Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Through March 28 The last time I saw Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Mr. Sondheim was in the house and stepped out on stage during the final curtain call to accept his share of the applause, which was rowdy by black-tie standards. What must it be like, I wondered aloud, rather starstruck myself, to wake up every morning and know that you wrote that show?

Sondheim, of course, has written a lot of memorable shows during his prolific career as a composer and lyricist and racked up shelves full of awards, but there's just something about Sweeney that gets you, so that even three weeks after the show you're still singing the opening chorus of this penny dreadful tale under your breath as you walk down the street: "Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd/ His skin was pale and his eye was odd/ He shaved the faces of gentlemen/ Who never thereafter were heard of again?"

The New York City Opera opened a run of the show last Friday, with matinee and evening performances through the end of the month. The fact that an opera company is performing what was originally a Broadway musical I think says a lot about its depth and reach. The cast members for this production rotate, but the big stars are leading NYCO baritone Mark Delavan in the title role and Elaine Paige (often referred to as "the first lady of British musical theater") as Nellie Lovett, the barber's partner in crime.

If you've never seen even an awkward college staging of the show, allow me to crash you through the plot line (though in typical operatic fashion, relationships get a bit crossed by the end). Basically, Todd has gone a little crazy after he is unjustly imprisoned and his family is destroyed by an evil judge. Vowing revenge, he goes back to his trade as a barber, renting rooms above a bar whose owner serves her patrons "the worst meat pies in London." When Todd starts slicing the throats of his customers upstairs, you can guess how the bodies disappear. Anyway, he locates his daughter, who is alive and in love with a young sailor, but that same judge is out to marry her himself. Plenty of spilled blood and tragedy ensues, with moments of dark humor.

I don't want to give too much away, but I don't think I'm ruining anything by saying there's no rainbow-and-wedding ending here. So if you usually get nauseous over the cotton-candy sweetness of the stereotypical Technicolor musical, you need not fear this show. But by the same token, though the score requires plenty of skill on the part of the singers, who must clearly deliver Sondheim's notoriously dense lyrics, the style is direct and in English, not stylized and ornamented, as you might expect from an opera. Despite the morbid events, the music is fascinating?intricate as a jigsaw puzzle. Sondheim gives up quite a few moments of beauty amongst all the horror, including the standards "Pretty Women" and "Not While I'm Around."

Sweeney Todd won eight Tony Awards when it opened in 1979 and still leaves 'em standing in the aisles. Long after we are finally allowed to forget shows like The Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King, my guess is that Sondheim's take on this classic Victorian tale will remain on the stage.

New York State Theater, 20 Lincoln Center, 212-870-5570, call for times, $25-$110.

?Molly Sheridan

Peter Boal & Company Tues.-Sun., March 16-21 In a deserving sideshow to the epochal Balanchine Centennial, one distinguished New York City Ballet principal dancer?and three of his cohorts?present a week of polished contemporary dance at the Joyce Theater.

Admired for the purity and depth of his performances, Peter Boal has enjoyed a rare 20-year reign as an NYCB darling, with leading roles in more than 60 ballets and close work with Balanchine, Peter Martins, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp and others. An early indication of talent?and a crucible of company loyalty?came at 16 when, at Balanchine's request, Boal turned down an offer from Baryshnikov to join American Ballet Theater. At NYCB, Boal distinguished himself in two Balanchine staples, the stripped-down neo-classical masterpiece Apollo and the biblical narrative Prodigal Son, a work many dancers botch on account of its dramatic demands. Boal, now inching toward 40, also teaches at the School of American Ballet, cultivating a new generation of NYCB male dancers.

This week's program is a follow-up of sorts to last year's Peter Boal, "Solos," an hour-long showcase of his skills included in the Joyce's Altogether Different Festival. For that project, Boal commissioned work from three modern choreographic talents, the choicest fruit of which was Wendy Perron's Tuesday Night in Memphis, a meditation on American masculinity and fatherhood that began with Boal literally running in place. It was, and is, an unusual role reversal for choreographers to be hired hands for a dancer's show?Baryshnikov was the single, impressive precedent for Boal's foray. The performance itself, a demanding hour of solo modern work, also squelched any doubts about Boal's durability. Though his raw virtuosity may be diminished, his dancing is still calm and secure with an attractive air of intelligent involvement.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about Boal's line-up this week. In addition to a modern classic Twyla Tharp made for Baryshnikov in the early 90s?Pergolosi, a cheeky number that teases ballet through choreographed missteps?the remaining choreographers, William Forsythe, John Alleyne and Marco Geocke, are all heavies with NYCB experience. No radical departure in sensibility seems necessary, though. These are four of the best ballet dancers in the world tackling innovative and technically fierce contemporary dance. One additional draw is the opportunity to watch promising corps de ballet member Carla Korbes, recruited by Boal as a teenager in her native Brazil, step into a more prominent spotlight.

Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (betw. 18th & 19th Sts.), 212-242-0800, call for times, $40.

?Emily Laroque

Whitney Biennial Thurs., March 11 through May 30 Stan Brakhage, Mary Kelly, Robert Longo, Jonas Mekas. Does this list of artists have what crabby critic Robert Hughes once called "the shock of the new" to it? No. And it's not supposed to. For in designing the roster behind the 72nd Whitney Biennial, its team of curators (from new director Adam Weinberg to individual group leaders like Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video; Shamim M. Momin, branch director and curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria; and Debra Singer, associate curator of contemporary art) have ducked backward with a cross-generational aim to look at the past of the popular culture and politics of the late 60s and early 70s, as well as (so states the Whitney) construct "fantastic worlds, uncanny spaces, and new narrative forms, often incorporating psychedelia, the Gothic, and the apocalyptic" in its reverie toward the intergenerational.

That non-age-ism effect brings some of the most fascinating artists of ye-olde and right-now into the maelstrom of Biennial-ism with more than 100 artists and collaborative groups in view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 30. What does intergenerationalism mean to the Whitney in 2004? It means the narcissism of 90s avant-alternative demi-gods Jim O'Rourke and Raymond Pettibon to nubile new-coming filmmakers like looping-mini-movie-maker Eve Sussman and Hammer Horroriffic site-specific installationist Aida Ruilova. It means the brittle bold pastels and watery washes of David Hockney, and it means the architectural complexities of Julie Mehretu.

For this critic's money, the two most fascinating displays of art come from "youngins"?but hardly novices. Video projectionist/performance musician, Wynne Greenwood?aka Tracy and the Plastics?of Olympia, WA has made a career of playing with "fellow" band members, that are/is essentially Greenwood made up in rock-skate multiples for an end result that's remarkably astute in its execution of pre-Peaches dirty-girl electronic music waiting for money from its record label, Chainsaw. While she/it/they record a new album for a spring '04 release, Philadelphian pop artist Virgil Marti has created a personal totemic vision, one soaked in icons and flowers in the same fey fashion as did Warhol, but whose colorfully repetitive images, embedded onto wonky wallpaper and installations, slowly churn themselves into a textile-acious mix of the low-heeled and the high-browed. For Marti, there's always an interior-design element to his art?ingrained, outside his works, in the feminist/gay questions of rhetoric versus politic?a fussy, messy "kitsch-meets-class" stoner's saturation that's built upon the sorrow and silliness of Marti's suburban youth. His The Flowers of Romance best displays his fascinations and fixations with the Warholian Silver 60s, what with its array of lights and phony posies for an end result of "tunnel-vision" that's funny, tacky and sad.

The Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. (75th St.), 877-944-8639, call for times, $12.

?A.D. Amorosi

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Fri.-Sun., March 12-21 At a glance, the 9th-annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema is all about shape-shifting. Rather than provide viewers with what they have grown accustomed to, the filmmakers on hand here have taken on new personas, changing roles as a means of keeping things fresh. The surprise of this year's series is Guillaume Nicloux's Hanging Offense. Much like Bruno Dumont's 2000 Humanite, Nicloux's film uses the format of the police procedural as a cloak for a creepily compelling psychological thriller. Michèle Varin (Josiane Balasko) is a police captain investigating a murder in Fontainebleau. As the investigation progresses, the circumstances grow increasingly opaque. Much like the case, Hanging Offense comes to be more about its asides, the details rendered more vividly than the various plot twists. Reality and dream slip together unnoticed in the protagonist's mind, and the safe ground of the dependably predictable cop movie is replaced by the treacherous terrain of metaphysical dread. Nicloux has a way with the use of sound, varying scenes of pounding rain with ones of unsettling quiet. At the film's end, it seems that all the terms have been reversed?it appears that we have been the ones conducting the investigation, and the case has less to do with police work than with the residual effects of traumatic experience. Profoundly unsettling, like a dream of your own death.

Since Nicloux has relieved Dumont of the responsibility of making a Dumont film, Dumont himself is freed up to do something different. Twentynine Palms is a contemporary update of the long-standing tradition of European filmmakers taking on the United States, and California in particular. Dumont's film is like Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, as directed by Michael Haneke. A man and a woman (Daivd Wissak and Yekaterina Golubeva) travel by Hummer around the California desert, ostensibly searching for locations for a photo shoot, and spend the majority of their time eating, having raucous sex and verbally sparring. Dumont's long takes and gorgeous photography are amiable enough at first, if somewhat empty narrative-wise, but the film's second half takes a disastrously bad turn. Twentynine Palms is so horribly misguided, so devoid of insight into either American life or human nature, that it would probably be best for Dumont's career if everyone avoided this film like the plague?it's like Haneke at his worst.

Dumont having borrowed Haneke's shock-jock tendencies, Haneke's Rendez-Vous entry, Time of the Wolf, is a surprisingly compassionate and intense theoretical equation about the death of European civilization. The film's characters find themselves in a way station between life and death, the degradations of this world and the possibility of another, better one. Time of the Wolf begins as a typically pitiless entry from the Austrian director, detailing the after-effects of an unnamed catastrophe, but over the course of its 113 minutes, it expands, growing in emotional heft. The survivors are heartless, petty and unstintingly cruel, and in the absence of first- world creature comforts, life is nothing short of brutal. Even inside this nightmare, hope remains?of companionship, of survival, of a future less bleak than the present. Haneke pushes to the brink of the unthinkable, a child's self-sacrifice, before pulling back, but his film is a remarkable evocation of a society in crisis that takes his unblinking vision of the world's cruelties and makes something grand of it. Time of the Wolf will make you appreciate the sunshine.

Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, 165 W. 65th St. (betw. Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.), 212-875-5600, call for times, $10.

?Saul Austerlitz

Etienne Sauret Through March 16 The First 24 Hours and Collateral Damages Directed by Etienne Sauret Playing through March 16 Etienne Sauret's two 9/11 documentaries, The First 24 Hours and Collateral Damages, which recount America's worst terrorist attack mainly through images and sounds, are playing at Film Forum, and should be seen by anyone who wishes to remember the emotional fabric of that time.

The former is quite effective. It strings together 30 minutes' worth of video images taken at and near Ground Zero, minus music. The shots are generally held as long as it takes for Sauret, the primary camera operator, to pan or zoom from one point to another. The images are direct and powerful. (For some reason, the shot of firefighters sleeping in a bodega, around a buzzing freezer unit, hit me especially hard.)

The hour-long Collateral Damages charts the emotional effects of 9/11 on three firehouses in lower Manhattan and is somewhat more problematic. Sauret honorably records the grief, pain and stoic toughness of the surviving firefighters. Except for a few iconically charged montages of wrecked ladder trucks being crushed like beer cans at Fresh Kills landfill?scored with faintly Kubrickian synth music?the filmmaker generally underplays his material. But the movie is too long, too disorganized, too self-consciously cosmic. Another flaw: Like Spike Lee in 4 Little Girls, Sauret estheticizes the firefighters, abstracting their faces and upper bodies with super-tight, sometimes off-kilter close-ups. With this approach, is he really listening to these soul-ravaged men? Or merely objectifying them?

I cannot deny Sauret's physical commitment to this material?the result of his labor is right there, onscreen. Nor can I doubt the sincerity of his grief over 9/11, or his respect for his subjects' pain. But I must say that both of his 9/11 films?particularly Damages?seem a bit too artful at times, too posed, too slick; not enough of a documentary, too much of a "reel." Sauret is a whiz with images?the sort of director whose obvious talent for composition and camera movement reminds me of a comment by a cinematographer friend of mine, who once said of De Palma, "his brains are in his eyes." That's a paraphrase of a comment that recurs throughout the reviews of Pauline Kael, but those who deploy variations of the phrase without irony risk exposing their inner 12-year-old. It's fine to have brains in your eyes, but it's better to have brains in your head.

Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. Varick St. & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110, call for times, and prices $10.

?Matt Zoller Seitz

Weds. 3/10

Alfredo de la Fe Alfredo de la Fe brings his electric six-string violin and his fierce, far-ranging jazz band to Joe's Pub in a showcase for his 20th solo release, which he's titled The Dancing Jazz Project. Recorded since last year's return to New York, Dancing Jazz brings De la Fe's instrumental mastery and his rich salsa experience to rhythms from Cuba's guajira and danzon to Argentine zamba and Peruvian cajon. "Latin jazz bands stick to instrumental Cuban son," says De la Fe's producer Nili Belkind, former head of Ryko's Latin music division. "Alfredo's new record is based on dance rhythms from Latin America to the Middle East, embracing their similarities in rhythmic structure."

Fresh directions are par for the course for De la Fe, who by the early 70s had created a new voice in early salsa with sparkling violin contributions to adventuresome records like Eddie Palmieri's The Sun of Latin Music and Grupo Folklorico's Lo Dice Todo. High-profile gigs and recordings followed with the formidable Tipica 73, Tito Puente and the violinist's godmother, Celia Cruz.

De la Fe was a prodigy trained in Havana's Conservatory who soloed at Carnegie Hall at age 11, playing Tchaikovsky and Mendelsohn concertos. A Juilliard scholarship followed, as did a spot with the Met Opera Orchestra, but New York held other paths for De la Fe. Just a teen, he began cutting his Afro-Cuban chops in the great flautist Jose Fajardo's orchestra. His first solo record, in 1979, produced radio hits and garnered three Grammy nominations, and he made records from his home base in Columbia for years.

Now he's back in New York, and for The Dancing Jazz Project he's pulled together a terrific line-up. The rhythm section melds members from the jazz bands of Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Arturo Sandoval, and from Puerto Rico's mighty Sonora Poncena. Guests on tap for the Pub show include Nelson Gonzalez and his steely tres guitar, and the flautist Dave Valentin, who as much as any instrumentalist exemplifies De la Fe's extremes: luminous, popular virtuosity and an unavoidable animal furor.

"As a violinist, Alfredo's tone is focused and his articulation sure," says Ned Sublette, whose big Cuba and Its Music (Chicago Review Press) is due out in late spring. "As a Cuban, his rhythm is powerful; as an expatriate, he sees things in an original perspective. And as an entertainer, he tries to get everybody as worked up as possible."

Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778, 9:30, $15.

?Alan Lockwood

Jordan Knight There's a scene in Darrin's "Dance Grooves"?a video created during the bygone era when Britney's songs about Justin weren't so toxic, and a few people actually cared what Carson Daly had to say?where a viewer can follow step-by-step the pop-and-locking for the dance sequence from the Jordan Knight 1999 single, "Give It to You." The mechanical, hiccuppy gyrations are so intricate, it seems you'd need hyperextended joints and a hefty dose of faith to execute them. But Knight, steeped in the throes of a renaissance, powers through the moves with a ballerina's grace and a surgeon's precision, as helpless viewers nationwide were fumbling around their living rooms, breathless. And as his song said, anyone could make you sweat, but he could keep you wet.

Sure, the former frontman and heartthrob from New Kids on the Block has always had a way with teen chicks, but Knight now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to come back from his comeback. With bubblegum-pop dead and popping-and-locking rightfully returned to the b-boys, his first- and second-generation fans both older and maybe also wiser, what is a flailing Tigerbeat icon to do?

His tactic is twofold?taking a step forward and back simultaneously. An as-of-yet untitled solo release, confirming Knight's worth in the here and now, is due to be released sometime this summer. But the genius move is what's coming at month's end: New Kids on the Block: The Remix Album, a release where Knight embraces his kitsch factor with gusto. Replete with new versions of NKOTB's most scream-inducing material, these remixes collide the contemporary digipop enjoyed by fashionistas and the low-tech boom-chick beats that got them riled up back when they pegged their jeans (earnestly, not ironically).

This new New Kids album is being promoted by intimate, secretive tour dates at small venues across the country, where diehard fans can fork over extra cash to take pictures with and get signed photographs of their teenage dreamboat. So embrace the opportunity to bring an adolescent fantasy you'd long since abandoned screaming back to life, when both you and your idol are old enough to know better, yet will surely be peeing-in-your-pants thrilled anyway. And this time, your mom won't have to wait outside the venue for you in the station wagon.

Maxwell's, 1039 Washington St. (11th St.), Hoboken, 201-653-1703, 8:30, $20.

?Devon Powers

New York Press Auction Advantage Last time at the New York Press online auction, a brand-new 42-inch JVC widescreen plasma tv went for about $2250?that's less than half the retail cost. This time, there are two plasmas on the block, plus loads of other goods and services?from gym memberships to furniture to electronics to fine art to spa treatments to acupuncture to eyewear? Our favorite item? A pair of season tickets (that's one full year) for the Sunshine cinema on Houston. Opening bid: $250. Visit nypress.com.  

Kollective at Kush Karsh Kale moves his popular Wednesday night party?Kollective at Kush?to the cozy and chic Cielo. His Asian influences span downtempo sitar tracks to booty-banging electronic affairs with bhangra beats and techno zapping into a set. It's free, so ladies, check your dowry at the door. Cielo, 18 Little West (12th Street), 212-645-5700, 10, free.

Thurs. 3/11

Skip Heller The City of Brotherly Love has splayed across the planet more musical exoti-cats (Sun Ra, Todd Rundgren, Uri Caine) than it has cheesesteaks and hoagies combined. That Philly-expat (for the hills of Los Angeles) Skip Heller has collaborated with all three of the above-mentioned folk in some shape or form, makes him a brilliant, feeling, almost-preemptive player in the annals of Philadelphian music. That he's worked those grooves?whether composing or strumming?for a solo catalog that's included Mexicali garage rock, cocktail jazz, avant-skronk, pure exotica, organ-combo soul, country, klezmer, rockabilly, film-and-tv soundtracks and Yma Sumac makes him a loose cannon the mashed-up likes of which hasn't been heard since John Zorn. Seriously, folks: From the rope-a-doping lope of 1998's countrified St. Christopher's Arms to 2002's blues-bouncing Homegoing, Heller has managed to create a West Coast equivalent of Zorn-Naked-City eclecticism while always remaining moody and melody-driven. Though the noir of L.A. exists in every note Heller's laid down while working with Angelinos like writer John Gilmore, oceanic-lounge king Les Baxter and Mex-Tex oddity Lalo Guerrero, he's remained Philadelphian at heart in that each of his CDs has included the classic Philly organ sounds of Charles Earland and Jimmy Smith in the mix. "Between Chicano music, cartoons, film and every other damn thing I involved myself with, I felt I'd better come back to the stuff that got me going in the first place," Heller told Philadelphia's City Paper a while back about the traditional "Sidewinder" grooves and Hammond-hounded ballads that infiltrate both his privately released live CD The Battle in Seattle and his newest studio recording Fakebook. While both feature deceptively complex hard-ass rhythms and simmering, dirt-ball organ sounds, Fakebook, released and annotated by Joel Dorn is Heller's most masterful recording yet; a freakishly emotional and frenetically distaff-rocking jazz-soul album that never shies from slyness. Or, as his website calls it, "11 songs that made this country great, featuring compositions by Grant Green, Les Baxter, Prince, Bob Dylan, Raymond Scott and Thelonious Monk." That it features ex-Wall-of-Voodoo frontman Stan Ridgeway means Heller's keeping the door to L.A. open. But everything else here is pure Philadelphia-brand creamy cheesy cool jazz and blues, so fattening you had better wear pants an extra size too big to Sweet Rhythm.

Sweet Rhythm, 88 7th Ave. (Bleecker St.), 212-255-3626, 8, 10, $10-$15.

?A.D. Amorosi

Gilles Peterson Good day, people. I'm reporting live from the 2004 Winter Music Conference in South Beach, Miami, home of tacky, yellow stretch Lamborghinis, cheap plastic surgery and plenty of Bolivian marching powder. The sun is nice. The Europeans can't find the club. And everyone is some sort of DJ, producer, promoter, A&R hack or media vulture. I'm excluding myself from any of these categories: I'm just drunk. People have begun asking me what and who I write for, seeing I'm in the corner scribbling on a beat-up notebook. My response: "Do you like poetry?" With an itinerary of parties, DJs and media events I'll be forced to go to, I've already got a headache. Despite the warm weather and excitement building up to the International Dance Music Awards?seriously, awards for dance music??I'd much rather be back in Gotham, where everything isn't so plastic. I'll return just in time, though, to catch Gilles Peterson.

Starting in the early 80s on a pirate radio station that he founded in London, Peterson played an eclectic range of music, from Northern Soul to Motown to hiphop, jazz, blues and house. Anything with a groove. Many credit him with developing acid jazz, which eventually turned into acid house. Like a good DJ, he broke records in, playing them constantly on the radio and at his club gigs. The attention garnered from the underground eventually led to a gig on the BBC, where he hosts "Worldwide." His format has stayed the same: anything with the right groove, to put you in a good mood and keep your head nodding.

On Thursday he'll take over Cielo. (Finally, a place to dance and hear good music besides APT.) Expect to hear his eclectic mix of UK hiphop, house and classic soul joints. Until then, I'm going to see if I can find a pair of silicon pillows on which to rest my aching head.

Cielo, 18 Little W. 12th St. (betw. Washington St. & 9th Ave.), 212-645-5700, 10, $15.

?Dan Martino ([soulstatik@hotmail.com](mailto:soulstatik@hotmail.com))

Bands Against Bush With more than 30 chapters operating around the world under this moniker, it's nice to see that the ol' prez has friends in the indie rock world. That is, if your friends would like nothing more than to see you get trampled by elephants. Featuring the Louisville and Brooklyn-based Kilowatthours, who do a symphonic take on rock, as well as the great Cholo, Shellshocked, who sound exactly like their name, and the Sonic Youth-meets-Cat Power-induced Emma La Reina. Put your ears where your mouth is, and let your backbone slip. Sin-é, 150 Attorney St. (Stanton St.), 212-388-0077, 8, $8. Mike Patton & Rahzel You want it all but you can't have it? Even when Mike Patton was on MTV 24/7, we suspected that he was far too much of a tweaker to fit that mold. Since falling off the pop-cult radar, he has only gotten stranger?the straightest thing we've heard from him was the avant-booty rock of Lovage. Tonight, he'll be making noises into a microphone with the human beatbox from the Roots. Trip on the sounds, then let the realization that this is essentially an a capella show flow over you like warm water. With JS-One, DJ Still. Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Pl. (15th St.), 212-777-6800, 8, $22, $20 adv.  

Jem Cohen The man responsible for the Fugazi documentary Instrument also made short films noted for their collage-like construction, including a portrait of suicidal mopey folker Elliott Smith. Tonight, The Tank is screening several of these shorts to kick off a weekend-long retrospective of the fiercely independent filmmaker's work. 432 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-563-6269, $7.  

Films of Pavel Juracek Pavel Juracek wrote and/or directed many of the best films associated with the 1960s Czech New Wave movement, including its crowning achievement, Daisies. For five days, MoMA's Gramercy Theater presents a rare retrospective of Juracek's lesser- known films, such as Voyage to the End of the Universe and The Key to Defining Dwarves. All titles are paired with a docudrama based on the filmmaker's journals from the upheaval of 1968. Thursday's screenings begin with an introduction by Juracek's son, Marek. 127 E. 23rd (Lexington Ave.), 212-777-4900, call for times, $6. Fri. 3/12

Socialist Scholars Conference Say what you will about socialists?they don't give up. The Socialist Scholars Conference is the largest annual gathering of dark pink rabble in America. Meaning that this three-day event is going to be a series of interminable speeches given by people who would waste a coke high talking about outsourcing and what it says about late capitalism. Speakers include Naomi Klein and Bill Fletcher. Topics include U.S. Unilateralism, the significance of the 2004 election and how we're not gonna let the kids at the fat-kid camp make fun of us anymore. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 7 E. 7th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-817-7868, $35, $25 low-income, $15 students.

Sat. 3/13

British Sea Power Not since Marlon Brando got brutally blond and lei-d for Mutiny on the Bounty has there been such a creepy pop-cultural clamor toward making so much Brit-themed nautical stuff in one year. With butch sea-faring brio mixed in with the nancing expected of most militaristically dressed dandies, movies like Master and Commander and Pirates of the Caribbean were excessively English in their yo-ho-ho-rum-spo-dee-o-dee-o-dee-ness, worse even than the rush of Gladiators, Troy and Alexander to come. Then there's British Sea Power, a provocatively brooding Brighton, England-ian quartet as notorious for dressing up like generals and majors and admirals as they are for sounding like a glammier, punkier Joy Division. Confused? Ahhhyee, maytie. But beyond the obvious churlish comedy of its water-themed staging (stuffed parrots beside them), naval tri-corned caps and epaulets, the Sea Power's Yan, Noble, Hamilton and Wood made one of 2003's most bracing CDs in its Rough Trade/Sanctuary debut?The Decline of British Sea Power. Parody? No thanks. Their melodicism is as big as their conceptualism, what with Decline's mix of songs flitting between the overblown ("Heavenly Waters") and the punkishly punctual (with "Favours in the Beetroots Fields" coming in barely over one minute). In the grand tradition of Iggy and Ians Curtis and McCulloch, singularly named singer Yan takes on the pernicious, existentialist lyrical dramas drawn across spacious, grouchy guitar-strewn epics like "The Fear of Drowning" and "Lately" with delirious, detached theatricality. When he's not pissing and moaning about Russian literature like a rancid Bolshevik, Yan is taking to task his own country's royal brood on the scabrous rock of "Remember Me" with the sort of passionate intelligence and laughing Brit-wit not felt since Morrissey. So chuckle at their outfits and snigger at the parrots. Think of Monty Python tossing seamen overboard. British Sea Power gets the last laugh every time. Arrgh.

Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 11:30, sold out.

?A.D. Amorosi

Identification Day Sort of like Antiques Roadshow, only with much older and much less valuable stuff. Bring in a rock, a bone or any other unknown oddity and an expert will figure out what it is. The other times that they've held this event, investigations have turned closet crap into whale jawbones and ancient spears with just a flick of the classification wand. Hopefully they'll tell us our goodie is fossilized caveman poo and not just a chunk of petrified peanut butter, as we actually suspect. American Museum of Natural History, Central Park W. (79th St.), 212-769-5100, 1-4, free w/adm. Toni Morrison Never trust a novelist who doesn't also write for little kids. Today Toni Morrison shows her lighter side when she reads from her latest children's book, Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? Toys 'R Us, 1514 B'way (44th St.), 646-366-8800, 1-3, free.

Sun. 3/14

Wrestlemania XX Oh yeah. This is it, the one night of the year where idiocy gets a chance to shine. Oiled-up, over-muscled men will preen in spotlights and no one will think it's the least bit gay. Fireworks, cheesy rap metal and girls in bikinis?it's gonna be great. Madison Square Garden, 2 Penn Plaza (32nd St.), 212-465-MSG1, 7, $54.50-$205.50. Mon. 3/15

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb What do you say about a serious jazz musician and vocalist who plays a balloon? Ayelet Rose Gottlieb finds this "liberating" and may make it her performance signature. She takes what is at hand in her life and connects it with her musical training, her heritage and her creative instincts. She confesses to doing much of her work on the subway and in the shower, when the mind is relaxed. ("It's a good time to process what you feel, what you think.") She relates to the filmed image of eccentric Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, practicing inside his head. Ninety percent of what Gottlieb performs are her own compositions. These are inspired by color, texture, and texts?including paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and passages from the Bible. But she says, "The first powerful thing I feel is color. I see color and sound as closely related."

Gottlieb was born and raised in Jerusalem and traces her maternal family's Sephardic roots back 21 generations in the city, after the family was expelled from Spain in 1492. Her father, an economist, is of Swiss and Eastern European-Jewish descent. His stint with the International Monetary Fund brought Gottlieb to the U.S. for her second and third years of elementary school, which explains her nearly flawless English.

Gottlieb returned to the U.S. to complete her university education at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she majored in jazz performance and composition. Her first CD, Internal-External, includes works by Charles Mingus, Walter Donaldson and Ornette Coleman, along with her own. She has written lyrics for Coleman's "Peace."

Tonight Gottlieb celebrates the release of Internal-External, and her voice is backed by piano, trumpet, sax, bass and drums. You might even catch her playing her balloon.

Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St. (betw. Bleecker St. & 6th Ave.), 212-989-9319, 8:30, $6.

?Ralph Seliger

Luomo With lengthy songs titled "Tessio" and "Body Speaking," micro-house maven Vladislav Delay (aka the Nordic electro-lord that is Luomo) comes off with something of a macro nature, as in "pretentious" or "over-the-top" or "disco hack." You thought maybe Bohannon with those songs, right? Au contraire. Expanding his deep but mini house sound from those initial earnest beginnings in ambient music (Finnish EPs like Livingston and Carter from the Force Tracks label) and a first quiet pop CD (Vocal City of 2000) to taking on the entirety of the Berlin school's electronic movement, Luomo's newest record for the bigger-label Kinetic, The Present Lover, is epic in comparison to his past releases. Though Luomo works a chilled-out, sexy downtempo esthetic at Present's start, the CD moves quickly through each track in a vicious trance that's anything but sedative. This is not "trance," the music, but "trance," the idea?an irksome, hypnotic house groove laced with subtle song structure, supple hum-ability and humble singing from Luomo's own odd lot of friends. From the greasy beat of "Body Speaking" to the acoustic-guitar chatter of "Tessio," you'll find yourself bugged by each and every rattling sound-scape and horror-house hymn. Happily perturbed, though, as each singer (Johanna Niemela, Watkinson, Antye Greie-Fuchs) seemingly works out their own demons by posing themselves as Alison-Moyet-like R&B heartachers taking on the breadth of Luomo's baleful, icy sound. That team of singers?whether whispering or shouting?seem to be looking through Luomo's dippy dub and trippy pop-o-tronics to find a deeper, darker, slurrier, sluttier way in to the singed 80s electro that Felix Da Housecat has mined so brilliantly. And that's a very good thing.

The Sulliv