Music: Old Electricity

The nightclub band struck up the opening bars of I Have All Paris in My Heart. The master of ceremonies bowed to the wings, and out stepped an old lady with long orange hair, baby-doll eyes, a headdress of bird-of-paradise feathers and an armload of eight diamond bracelets. In lusty French she launched into her song. Thus, last week, a Manhattan audience got its first look in 28 years at Mistinguett.

Mistinguett, who was singing in French music halls when the sinking of the Maine set off the Spanish-American War, sometimes gives her age as 60, sometimes as 2,000 ("the age of...