In the seemingly endless race to adapt every movie ever made into a musical, the producers of Xanadu, now at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theater, have tried a new tactic: Scraping the bottom of the cinematic barrel. But guess what! Choosing the 1980 Olivia Newton-John disco-oriented embarrassment turns out not to be such a desperate measure.

The simple reason is that only the doltish could fail to improve on something so awful -- and the Xanadu creative team, headed by playwright Douglas Carter Beane and director Christopher Ashley, is clearly not a convention of dolts. Indeed, they have taken the movie's bare essentials and transformed them into a cute 85-minute spoof that works more effectiv[...]