Veritas ad nauseum

Non sequitur, Amen...

Ex libris cabot hilles

Cloris Leachman stars in phyllis

Non sequitur Amen

The unlikely bunch consists of the Countess and her husband, Count Yerblessings (Ron Duvernay) and their liege Sir Vance Entrance (David Chase, who also wrote the rollicking score) and his wife Rhea Entrance (Adrian Blake). Plus their two ill-matched offspring, engaged to be married: Chrysler le Baron (Erick Neher) and Ethel Alcohol (George Zlupko). Chrysler, to put it mildly, is a disappointment to his amazon mother. And even his father gets exasperated with his poetry spouting and inability to dig warfare: "Chrysler, why can't you be more like Rambo?" Ethel's not much help. She's busy with her rather healthy appetitite.

Having established themselves as utterly clueless, this oddball crew proceeds to deliver a rousing number, in which they equate the whole operation with a religious football game. ("We're special-teamin' for the Lord...") Their energetic pep-rally-cum-war-anthem is the production's first real show-stopper.

And they're off. Destinies will clash. Conflicts, romances, and plot-torturing absurdities will abound.

YET ELSEWHERE, somewhere in the desert wasteland outside Solong, the wandering Prophet Motive (Leonard Dick) and his hapless sidekick Ahmed A'Boubou (Jeffrey Korn) are way ahead of their time, preaching the good 20th century values of capitalism and personal repression. Dick's enormous birdnest of a white wig and his well-developed evangelistic twang are all-too-familiar and consequently quite effective. Their energetic duet, "Moral Hygiene," is yet another showstopper.

When Ahmed discovers a golden lamp inhabited by a strange female personage, Abby Cadabra (Mark Meredith), the cast is complete. When the trio stumbles unwittingly upon the town of Solong, shortly before the football-crazed but directionless crusaders arrive, the melee begins. Destinies have clashed.

It's time for the Grand Themes of the evening to entangle themselves. East meets West. The lure of capitalism--in the promising form of the "black goop" everywhere--overtakes a sleepy, sandy desert town. Strong women dominate wimpy sniveling men amid chastity belts and harem-slaves. The Church meets the heathens. Everyone falls in love.

And it all happens, naturally, in true Pudding fashion.

This means, for the benefit of the great unwashed who have never seen a Pudding show, that every slice of dialogue is a self-transcending attempt at stupider jokes than the ones before. And the authors have outdone themselves this year. Whether it's the Bible, Consumer Reports, or the game-show circuit, Jess Bravin and Peter Sagal have plumbed the depths of Americana, Harvardiana, banality and even hallowed Tradition to create some of the longest strings of groan-inducing one-liners in history.

Which is not to say the audience doesn't eat it up--provided they're sober enough to follow. This is the stuff of which Pudding shows are made. What "Between the Sheiks" has also got, though, is a collection of uniformly well-developed characters: there are virtually no stars (as written), and yet almost everyone has a chance to shine.

The evil Countess Interruptus (Klobucher), for example, not only mugs and sneers hilariously, but shows off the best legs in the production (and does some impressive things with them), earning the envy of any woman in her right mind.