Restoring The Norm

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: WILD MEN!

AUTHORS: MUSIC AND LYRICS BY MARK NUTTER; BOOK BY PETER BURNS, MARK NUTTER, ROB RILEY AND TOM WOLFE

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: The men's movement might howl at the moonshine, but George Wendt fans get to chortle once more.

Yes, the pseudo-war chant songs make rap sound melodic. Yes, the plot is thin and predictable and the execution as slick as a frat-party drag show. All that has little to do with why a featherweight send-up of the men's back-to- primal-nature movement ran a year in Chicago and has chugalugged onto off- Broadway. The show offers fans of the departing sitcom Cheers, wondering how to cope without their favorite palookas, a two-hour maintenance dose of Norm, the fat, idle, beer-guzzling oaf with the inexplicably likable stumblebum smirk.

George Wendt describes his stage role -- as an alcoholic commodities trader who has gambled away his marriage, career and net worth -- as "Norm's evil twin." There isn't even that much difference between Wendt's characters. The guys gathered to roast in the tribal sweat lodge and discover the "wild men" within are losers, not predators, full of thwarted yearning and silly sweetness. One moment rises to real wit: a dream sequence in which a neglected son of a rich man summons his father, only to find the old man is as usual too busy and has sent a surrogate.

Two harrowing anecdotes are told with apparent amusement that makes them all the scarier. The group leader recalls falling into the men's movement as a scam after a sexual-harassment case ended his college teaching career. Wendt depicts, with Normesque what-the-hey gestures and overstuffed teddy-bear charm, how he plunged far beyond his means to display machismo to fellow traders in the pit. These men clearly ought to be in search of something. But they can't see the forest or the trees.