Capeman.

A director has but one task," the director Tyrone Guthrie once remarked; "to make each rehearsal so amusing that the actors will look forward to the next one." While most directors (and actors) would probably disagree, sometimes the making of a play intrigues us more than the play itself.

Witness, for example, the premonition that heralded Paul Simon's musical The Capeman, which opened in January and closed in March. As the first theatrical venture of the celebrated songwriter, this biography of the murderer Salvador Agron attracted notice from its inception. Other celebrities who came on board brought still greater visibility: Derek Walcott, collaborator on book and lyrics, is a Nobel Prize-winning poet; Capeman's leads - Ruben Blades and Marc Anthony - are superstars in the world of salsa music.

Nevertheless, noting that Simon's production team had little experience with Broadway's harsh realities, pessimists glimpsed trouble ahead. The cynicism increased when Simon dismissed his first two directors and hired as replacement Capeman's choreographer, Mark Morris, who had never directed a musical before. A November article in the New York Times Magazine ruthlessly documented Simon's micromanaging perfectionism. When the premier was postponed three weeks, when veteran directors were rumored to be offering advice, and when one of those (Jerry Zaks) was hired for a last-minute overhaul, gossip flew. As relatives of Agron's victims lined up demonstrations to protest what they saw as glorification of a murderer, the situation began to resemble a soap opera custom-tailored for readers of Variety.

Ultimately, it couldn't be helped: The Capeman had to open. Audiences who ascended to the Marquis Theater - a soulless auditorium situated inside a hotel - witnessed a failure of breathtaking proportions. Simon and his colleagues had taken a story that was, at best, fleetingly dramatic, and systematically deflated it. A misshapen script, parked like a tank across the inroad of our sympathy, made Agron by turns inscrutable and boring. Lyrics of stunning banality - "It's the time of year when I shop for clothes" is the text of one rousing chorus - might belie Walcott's contribution, were his name not on the program. Fault rests with the interpreters, as well as the creators: betrayed by shoddy direction, the actors stood awkwardly on the stage, hands by their sides. With the exception of the odd set, the highlight of this embarrassing production was Simon's score - innocuous global village pop with a Latin twist.

Acts 1 and 2 foundered in different ways, deftly thwarting the talents of both Anthony, who played Agron aged sixteen to twenty, and Blades, who played him as an adult. Agron emerged as a cryptic figure in act 1, which sampled his early years in Puerto Rico, his family's relocation to New York City, his initiation into a gang, and the senseless murder in a basketball court of two teen-age boys. Bad pacing obscured the character; overemphasized anecdotes from Agron's childhood - when he apparently had no personality - led to the disastrously rushed sequence in New York, which glided over his delinquency and the murder without revealing his feelings, qualms, or understanding of the world.

Making the character still more remote, the script stressed destiny over free will. In an initial scene, a santero (Ray De La Paz) sees crime in the future of seven-year-old Agron (Evan Jay Newman). Later, the onstage presence of Blades, as the repentant older criminal looking back on youthful errors, underscored the irreversible quality of the past. By hinting that Agron was passively submitting to destiny, rather than acting as a moral being, and by giving us the Cliffs Notes version of his adolescence, the play effectively squashed the drama of the murder scene. The cheery do-wop music that accompanied the stabbing didn't help either.

Convicted of the killing, the sixteen-year-old Agron is sentenced to death. Nelson Rockefeller commutes the sentence, with the unfortunate consequence that Capeman has an act 2. Jumping ahead seventeen years, the musical slows down enough to acquaint us with the wiser, self-educated protagonist, whose adventures have limited interest at this point because he is locked in prison. An epistolary romance with a beautiful Native American leads nowhere. A quixotic dream sequence, whose billowing pastels give the stage the feverish look of a psychedelic rock video, tug dutifully at the theme of freedom but trail off. Finally, the reformed prisoner is released, but the play fizzles to an end so anticlimactic it seemed like a practical joke.

A few noteworthy visual images did buoy above the tide of blunders. In particular, set designer Bob Crowley devised a remarkable mural to represent the prison: the heads and shoulders of identical mannequins jutted out of a white wall, so that viewers felt they were looking down on a jail cafeteria. Other compositions, though interesting, were less effective: a statuesque, blue-robed figure representing the biblical Lazarus (Nestor Sanchez), whom Agron apparently revered, wandered onstage periodically, to no metaphorical purpose. And the directors erred greatly in incorporating historical newsreels which made the play's own action seem all the more vague and lifeless.

How did so many distinguished artists concoct such a calamity? The spectacle at the Marquis Theater, and the preceding press reports, suggest that Simon put too little faith in his collaborators; The Capeman's score seems to have been written first, and the drama patched in afterwards. Staging a play, and especially a musical, requires the coordination of talents: if the production team does not work in concert, giving the proper weight to direction, script, design, and all other elements, they risk producing an ungainly mess.

A marvelous satire of theatrical collaborations recently lit up the Judith Anderson Theater, when the Gilgamesh Theatre Group mounted the play Black Snow. Adapted by Keith Reddin from the comic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, Black Snow depicts the woes of a fledging Soviet writer who turns his epic into a play for a prestigious theater company. Bulgakov's writings, including his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, were repeatedly banned by the Stalinist regime; his relationship with the theatrical establishment was discordant as well. Drawing on his experiences with the Moscow Art Theater, he packed Black Snow with grotesque bureaucrats and vicious artists, but his novel still captures the intoxicating atmosphere of the theater world.

In an exuberant production directed by Ralph Buckley, The Gilgamesh Theatre Group hit on just the right mixture of hilarious, deadpan comedy and Kafkaesque foreboding. Popping on and off a frugal set whose red surfaces recalled constructivist art, the superb cast juggled several roles apiece (except Christopher Duva, who played the hapless Sergei throughout). Among the brilliant characterizations were John Hines as a business manager with a crazed look in his eye, and Greg Stuhr as the mysterious nighttime visitor who vows to publish Sergei's novel if three words - "apocalypse," "archangel," and "devil" - are deleted.

Sergei suffers when an imperious director (based on the legendary Konstantin Stanislavsky - the role was played by Sal Mistretta) rewrites the play so as to eliminate all the gun shots. He suffers when weeks of rehearsal are frittered away on acting exercises involving imaginary bouquets.

And yet, despite everything, he still feels drawn to thespian life, "pinned to it like a beetle to a piece of cork." The mystery of the theater transcends the squabbles and intrigue of individuals; it exhilarates, tempting initiates and the foolhardy to continue staging plays, no matter how tempestuous the process.