Short Takes

THEATER

Fruit-Bowl Fantasy

OBA OBA '93 offers more dancing in the aisles than Five Guys Named Moe, more exposed flesh (of both genders) than Miss Saigon, more relentless good cheer than Crazy for You and more Carmen Miranda fruit-bowl hats than any other musical in Broadway history -- except for its predecessors of the same name. Yes, the brainless Brazilian musical celebration is back in all its feel-good glory, blending campy musical novelties, twanging folk songs, a jamboree of gymnastics and color-drenched carnivals when the entire 75-member cast is onstage, shamelessly seeking to please. The show serves a more diverse, multicultural crowd than most of Broadway, and in its bawdy Ed Sullivan-meets- burlesque way, please it surely does.

MUSIC

Deja Vu, Again

An intensely seductive, almost mesmerizing quality in her music has helped Helen Folosade Adu, the Anglo-Nigerian singer better known as SADE (pronounced Shah-day), sell more than 22 million copies of her first three albums. But the sameness of Sade's smooth, samba-scented love songs has always verged on monotony. Now, after a four-year silence, the singer is back with Love Deluxe (Epic), an album that is virtually indistinguishable from her previous ones. The final track, an overly long instrumental, underscores the fact that Sade has no new ideas. Anyone who owns an earlier Sade album would get as much satisfaction from giving it another spin as from buying this one.

MUSIC

Space Odyssey

If Philip Glass met Phil Spector . . . well, they'd probably just stare at each other. But it's conceivable that the composer and the pop mogul might collaborate on a 73-minute 12-second postmodern song cycle you could dance or dream to. That's the symphonic rock album Moodfood, by the British duo MOODSWINGS (percussionist J.F.T. Hood and producer Grant Showbiz). The set punctuates its disco-liturgical luxuriance with ethereal vocals by Chrissie Hynde and a pulsar guitar solo by Jeff Beck. Mixing rap and classical and everything in between -- and then remixing it to suggest a Top 40 radio show beamed from Mars -- Moodfood is a haunting and hummable blast. It's like the sound track for some visionary movie no one has yet dared to make.

CINEMA

Wasted Opportunity

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, is the obvious inspiration for Joe Pesci's Bernzy in THE PUBLIC EYE. Weegee was the ultimate New York City night person of the 1940s. Armed with a Speed Graphic, his car radio permanently tuned to the police band, he roamed the streets photographing urban life and death as he found it. Eventually his pictures made their way from tabloids to museums. A movie based on him might have been a marvel of period realism or a sharp study of the primitive as aspiring artist. Instead Howard Franklin's film involves him in a stupefying tale of government-Mafia corruption and a feckless romance with a nightclub owner (Barbara Hershey). It is, very likely, the year's most stupidly wasted opportunity.

BOOKS

Life at the Bottom

Talk about a bleak look at single life. Jesse, the heroine in Darcey Steinke's erotic pop novel SUICIDE BLOND (Atlantic Monthly Press; $19), is in love with the wrong guy. He lacks commitment and still pines for his first boyfriend, not to mention all the men he picks up in San Francisco's gay bars. Distraught and rudderless, Jesse dyes her hair blond, clouds her mind with large quantities of drink and escapes to the home of Madison, a cruel hooker at a low-life strip joint. Madison sadistically manipulates Jesse and fuels her descent into prostitution. Steinke's characters are unsympathetic and do not conform to the current notion of family values, yet her beautifully crafted prose brings clarity to Jesse's dizzily futile decline into hopelessness.