Patti LuPone on Broadway.

Mr. Bloom is NR's theater critic.

THOSE of us who arrived for Patti LuPone on Broadway without proper visas were diagnosed according to our degree of benightedness and assigned seats adjacent to fervid LuPonistas. You can recognize these gentlemen (they are rarely females) by their tendency to convulse on the money notes, tear up when Miss LuPone sings to "cruel Johnny," and make involuntary hand gestures as soon as the piano introduction is into its second bar. I was assigned to a LuPonista First Class, who told our row where he had first heard Patti sing each page of the LuPone songbook.

Unfortunately, despite this level of scholarship, he could not explain the pants suit. When the curtain rises, Miss LuPone sings a few bars from the deep shadows, then emerges in a white blouse that resembles a frilly lampshade and black velveteen pants that exaggerate her pear-shaped bottom beyond what is normally acceptable at Long Island bridge clubs. The only nod the diva makes toward Broadway glamor comes when a quartet of black harmony singers wrap her in a giant yellow feather boa while singing "Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chick- ens."

Somewhere between the Iran hostage crisis and the L.A. earthquake, I seem to have missed Patti LuPone. I missed her legendary star turn as Evita Peron. I missed her as Fantine in Les Miz, as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, and as the original Norma Desmond in the London production of Sunset Boulevard. To devoted LuPonians, a cultural disaster occurred when Miss LuPone was fired and replaced with Glenn Close just before the show opened in New York. This tragic event is regarded as a theatrical equivalent to the Kennedy assassination: a diva in her prime, in the most glorious role of her life, struck down before her greasepaint was dry. Andrew "Lee Harvey" Lloyd Webber is so reviled by her fans that he is never mentioned in the current show, even as she sings one after another of his hits. She makes several not-so-thinly-veiled references to the firing, all in that Las Vegas "show patter" kind of way, and at one point trots out her Norma Desmond costume, one of many she says she has stolen (wink, wink) from various theatrical producers. This is about as profound as the show gets.

Even when Miss LuPone does her hits, like "I Dreamed a Dream" (one of the most heart-rending songs of the stage) and "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina," there is something cold and mannered at the center of that tremulous vibrato. Perhaps that's why the show is chock-full of lighting effects (including the fashionable practice of letting a blinding spot pass across the eyeballs of the audience), bits with jolly back-up singers, and blurry slides projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. When she flutters a fan across her overly lipsticked mouth and launches into "Heat Wave," it feels like Tuesday night in a Greenwich Village cabaret. And maybe that's the point. This is a backstage show, for those fascinated with backstage stories. Old-fashioned guys, like me, who still want to be swept away by a musical fiction, are left thinking that maybe we would have been better off a few blocks south at Sunset Boulevard, where, if Miss LuPone had forgiven Lee Harvey Webber, she would be holding court now. For in the theater, an assassination can be reversed.

Nixon haters and Nixon lovers will feel equally shallow in the presence of Gerry Bamman's portrayal of the now-mythic President on the night before his resignation, in a remarkable off-Broadway play by Russell Lees called Nixon's Nixon. This fictional version of a two-hour meeting between Nixon and Kis- singer that took place that night (but was not taped) sails from the farcical to the tragic, stopping at every emotion in between, and when Bamman takes his final bow, on the tiny stage of the MCC Theatre, the amazing thing is that the audience realizes, for the first time, that he looks nothing like Nixon.

Pomp, Duck, and Circumstance is the world's largest dinner theater, conducted in a 1930s circus tent that was imported by entrepreneur Dieter Esch, former resident of German prisons (for financial misdealings) and current owner of the flashy Wilhelmina modeling agency. For 150 bucks a person, you get to sit at a table for eight, where you are assaulted by 85 comedians, musicians, acrobats, trapeze artists, fake waiters, and real waiters while you consume a four-course meal (hence the duck in the name) and try to puzzle through a con- voluted farce involving treachery, ineptitude, and, of course, love among the employees. If having a soup plate thrown to you while watching a mid-level European circus act appeals to your sense of humor, by all means head to the park at 53rd Street, overlooking the Hudson, and order some cheap white wine before the whole troupe decamps for Las Vegas, where I'm sure they will feel much more comfortable.

Elsewhere in Manhattan: The impossibly tall Jordan Baker, a mesmerizing actress wherever she appears, overwhelms the rest of the cast of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, a Circle in the Square revival worth seeing if only for Miss Baker's unbearably emotional take on the haunted lobotomy candidate Catharine Holly. . . . From London comes Tom Courtenay in Moscow Stations, a one-man play based on the dead-end life of alcoholic Russian cult novelist Venedikt Yerofeev. It's one of those things that try to say something about Communism, brotherhood, art, life, and the cosmos, and it's all very Russian, and it's all very British, but the philosopher/drunk is a conceit not readily saleable to an audience that has just trundled in on subway cars full of such characters.