“To my mind, what really makes ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ special is how it embodies the rise of what I think of as sarcasm news. More and more news programs are likely to go absurdist,” writes Alissa Quart in an examination of the MSNBC broadcasting trend. This is in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Quart traces this kind of skeptical, humorous TV examination back to “Saturday Night Live,” to politicians making fun of themselves on “Leno” and “Letterman” and then up to the present with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, making fun of everything. 

Writer Quart obviously believes that even more ironic anchors and absurdity will be serious stuff for viewers who increasingly seek opinion instead of straight news.

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"La Cage aux Folles” has just won the famed Olivier Award as the best musical revival in London. When this Jerry Herman, Arthur Laurents, Harvey Fierstein musical of men in drag, men in love, men pretending to be “straight” was brought to Broadway in 1983, it was a hit. It was nominated for eight Tonys; it won six, with “best musical” included.       

The French film from which it was adapted was a sheer masterpiece, and I thought the movie Mike Nichols made from it, titled “Birdcage,” was also first-rate. (Every time it comes on TV, I sit down and watch Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman, Calista Flockhart, Dianne Wiest, Hank Azaria and Christine Baranski all over again.) Now we will surely get the English, musical, stage version back on these shores.

Oh, and not so incidentally, it was America’s “Jersey Boys” that won the Olivier’s best musical award.

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Speaking of all this, there is an intellectual smash hit on the boards at the Eugene O’Neill theater and it boasts two major stars – Ludwig van Beethoven and Jane Fonda! He is incomparable and incomparably acted by Zach Grenier, with the wonderful Diane Walsh at the piano, playing the music created in Beethoven’s deaf head.     

And Jane is glittering, stylish, glamorous, sardonic, cold and stunningly competent in her role as the musicologist out to determine why Beethoven wrote 33 variations on the minor music of history’s Anton Diabelli. (The play ranges from 1819 and 1823 to the present. It is, in part, a mystery.)

Miss Fonda and Mr. Grenier are joined by a superb, totally appealing cast: Don Amendolia as Diabelli, Erik Steele as Beethoven’s aide, Susan Kellermann as a meticulous German records keeper with an insight into sexual satisfaction, an attractive Samantha Mathis as Jane’s daughter and Colin Hanks as the girl’s lover – who happens to be a male nurse. Yes, there is illness in this play but I don’t want to give away any plot. It hardly matters. Miss Fonda’s progression in the story is amazing and deft. She appears before us now completed as a truly fine actress, a position she seems to have been seeking since she was a teen and through all her various changing and even Oscar-winning selves. (Her own 33 variations?)  

But it is Moisés Kaufman’s book and brilliant direction and staging, plus a dazzling set by Derek McLane that are the true stars of this drama. This is an evening like nothing I remember since Jack O’Brien’s staging of Tom Stoppard’s astonishing “Coast of Utopia.” This was a compelling night in the theater.

It is risky to call a play by a number because the audience may dread progressing from one to 33. But this time, it worked. It seems, however, that I am alone in my excellent review. Generally, the New York critics were less impressed with “33 Variations” than I was. I just never understand these guys. They always moan about quality theater, but when they get it, as in “ever so rarely,” they turn their backs on it.