No Worries! No actual spoilers included.

You're probably wondering why in the world all this site seems to cover these days is Xanadu. It's because we're changing the name to "afterxanadu.com." Actually, make that "before_during_after_ under_behind_andkneelinginfrontof_CheyenneJackson." Dot com.

Since many of you might still be booking travel arrangements to come to New York to see the beauty that is Xanadu On Broadway in person - and you'd better hurry, or you'll officially no longer be gay - we decided it would be helpful to tide you over with a recap, unfiltered by anything distracting like intelligent writing and actual critical judgment.

When you first go into the Helen Hayes Theater, right away you can see the set, a Grecian amphitheater thingie like in that episode of Star Trek where Kirk and Spock reenact Spartacus, complete with inappropriate fondling. Suspended above the stage is what appears to be an enormous side-view car mirror. I start to worry that maybe we've walked into a new Disney show, "Honey, I Shrunk the Gays."

I also notice there are people sitting on stage who don't appear to be the actors. I can tell because only a few of the men are wearing makeup, and everyone looks uncomfortable and frightened, like they're wondering what will happen if during the show one of the actors is distracted by something shiny and decides to attack. Hah! That's what you losers get for being too cheap to fork over your life savings for a full-price ticket and too unimaginative to come up with some bogus blogging recap scam.

A woman sitting behind me opens her Playbill and says, "They made a musical from the book Wicked?" This leads me to look around the audience and notice, with surprise, that a show that's been described as the gayest thing since Happy Feet has an audience largely filled with what are clearly straight tourists. I comment on this to my wise, wonderful partner Mark, who says, "Don't worry. The gays just like to come late." And sure enough, at 5 minutes after 8, there's this mad rush as tides of hair-gelled, Kiehls-scented men storm through the theater doors, like the start of a Dolce & Gabbana sample sale.

They all stop and collectively gasp, me included, as Cheyenne Jackson comes on stage, and it immediately becomes clear what the big mirror is for - so that everyone can get a good close look at his glorious butt.

Like many of you, I groaned when I heard they were doing a stage version of the 1980 movie Xanadu. As far as I'm considered, that movie is utter perfection as is, so why would you mess with it? It's like trying to do a staged musical based on Citizen Kane or Pygmalion. It just can't be done!

What I wasn't considering was The Cheyenne Jackson Studliness Factor. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Michael Beck, who originated the role of Sonny Malone in the movie. In The Warriors, Beck played the gayest and prettiest gang member since West Side Story's Bernardo. And it's just sad that mining the complex emotional depths of Xanadu's tortured artist apparently proved such a harrowing, life-altering experience that he was never able to bring himself to act on screen again. But Cheyenne Jackson, well, it just has to be an inside joke that the only cast member not playing a Greek god is the one who comes closest to being one.

The show starts pretty much where the movie does, with the lousy mural Sonny is drawing coming to life, although something's a bit off here with the costuming. If I remember correctly, the museli (that's the plural of muse, right?) in the movie were dressed in Stevie Nicks/deranged bag lady style, while here they've gone for something a bit more authentically faux Grecian, although they've kept the metallic headbands. You know, if you weren't alive then and only saw the movie, you might mistakenly have thought this was just some bizarre costuming choice and not realized that real women were actually walking around in them at the time, like they'd all been crowned Hooker Queens in some back alley. What were fashion people smoking when they came up with this? It makes about as much sense as spats...

... or leg warmers, the other horrendous fashion accessory the movie also proudly displayed that this show picks up on. Fashion has certainly been cruel to women, but it's not like men get off any easier. The male equivalent of the leg warmer was probably the capri manpants craze of a few years ago, a fashion that in my mind succeeded only in drawing attention to hairy ankles. I prefer male fashion that draws attention to crotches, which is why in my opinion, the greatest male fashion advances of the past 50 years have been cut-off shorts, leather pants, and 2Xist underwear ads. I'd like to see Cheyenne in all of these. And less.

The show starts off with part of that wish already fulfilled, as Cheyenne is wearing clothes that show off all his bulges in just the right places - a tight tank top shirt and jeans shorts. In his AfterElton interview, Cheyenne made some comment about being embarrassed to wear short shorts on stage. Cheyenne, I worship you and want to have your baby, but I don't want to hear about your body issues. Because if a hunk of delicious man meat like you has body issues, what hope do the rest of us poor slobs have?

The leg warmers in question are worn by Clio, the head muse, played by Kerry Butler, who fully earns her gay icon laurels here. At one point, they make a crack about her being "thinner and prettier" than that country singer not from our country who played Kira in the movie, and they might have added "and more capable of pulling off basic human functions like walking and breathing in a semi-realistic manner." She deftly mimics a lot of Olivia Newton-John's weird vocal intonations and gestures from the movie - frankly, Kerry manages to work more comic gold out of a mangled Australian pronunciation of the word "Malone" than the cast of Spamalot gets out of an entire catalog of Monty Python shtick.

In one of many improvements on the movie, the show manages to provide a plausible explanation for those leg warmers and the Australian accent. Although it was never explained in the movie, it always made perfect sense to me that a supreme being coming to Venice, California in human form would decide to be Australian. It's one of the few countries left that other countries don't hate all that much, and it's got a cool British sounding accent without all that "Splendid! Lovely! Wot wot?" nonsense that makes the British sound so smug. Plus when the movie came out, America was in a major, inexplicable "Crikey Craze," with every kid asking for a wallaby or bowie knife for Christmas. Here, they just say that the Australian thing is part of Clio's disguise, as is her name change to Kira. Her goal is to help create a great work of art, and as her sisters point out, this being 1980, her work is going to be cut out for her.

She meets Sonny just as, in despair about his inability to create a great work of art, he is going to kill himself. The show jettisons the whole plot in the movie about quitting his job working for "The Man," who doesn't appreciate his genius as a painter of enormous album covers for the outside of Tower Records - perhaps the dopiest image of pointless indentured servitude on screen since the Oompa-Loompahs. Did they really want us to believe that the best way Tower could come up with to display album covers outside their stores was to have them handpainted by touchy, no-talent street artists? No wonder they finally went out of business.

Anyway, on stage, Sonny bumps into Kira who, as in the movie, spends much of the show gliding on roller-skates and waving her arms in a way meant to be ethereal but that actually forces her to smell her own armpits. Can I also just say that everything wrong with this country can be summed up by the transition from roller-skating, a pleasant leisurely activity that lends itself to calmly meandering with your hands linked to your BFF, to inline skating, with its tough-guy body armor and relentless forward momentum lacking in such common courtesies as self control and respect for others. Inline skating is just so much more, well, straight.

So Kira persuades Sonny to pursue his dream of creating the one masterwork that incorporates all art forms by opening a roller disco. They decide to rent out an empty theater owned by Danny Maguire, played by Tony Roberts, taking over the Gene Kelly part from the movie. It still makes me sad that this legendary performer's last movie is one many consider such an embarrassment. That seems to happen with so many of the great actors - it's the "Trog/Dr. Moreau Effect." Stars getting on in years would be wise, before agreeing to certain questionable movie roles, to consider how it would look if they suddenly dropped dead and it was the top listing on their IMBD resume for all eternity. Think about that, Dame Judy, before you agree to do another Vin Diesel movie.

Danny and Sonny then each envision the club they want to open in this "I'm a little bit country/I'm a little bit rock and roll" battle of craptacular bands that culminates in this frenzied musical union of the two that's so orgasmic they should all just smoke cigarettes afterwards, if cigarettes, unlike glittery headbands, were still considered cool. Then they set about building their dream roller palace in this great number where the cast "transforms" the ramshackle theater into The Xanadu through flashy scarves, a big sign, and strategic use of a mirror ball. If this was an Andrew Lloyd Webber show, the whole mechanized set would have imploded and reassembled itself Transformers-style into some multi-tiered expensive eye sore. This set change would also have gotten more applause than anything actual human beings did on stage.

Anyway, lest you think all this is moving along too smoothly, there are complications. Kira's two older sisters are jealous of her and plan to put a curse on her that makes her fall in love - something inexplicably forbidden by Zeus. The sisters are played to cackling perfection by Mary Testa and Jackie Hoffman - national treasures deserving of their own postage stamps. Life would be so much better if women like this were given sitcoms instead of the Heather Grahams of the world. I've seen them both in many shows and like gay men everywhere I completely adore them. I'm also a little frightened of them. I once saw Jackie Hoffman doing a solo show where she spit her drink out on an audience member. But my friend Will who camped outside the stage door to meet the cast said they couldn't have been nicer. That's always so gratifying to hear that people you love on stage are actually decent in real life, especially when some theater artistes can be such jerks and yes I'm talking to you Mr. Anthony "Easily Replaced in Rent by a Backstreet Boy So What Do You Have to Be So Smug About" Rapp.

Mary and Jackie sing about their evil plans, appropriately, to "Evil Woman," an ELO song added to the show in addition to the ones from the movie. Ah yes, the Electric Light Orchestra! Thanks to Dexy's Midnight Runners, they're one proper noun shy of having the world's most ridiculous yet vaguely comprehensive sounding band name ever. When I was a kid, I thought, quite logically, that the Electric Light Orchestra were the people playing music during Disney's famed Electric Light Parade. It's a good thing I was wrong, because that parade is already as close to being a kiddie acid trip as it needs to be.

Mary and Jackie manage to do the entire "orchestra" part of ELO with just their vocal chords and it's totally awesome. They plant a curse and Kira and Sonny fall in love. This is staged through several love songs clearly in the Peaches & Herb mold, reminders of the past popularity of pop duets, a music form rendered extinct by mouseketeer-turned-popstars trained to sing so robotically similar that the concept of harmony is impossible.

One tiny criticism of the show - they left out the animation sequence, one of the best, most artistic parts of the movie! Frankly, few movies couldn't be improved by having the leads morph into cartoon goldfish. And don't tell me it's impossible to do animation on stage because isn't that the whole secret behind Disney's draconian takeover of Broadway?

Kira realizing she's done the forbidden, returns to Zeus to accept her punishment, and Sonny tracks her up Mt. Olympus. Pleading for Kira's life, they sing the Newton-John classic "Have You Never Been Mellow?," a song that has just about the dumbest lyrical premise ever. Out of all the problems threatening modern love, lack of mellowness seems fairly minor. It baffles me that this song rose to the top of the country charts, given that it seems to most accurately describe the plight of bickering New York power couples arguing about what movie to see. He: "Why can't you just be mellow for once?!" She: "Why can't you?"

Anyway, the song ploy works, Kira and Sonny return to earth, and Xanadu is born! The big finale is done entirely on skates and it is utterly thrilling if not entirely original. It's important to remember that Xanadu was not the first movie on roller skates - that would be Roller Boogie, starring Linda Blair, who after starring in a movie that depicted her projectile vomiting and urinating on her mother's carpet figured there were few indignities left to suffer on screen. And this show isn't the first one on roller-skates. That would be Starlight Express, a musical that took the idea of a "trainwreck" to impressively literal extremes.

I've seen a lot of things drop from the ceiling at musicals - chandeliers, helicopters, Mary Poppins. But nothing comes close to the giddy feeling I got seeing hundreds of disco balls came down to the pumping sounds of Xanadu's closing title number. I don't care how much you might have hated the movie, when you're in the theater and you hear that music and you see Cheyenne in his satin short shorts, you'll feel a swoony sensation I can only describe as "vertigay."

Now somebody start working on the stage version of Grease 2.