Usually when I see a play and think that the acting is a little hammy and the script a bit sappy, I have not had a good time. In the case of War Horse, however, which Ginny and Molly and Cara and I saw last Sunday, those objections were overshadowed by the sheer awesome, brilliant theatricality of the production. This play, which is about an English boy and his horse and their experiences in France during World War I, was originally written as a children’s book, and is now being produced as a film by Steven Spielberg. I will admit to pre-judging these two works sight unseen when I say that I would expect them to be soppingly sentimental. And the play, which is running at Lincoln Center, is indeed sentimental (yes, it brought a tear to my eye.) But as you can see from the commercial that appeared on behalf of the London production (below), the puppets that are used to portray the horses (and other things, like a tank) are astonishing. Created and operated by the Handspring Puppet Company, they are life-like, and yet larger than life. Combined with lighting, music and video, the amazing puppets created an affecting, and amazing, theatrical experience.

Cleaning the attic this week, I came upon this trove of photographs of the original cast of Loose Lips, taken during rehearsal, probably in June or July of 1994. The pictures were almost certainly taken by my co-writer Lisa Birnbach. Above, Jimmy Biberi, Sarah Pratter, Ingrid Rockefeller, Keith Primi, Luke Toma and Scott Bryant. Below, Biberi and Toma, probably rehearsing the mob sketch; Ingrid, Keith, Luke and Scott; narrator Mark Smaltz; Smaltz, with Sarah and Keith behind, perhaps setting up the Camilla and Chuck bit; Scott and Sarah, and Scott and Mark. At bottom, the Loose Lips Action Figures that Daniel Carter worked up. I wish we had thought to photograph the packaging.

Ladies and gentlemen, your brand new traffic-less Times Square. Much less life-threatening now.

One of very favorite sites from an ever-rapidly disappearing Times Square: The old I. Miller Shoe Company on the northeast corner of West 46th Street and Times Square, a great shoe-supplier to the stage during the theatrical heyday of the 1920s, when close to a hundred theaters operated in the Times Square theater district. On the second floor of the building, Miller’s proprietors erected statues to his four favorite female performers: Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia, Marilyn Miller as Sunny, Mary Pickford as Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Rosa Ponselle as Norma. The statues are poised below an engraving of the store’s motto: ”The Show Folks Shoe Shop Dedicated to Beauty in Footwear.”

A stranger comes up to you at a bar or in a train station and starts to tell you a story. How long do you last? Five minutes? Could you tolerate him for ten minutes without looking at your watch? How about ninety?

Impossible. And yet seven times a week at Greenwich Village’s Barrow Street Theater, Campbell Scott accomplishes the feat of standing alone on a stage and absolutely captivating an audience. Scott, one of his generation’s very best (and yet, oddly, in an industry where the fortyish leading man is an endangered species, least famous) actors, plays Augustine Early in a play called The Atheist by the Irish playwright Ronan Noone. Early is a reporter for a newspaper in a small town in Kansas, and he brings to his job far more ambition than scruples. One night he rolls into bed with a pretty girl, and the next morning rolls out of it, and into his main chance. Scott is incredible as he discloses to his increasingly fascinated audience how he manipulates the subject of his investigation. He is, by turns, funny, appalling, sympathetic, repugnant, clever, nasty, deceitful and brutally honest. One of the evening’s best moments comes after the play ends and Scott takes his bows. After holding us in the palm of his hand for an hour and half, we expect him to say more, but Scott just looks at us, and then walks away.We have forgotten that Scott is an actor, and that Augustine Early is not real. How often does that happen any more?

Congratulations to Cara and her friends in the Summercliff Players on their excellent performance of Les Miserables. It’s amazing that they were able to pull together this complicated show in just five weeks. It was very, very enjoyable, and I was happy to see that Cara seemed to enjoy the experience so much.

One of the best highlights of summer these last few years has been seeing Shakespeare in Central Park with my daughter Molly. We’ve seen Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona: The Musical, Mother Courage, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hair, and, last week, Hamlet. The productions aren’t always great, but it’s always fun to go and to spend time with M. This year, Michael Stuhlberg gave us a really crazy Hamlet, which is surely a legitimate interpretation, but he really wears out his welcome. Andre Braugher could have displayed a bit more hauteur as Claudius, but Margaret Colin (I’ve always liked her) as Gertrude and Lauren Ambrose as Ophelia were strong, and Sam Waterston stole the show as Polonius. It’s a sign of my advancing age that I identified with Gertrude (why won’t my son grow up and let me enjoy my life a little?) and Polonius more than any of the other characters. (Below, Molly, before the show, right, and taking the late train home, left.)

On a clammy, sweet Central Park Saturday evening, the New York Shakespeare Festival celebrated the 40th anniversary of he musical Hair with the first of a three performance revival. Many in the crowd that was well-mixed between genuine youths and paunchier, grayer veterans youths who were in their salad days when Hair was in its single digits wondered why Festival had decided to throw a three day party, rather than run the show for five or six weeks as one of its main summer offerings. The reason was soon apparent: Hair at 40 is thrilling but boring, exuberant but tedious, fresh but musty. You walk out humming the hit songs, and wondering how 1967, a year so seemingly clear in memory, can seem to have happened so very long ago.

One of the things that’s striking about the show is how poorly shock ages, and how very much this show must have depended on shock for its success. Saying cunnilingus onstage, imitating a hallucinogenic haze onstage, going buck naked onstage, seeing a show where all this happened onstage—these things must have marked one as quite the daring cultural pioneer in those days of yore. Now they are all quite commonplace, if not clichéd; indeed, a great corporate giant like HBO counts on being congratulated for boldly airing programs featuring nudity, profanity, and all sorts of wild behavior—plays from the Hair playbook updated and turned into lucrative home entertainment. Madonna built an enormously successful career by calculating how to take the spirit of rebellion and self-expression and turning it into cash. Sadly, when stripped of its power to shock, Hair is left being a largely bookless review and a collection of songs that for the most part bettered in lyrics and musicianship by whatever happens to be playing on your local Top 40 radio station at this very second. And that includes commercials.

However, the show’s very best songs are wonderful. Hearing the Fifth Dimension sing `Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’’ a million times over the years cannot dilute the impact of the single soaring voice that opens the show with an almost majestic Aquarius. Later in the first act, the song Hair remains a comic joy—clever, funny, exuberant. In both songs, a splendid spirit of triumphalism joyfully explodes from the stage. In these moments, the show’s original spirit shines through, and one shares the sheer pleasure the show takes in being young, in discovering the world anew, in believing one has the power to change things.

And then there’s the show’s ending, in which the character of Claude, a sweet-tempered young man just starting to enjoy life, ends up as a casualty of war. It is unfortunately, as subtle as a brick. And yet affecting. Sobering. Anger-making. It’s sad to see this show and realize that the shock ends, the idealism ebbs, the triumphalism wanes, but the bodies and still pile up. As Sonny and Cher sang so sardonically in the same summer of love when Hair first appeared, “the beat goes on.’’