Musical 'Witches,' the Way of the Future

So what do we know about ''The Witches of Eastwick,'' directed by Eric Schaeffer, at Drury Lane? First, it is that real and precious rarity, a musical comedy; we haven't seen one of those in the West End for about a decade, since ''City of Angels.''

For that reason alone, we should already be cheering these ''Witches.'' Why else? For a start, or rather a first-act finale, there's the flying: not just up and down as in the old ''Peter Pan,'' but way out into the auditorium, and achieved not by a network railway on the roof of the theater, but by a revolutionary system involving a series of winches.

Then there's the casting: as the witches, Maria Friedman, Joanna Riding (arguably the two greatest British music-theater talents of their sex and generation) and, from Broadway, Lucie Arnaz, who learned a thing or two about being a funny and yet also a dazzling leading lady in musicals from her mother, Lucille Ball. As the randy devil who erupts into their small-town lives, Ian McShane returns to the West End after 30 years, joining that select group of British stage actors (Rex Harrison, David Tomlinson, Paul Scofield, Jonathan Pryce, Warren Mitchell) who discovered, often in midcareer, that they could sing and dance a little.

True, having decided to play the devil as Hugh Hefner, complete with his own Playdevil mansion, there is not a lot more that he can do with a somewhat underwritten role; with McShane, what you first see is what you get for the next couple of hours, but he has an admirable energy level and a useful line in old-fashioned stardom. He has also learned the invaluable trick of having other people dance around him, rather than having to prance uneasily around them.

And in one of the best-written roles, that of the manic leader of the Eastwick townspeople, Rosemary Ashe finally comes into her own brand of musical stardom as the English Ethel Merman she has always been in cabaret. Then there's the score, and what is remarkable here is the way in which its writers, John Dempsey (book and lyrics) and Dana Rowe (music), seem to be auditioning songs from the whole history of the American musical.

We're by now a long way away from the original John Updike novel, but then so was the Jack Nicholson film. The magical attraction of this project is that, unlike more familiar or simplistic material, ''The Witches of Eastwick'' can be adapted into just about anything you want. What I think Dempsey and Rowe want, apart from demonstrating their breathtaking versatility and nostalgia for the golden years of Broadway, is to rewrite ''Our Town'' in acid and blood and tears.

Eastwick therefore becomes the reverse of Stepford - a town where the all-American wives, instead of robotic docility, opt for lethal revenge on any men unwise enough to have married them. Even the devil eventually gets annihilated by their curses, in a spectacular church conflagration that ends with the funniest line in the show.

All we have hitherto heard from Dempsey and Rowe in London is ''The Fix,'' a savage little musical about a White House family inventing the word dysfunctional. This time the writers come at us from all corners of the stage with every kind of song, all given a lethal vodka twist. Love songs stop abruptly, or change into hymns of hate in mid-bar; nothing is quite what it seems, and in that at least they are faithful followers of Updike.

He is one of the great American satirists of our time, and it is that sense of satire, of the American dream's becoming a nightmare even before we fall asleep, that gives this score its much needed unity.

There are also echoes of ''The Wizard of Oz,'' complete with a tough little Dorothy who acts as a kind of weird narrator, ever eager to point out that Chicken Little may have been right about the sky's getting ready to fall. Bob Crowley's witty, cut-out sets, the orchestrations of David Caddick and William Brohn, the choreography of Bob Avian and Stephen Mear - all veteran technicians of other Cameron Mackintosh musicals - surround the newcomers here with an expertise that they would ironically no longer find on the Broadway from which they derive their art.

But any musical comedy in which witches can fill a neighbor's mouth with eyes of newt, and add the Shakespearean reference just in the nick of time, has to be something out of the ordinary. The final genius lies in the recognition that these three witches are not only the weird sisters in ''Macbeth,'' they are also the ugly sisters in ''Cinderella,'' except of course that they aren't ugly at all, but funny and touching and sometimes even heartbreaking.

This is, in every sense, a truly magical show, written, composed, choreographed, designed and directed to within inches of perfection. It is also, in my view, the most unmistakably produced musical I have ever seen; every element of ''Witches of Eastwick'' is about what Mackintosh has learned in almost 30 years of producing wide-stage epics. This lyrical, wistful, jokey, melodic, cynical, celebratory new score manages to salute or satirize almost every major musical of the last 50 years, while looking ahead to the way shows like this (not that there are any others yet) ought to develop in the next half-century or so.

If you want it in a single word, that word is expert. ''The Witches of Eastwick'' is the musical that starts the 21st century, and it will be a hard act to follow.