role, but for the time being Janet McTeer's brave, breathless performance renders comparison irrelevant. As drama William Luce's Barrymore ranks somewhat below Ibsen, but as a pretext for extreme acting by Christopher Plummer this one-man impression of the late matinee idol does the job handily. Unseen at press time, the worthy contender Stockard Channing bares her fangs as Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, challenging the celluloid ghost of Bette Davis. (For tickets to all these plays call 212-239-6200.)   Forbidden Broadway For further proof that happy Broadway days are here again, look in on Forbidden Broadway Strikes Back!, at the Triad on the Upper West Side (212-799-4599). It seems like only yesterday that Gerald Alessandrini's long-running spoof had to close for lack of inspiration downtown. Now it's back with a vengeance, well stocked with fresh material such as "Shall We Boink" (baring the subtext of The King and I) and Master Class, with Patti LuPone's Maria Callas giving the business to Sunset Boulevard's Glenn Close and Evita's Madonna. You don't need to have seen the originals to get all the jokes (who saw State Fair?), but sometimes it helps. The relentless twenty-minute parody of Rent, however, is about as funny as the real thing. --A.B. Afoot in America The Paul Taylor Dance Company I love to go to performances in the summer, when the days are long and the sky turns white before it turns black. You go in, and it is day; you depart, and it is night, velvety and magical. Outdoors, better yet, you can watch that most beautiful time of day, dusk, and see the stars come out over the dancers. The grand old ladies of dance festivals are the American Dance Festival, in Durham, North Carolina (June 12-July 26; 919-684-4444), and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, in Becket, Massachusetts (June 24-August 24; 413-243-0745).   Brown's Company Both have terrific offerings this year: at ADF the companies of Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown are best bets, and Pilobolus is the perennial favorite; at the Pillow, I recommend especially the companies of Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, and Elizabeth Streb. Out west are two Colorado festivals: DanceAspen (July 1-August 23; 970-925-8400, with Paul Taylor again the hot ticket, and other companies ranging from Martha Graham to the National Ballet of Caracas) and the Colorado Dance Festival, in Boulder (July 6-August 3; 303-442-7666). Other notable events include the Huntington Summer Arts Festival, on Long Island (June 20-August 17; 516-271-8442), the Maine Festival, at Thompson's Point Beach, near Brunswick (July 31- August 3; 207-772-9012), and the Arts Festival of Atlanta (September 5-21; 404-885-1125). --N.D. A Stellar Performance in Print Even among the most fervid performance addicts there are those who consider the ideal summer art to be the proper placement of a hammock, and the entertainment of choice to be a book. I have on my desk the perfect volume for balletomanes and balletophobes alike: Julie Kavanagh's Secret Muses, a biography of Sir Frederick Ashton, the great English choreographer. Kavanagh--whose marvelous gifts include a wily grasp of the novelist's narrative devices--conveys her profound scholarly knowledge of Ashton (whom she knew late in his life, and whose papers she supplemented with a truly staggering amount of research) in a beautiful, decidedly English manner. Part social history, cultural history, dance history, collection of letters, and photo album, Secret Muses is, against all odds, a real page-turner. At the beginning of the book I thought I had fallen into Trollope (as when Kavanagh describes Ashton's mother as "a pretty girl from Wooky Hole"); by the end, where Sir Fred is tangoing with the Queen Mother, I had segued into Angela Thirkell territory, so clearly marked by both sentiment and wit. Only now, in telling about it, have I realized that Kavanagh's style is, in fact, a dead ringer for Ashton's own. --N.D. Austin Baer is a writer based in New York. Nancy Dalva is working on a series of essays on Merce Cunningham. Go to ... Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.