AH, THE THEATER - 'Cradle Will Rock' & 'Topsy-Turvy'.

The Cradle Will Rock, the title of Marc Blitzstein's 1937 social- protest musical, now also serves as the name of Tim Robbins's film account of how the show, sponsored by the Federal Theater Project (the theatrical branch of the WPA) and mounted by Orson Welles and John Houseman, lost its stage on opening night when punitive budget-cutting by a hostile and Red-hunting Congress closed the doors of the Maxine Elliott Theater and placed sets and costumes in limbo. The cast marched over to the Venice playhouse, where Blitzstein played his score on an upright while cast members (forbidden to perform on any stage because of union problems) stood up in the auditorium to sing and act. The event was a history-making rouser but proved to be virtually a one- night stand, since the Welles-Houseman unit within the FTP folded within weeks, to be followed shortly by the demise of the FTP itself.

Robbins fictionalizes what was an already incredible event in order to create a portrait of Depression America that mirrors, expands upon, and enfolds the substance of the Blitzstein opus. We are presented with a panorama reminiscent of the novel Ragtime: the machinations of capitalists dealing with Mussolini; the scratchy relationship between patron and artist exemplified by Nelson Rockefeller's hiring of Diego Rivera to paint a public mural; the McCarthy era adumbrated by the Dies committee grilling FTP head Hallie Flanagan about Communist infiltration. Even the future ascendancy of abstract art is forecast when Rockefeller longs for paintings of pure color and form, free of potentially subversive subject matter.

The sweep of the movie, with its virtuosic long-takes and labyrinthine camera pans, echoes the force of the original Cradle, but Robbins also seems to subscribe to Marc Blitzstein's bullying Marxist shallowness. Of course we expect the capitalists to be the heavies in this lefty movie, but why does Robbins conjure up a costume ball at which the plutocrats dress as eighteenth-century French aristocrats? If a guillotine fell on somebody's neck, it certainly wasn't that of American capitalism, so shortly to be revived by World War II.

This movie is stuffed with unexamined information that will puzzle any audience member who isn't a theater student or practitioner. One example: Who is the funny-looking dude with the Caesar haircut and German accent who serves as Blitzstein's artistic-political conscience? Answer: Bertolt Brecht. But even if his name is on the soundtrack (I didn't hear it), will the uninitiated understand how the German's theories of stagecraft influenced American theories?

Worse, Robbins is so anxious to establish parallels between the misadventures of the FTP and the recent woes of the NEA that he presents Hallie Flanagan as a saint (to be sure, Cherry Jones gives great pleasure in the role) because she encourages a socially engaged, basically utilitarian art that is sniffed at by the Dies committee. Yet, while Dies projects a certain sinister force, Flanagan's real foils here are Welles and Houseman, debasingly caricatured by Angus Macfadyen and Cary Elwes as a pair of prancing queens (though Welles was straight and Houseman always dignified), wagging their fingers at each other and screaming "You shut up!" In Robbins's view, apparently, these two are the avatars of Art for Art's Sake, and that is why the filmmaker sends them up and puts them down. This is not only nonsense in itself (Welles's brand of liberalism marked almost all his work) but also vitiates the second half of the film.

For surely one of the key themes of Cradle (the movie, not the musical) is the conflict between the sort of administrator (Flanagan) who, however generously, looks on art as one contribution among many to the ongoing health of the country, versus the totally consumed artist (Welles) who views his art as Dionysian vision that can never be bracketed as an "educational resource." Both positions have their measure of truth, and the conflict between them might have produced true drama. But with a Flanagan embodying pure goodness opposing a Welles/Houseman duo oozing effete aestheticism, the battle has to be one-sided.

It's odd that a movie as panoramic as this one should also be so intellectually narrow-minded. Cradle Will Rock is committed art, all right, but it's committed only to the naive historical revisionism of Hollywood liberals.

Topsy-Turvy, another film about a theatrical opening-The Mikado in London in 1885-proves to be one of the best films of 1999. Its maker, Mike Leigh, is probably further to the political Left than Tim Robbins, but he's too intent on creating multilayered life on screen to find time to wag a pedantic finger at us. His trust that we will be intelligent enough to reach our own conclusions about the Victorian society that embraced the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas is the sign of a mature artist.

At The Mikado's rehearsals, the male actors have on formal jackets and ties and top hats, while the women wear dresses that would not look out of place at a lunch in a good restaurant. The "call boy," who warns the performers about the proximity of their entrances, begs permission of the stage manager before he raps on dressing-room doors and then waits respectfully while performers run through the opening bars of numbers before he gives the time check. When Gilbert stops by on opening night to wish the two lead actresses luck, he is cordial to both but kisses only one; the slighted woman stiffens but then seems to accept the slight snub as her due. Though Gilbert has entrusted her with the lead role of Yum Yum, he cannot bring himself to give her his complete benison because she is an alcoholic and an unwed mother, and she understands this.

What kind of society is it that supports a theatrical community operating within these norms of propriety? Surely it is as stable, as hieratic, as self-approving, and as rule-bound (at worst hidebound) as the mythic Japan that's portrayed in the operetta. But this is precisely the sort of straitened society that produces men such as W. S. Gilbert and Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, and Jerome K. Jerome. The satirical absurdities in their work (Gilbert's "topsy- turveydom") draw their sustenance from the pompous equanimity of the social world they live in.

This movie may seem a little too amorphous in its first half. What do all these facts add up to, we may well ask ourselves, as we learn that the 1880s saw the flourishing inventions of the fountain pen (the "reservoir pen"), the doorbell and the telephone; the slaughter of General Gordon and his troops by the Mahdi at Khartoum; that Gilbert had abominable relations with his dotty parents; that Sullivan was a sexual gourmand? Are we merely being given a guided tour of the Life and Times of G&S? Is Topsy-Turvy the cinematic equivalent of a coffee- table picture book?

Though I don't think all its details line up neatly in support of one theme, Topsy-Turvy comes into focus in the second half when The Mikado rehearsals get underway. In the midst of Victorian splendor and squalor, a small band of men and women are achieving radiance and order through devotion to work. Cocaine, alcohol, promiscuity, vanity, fear of physical and professional decline, gluttony, even varicose veins, all take their toll, but when a piece of comic business falls into place, when the high note can be maintained, when a dance finally achieves the correct style, then, however briefly, a god descends.

And two men who can barely stand each other save each other. Gilbert- despised by his parents, unable to make love to his wife, feeling such a fury at the opening-night audience (and perhaps at all humankind) that he takes a nightmarish walk through the worst slums rather than pace backstage-burrows into his writing as a soldier under bombardment huddles in his foxhole. Gilbert, like a surprising number of eminent Victorians, felt life to be a nightmare with meaninglessness lurking at its center, and his poetry, wittily dense to the point of impaction, both dazzles and cries out for oxygen.

That oxygen comes from Sullivan's music. The composer aspired to Beethovian grandeur and despised himself for writing what he considered fluff. But it was precisely Gilbert's gift for absurdity that tapped the vein of greatness in Sullivan's limited talent: his penchant not for the grand musical statement but for lyrical grace and humor. Allan Corduner's Sullivan, an amalgam of shy sensuality with Victorian dignity, and Jim Broadbent's Gilbert, a bull both undermined and inspired by melancholy, perfectly complement one another.

Unlike Tim Robbins, who serves up so little of The Cradle Will Rock that we can hardly grasp what was so revolutionary about it, Mike Leigh gives us more than half-a-dozen full numbers from The Mikado, and his performers convey what it was like to deliver these enchanting songs for the first time, without the crust of a hundred years of tradition, a word that too often stands for rote taking the place of thought.

Topsy-Turvy doesn't propound any new ideas about the life of the theater, perhaps because all the old ideas are pretty much true: The real children of playwrights and composers are their plays; devotion to craft leaves one insufficient for everyday existence, especially domesticity. But Topsy-Turvy's real achievement is in demonstrating what can never be demonstrated too often: The texture of a work of art validates its ideas, not vice versa. What you take away from this movie is not a bunch of half-baked notions about the social role of the theater, but the sensation of having been in the theater itself and subject to its unreliable but addictive glamour.