Short Takes

THEATER

A Dime-Store Ziegfeld

TOM MEEHAN, THE LIBRETTIST OF ANNIE, describes his latest effort as "a brand- new 1948 musical." He means that AIN'T BROADWAY GRAND, which opened last week on the Great White Way, is a deliberate throwback to the aesthetic described in one of its lyrics as "tall dames and low comedy." Full of loud and tuneful music, skimpy costumes, tireless dancers, ageless baggy-pants comics, chutzpah and pizazz, the show celebrates the life and craft of producer Mike Todd, a dime-store Ziegfeld best remembered these days as the third of Elizabeth Taylor's eight husbands. That biographical fact is a little inconvenient for the narrative, which builds to a reconciliation with a prior wife, film star Joan Blondell. But in its corny, cheerily brainless way, the show is a charmer.

THEATER

Out to Lunch

When the two big laughs come from a bathtub-size salad bowl and a food fight, you can guess that the playwright is flailing. Tina Howe (The Art of Dining, Coastal Disturbances) probably meant ONE SHOE OFF, which opened off-Broadway last week, as a poetic comment on the corrosive effects of professional failure on personal life, combined with a feminist fantasy of zipless fulfillment. Instead of an absurdist Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? her tale of two unhappy couples at a fiasco of a dinner party resembles sketch comedy -- wacky whimsies stitched together, abasing an able cast. The one memorable notion: an abundance of unwanted vegetables flourishing everywhere inside, not outside, a crumbling country house.

CINEMA

Triple Play

Comedy short subjects long ago vanished from movie houses; now they are made for TV. TWO MIKES DON'T MAKE A WRIGHT is a trio of such trifles packaged for theatrical release. The Appointments of Dennis Jennings showcases Steven Wright's affectless paranoia ("I remember when I was in the womb; I was over on the right"). Michael Moore of Roger & Me reruns his rollicking contempt for General Motors (and for humanity) in Pets or Meat. The gem is A Sense of History, directed by Mike Leigh. Jim Broadbent, who wrote this deft monologue, plays a squire of Churchillian mien and Sweeney Todd meanness. Not since Browning's My Last Duchess has an aristocrat confessed his crimes with such self-lacerating wit.

BOOKS

On the Byways Of New York

Come on along, fiction lovers, James Wilcox writes your kind of book. GUEST OF , A SINNER (HarperCollins; $20), his sixth novel, is a funny, rambling chronicle of half a dozen people in New York City whom any sociologist would label misfits. Eric Thorsen gets by as a piano teacher and accompanist. His sister sells espresso machines at Macy's. Their father brews trouble. So do the people drawn to the Thorsens, mostly by Eric's good looks -- to which he is indifferent. Wilcox's skill is in taking the reader by the hand into his shaggy narrative and filling it with unexpected turns. Serious things happen in his books (Modern Baptists, Polite Sex), and the characters are not frivolous. Yet -- mostly in self-recognition -- the reader laughs.

MUSIC

The Wheel of Love

THE MOST PASSIONATE COUPLES CAN BEcome the worst of enemies, as love and hate loop into each other like a Mobius strip. "I'll kill you if we can't be friends," ROSANNE CASH sings on her new pop-country album The Wheel (Columbia), and instantly we feel that she understands this love-hate connection, that she might even have lived it. "I'm not looking for your answers," Cash sings on the title cut. "Just to know the question/ Is good enough for me." The questions she raises have a kind of unanswerable rhetorical strength. She sings on the closing track: "If there's a God on my side,/ Why don't she show me her face?" Ironic: religious doubts from a woman with the voice of an angel.