THEATER: PERCHANCE TO DREAM

On one stage a flock of doves is released to flutter over the heads of the audience. On another there's an ethereal procession of dancers dressed as parti-colored birds. The avian stagecraft is not the only thing linking two complementary productions that have enlivened New York City's traditionally slow summer season. James Lapine's Twelve Dreams is a straight play that feels like a musical; Graciela Daniele's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a musical that often feels like a straight play. Both appear under the aegis of Lincoln Center (though the first is off-Broadway, the second on). And both are smart, surrealistic and visually entrancing.

Chronicle is adapted from a novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Set in an "isolated Latin American town," it's a tale of stiff-backed, implacable male pride. A handsome groom (Alexandre Proia), on discovering that his lovely bride (Saundra Santiago) is no virgin, initiates a chain of retribution that leads to a tragedy and ramifies through town, blighting one life after another.

Daniele, who has staged such musicals as Once on This Island and Falsettoland, not only conceived but directed and choreographed Chronicle as well. Yet in the novella's passage from page to stage, something of its fateful weight has been forfeited. For one thing, Garcia Marquez's signature tone of sagacious melancholy is necessarily lost. For another, Bob Telson's music fails to deepen or extend the characters. In musical theater the audience longs to feel that it knows someone much better after listening to him or her sing for a couple of minutes. But Telson's priorities seem to be elsewhere.

His jazzy, punchy music does create a fluid but vigorous medium on which the actors, many of them ballet dancers, can glide. What the tale has lost in terms of weight, it may have gained in mobility. There's a beautiful wedding fete, for instance, in which even the food takes wing, and an appealingly somber/silly march. Indeed, at times Chronicle looks and sounds positively resuscitative: this colorful show, with its percussive Latin rhythms, could be a tonic for Broadway.

Twelve Dreams, oddly, might also have been titled Chornicle of a Death Foretold. The play, set in New England in 1936, focuses on a young girl named Emma (Mischa Barton), who presents her psychiatrist father (Harry Groener) with a book of her puzzling dreams. Finding their interpretation intractable, he consults a renowned professor (Jan Rubes), who suggests that the dreams "foretell the demise of the dreamer." Though all the characters are fictional, the plot springs from a case study of Carl Jung's; the psychologist found corroboration for his theory of the "collective unconscious" in a 10-year-old whose dreams seemingly divined her own death.