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THEATER/PORTUGAL

The Night They Invented Maxim's

Damned Cocaine

Written and directed by Filipe la Feria; Teatro Politeama, Lisbon

POP OPEN THE CHAMPAGNE and toast Lisbon's Teatro Politeama. The once shabby 795-seat theater has been delightfully done over, and is now the ornate showplace for Portugal's first homegrown musical. To the Portuguese, who daily see new headlines about political corruption, Damned Cocaine (Maldita Cocaina) is less madcap romp than pointed satire. The Roaring Twenties return, with characters modeled on colorful real-life denizens of that era, and the setting is Maxim's, then a well-known Lisbon night spot. Through its doors parade a fascist army general with an eye for beautiful women, a count who has gambled away his fortune and a swindler who boldly tricked the London printer of Portuguese banknotes to run off an extra 100 million escudos for him. The money set him up in banking, mining and a railroad in the Congo before he landed in jail.

Composer Nuno Feist keeps things moving with a peppy score of jazz, rock and fado. Critics have airily dismissed the show; nonetheless, it has already broken Lisbon attendance records, with more than 100,000 tickets sold in its first six months. An elegant 1912 dowager, the Politeama had fallen on sad days, becoming a seedy home for kung fu and soft-core-porn films. Restored for $3.3 million by producer-director Filipe la Feria, it is now occupied by the $ 65 members of Damned Cocaine's cast, and the entire orchestra level is a stylish cafe where audience members dine at 8 and are ringside at Maxim's by 10.

THEATER/UNITED STATES

Past Forgetting

Kindertransport by Diane Samuels; Directed by Abigail Morris; Manhattan Theater Club, New York City

FOLLOWING KRISTALLNACHT IN 1939, when Nazi mobs in Berlin destroyed synagogues and shops owned by Jews, a small window to freedom briefly opened for German, Austrian and Polish children. Over the course of eight months, nearly 10,000 Jewish youngsters under 18 were evacuated to Britain to stay with foster families until it was safe to return. Most never saw their parents or homeland again. While the Kindertransport saved them, the separation from everything they had cared for would be a kind of death.

From her interviews with the grown children of the Kindertransport, British dramatist Diane Samuels has written an affecting drama about a girl whose past was severed as though cut by a knife. "England is quite tolerant in many ways," Samuels notes, "but when aliens try to retain their differences, there is not much tolerance." Her play, now in New York City after its premiere at London's Soho Theatre Company, takes place in an attic, where a middle-age woman sorting through her belongings reluctantly confronts who she had once been. As a nine-year-old named Eva Schlesinger, she says a last farewell to her German mother. Brought up by a good-hearted Englishwoman, young Eva clings to the hope of returning until salvation comes to seem like abandonment. To survive, we see, she turns her back on every aspect of her heritage and becomes frozen in emotional coldness, a rigid perfectionist who cannot give or accept love.

TELEVISION/INDIA

Vicissitudes in Videoland

Channel V