The Second:

The next night, a few casinos down the strip, I'm sitting in a heart-shaped velvet love seat, watching a drag queen in a Thierry Mugler bustier. She has a long, black ponytail that trails all the way down her back past her knees, and a redundant leather whip. Her true identity? Celebrated New York downtown performer Joey Arias, long known for his savagely accurate impressions of Billy Holliday, and his definitive East Village, gender-bender haute attitude. I used to see him in fabulous dives in Alphabet City, mesmerizing and terrifying club kids half his age. Now he's been shipped out West, put under contract, and re-packaged in a Vegas lounge act; it's a little like plucking a lion from the plains of Africa, and plopping it down in the midst of Siegfried and Roy.

With a loud crack, Joey leans into the first row and coos to a balding, septuagenarian tourist "Tonight you will see deviance in all its myriad formssex celebrated instead of revileda frenzied orgy of love, love, love!"

So begins ZUMANITY, the latest extravaganza from Cirque de Soleil, this one with a self-proclaimed erotic bent. Two lithe Asian women undulate, naked, their bodies impossibly intertwined in a giant fish bowl. An aerialist in a body stocking dangles hundreds of feet above us from leather ropes, her face concealed with an S&M dungeon mask as she bungees up and down, accompanied by a soundtrack of sighs and moans. A midget tumbler with steroid pecs catapults atop a pyramid of studs in spandex. And all the while, Joey watches, his eyebrow cocked as if to say "Shocked yet?"

It's sex as imagined by Walt Disney; transgressive and outrageous, perhaps, to people who wear appliquéd sweat suits, collect Hummel figurines and order curios from the Franklin Mint. Folks for whom the word "sex" itself, when muttered in mixed company, is sufficient reason to giggle or smirk. Real decadence is never self-congratulatory or smug; real decadence is too voracious to pause and render judgment upon itself. Sex should be animalistic; and two elephants, rutting and heaving in evergreen forests of Sri-Lanka rarely stop to beam self-consciously and exclaim, "Look at us! Aren't we wicked?"

ZUMANITY is, alas, like a three-dimensional Playboy cartoon; too selfishly smitten with its own naughtiness to offer forth any genuine, any spontaneous, illicit pleasure.

The Third:

The ushers throw up their arms, helpless. The sign in the lobby expressly forbids photography of any kind, but the whir and click of so many digital cameras is unmistakable. People haven't come to Broadway's Majestic Theater to have an experience; they've come to document one. To prove they were here, like pilgrims to the Holy Land, seeking not enlightenment, but a sliver of the cross, or a few tattered fibers of the Shroud of Turin.

The audience is as international as any religious odyssey. Many don't even speak the language of the play; still, its broad gestures, illustrative style, and declamatory story telling are as easy to follow as a children's pantomime. For many in the house, as they crinkle their candy-wrappers, whisper to their companions, and rustle their shopping bags underfoot, this will be their only attendance at a live event all year. They've scrimped and saved for months to pay the outlandish ticket price. No wonder, for this crowd, congressional phrases like "arts funding" have no meaning. This single experience will become their personal benchmark for that most intimidating of words: "culture." For them, tonight will represent the apotheosis of my craft.

Regrettably--after a fifteen-year run--the actors onstage are less animated than the crowd. They move through their paces with the mechanical precision of watch-works; characters pop forward, vocalize, and then recede, like the historical figures in a German clock. In fact, many of the show's key principals can be purchased down the street at a souvenir shop in Schubert's Alley.

You can watch the Phantom live as he kidnaps Christine, then you can stroll down the street and purchase him, in a decorative animatronic snow globe with a music box base. Tiny revolving metal plates trill "The Music of the Night" as the masked figure pilots his captive in a gondola through a teensy, candelabra-strewn lair. The whole show, miniaturized, and pressed under glass. The ultimate distillation of spectacle; a ten million dollar musical that can still fit on your night table.

Why?

Now, admittedly, I flatter myself a rather sophisticated theatergoer, and yet I voluntarily attended these shows. Why?

A friend of mine has an ingenious theory called "Instant Camp." You see, most cultural artifacts that wind up under camp's gaudy rubric enter the landscape without irony, and are subsequently recycled and so labeled by a future, post-modern generation. The passage of time renders them comic in retrospect; witness the films of Busby Berkeley, the inflatable furniture of the 1960's, or the Bee Gees.

But some rare phenomenon hit the aesthetic arena with such deliriously misguided ambition, such brazenly bad taste, such benchmark kitsch that they achieve immediate camp status. The three aforementioned shows, my friend insists, all qualify. He proffers other examples: the Paul Verhoeven movie "Showgirls." Broadway's recent debacle "Lestat." Such works, he explains, don't need the distanced critique of time; they give us, in the moment, precisely what we deserve.

I'd like to describe a fourth, and very particular, theatrical event which I had the privilege of witnessing. I hope it serves as an antidote to those I've already cited. And I hope it is instructive in re-asserting the primacy of the word; and reminding us that simple story-telling can still hold its ground in the face of down-loadable movies and the revolution that is Tivo.