The Theater: The Tiger & the Lady

To wild applause, a shaggy, prune-faced man lunges onstage at Manhattan's Bijou Theater, his skinny torso masked by a loose red sweater, his hands feverishly clutching a rolled-up newspaper. Then Monologuist Mort Sahl, 30, star of The Next President, tigerishly launches into his act. He runs on and on and on, a Beat-Generation Cotton Mather who gives half the names in the news a beating, cracking his whip up Pennsylvania Avenue one minute, down Madison Avenue the next. Ostentatiously irreverent, he is at times witty, oftener merely outspoken.

In offbeat nightclubs and twice...