The Light Fantastic" is a buoyant collection of 41 of John Lahr's New Yorker pieces, and it demonstrates once again that he's the most generous and gregarious theater writer working today. Perhaps this is because Lahr is an insider. He's written four plays and 15 books, including "Notes on a Cowardly Lion," the bestselling biography of his father, Bert Lahr, and "Prick Up Your Ears," about playwright Joe Orton, which was made into a feature film. "I'm proud of my raffish pedigree: my father was a clown, my mother was a chorus girl," Lahr writes. "Most of my life has been spent within shouting distance of a stage."

His book is divided into such sections as "Comedians," "Playwrights," "Musicals" and "Productions." In "Bill Hicks: The Goat Boy Rises," Lahr admits that his 16-year-old son made him watch a Hicks' midnight comedy show on English television. "Saying the unsayable was just his job," Lahr writes of the controversial late comedian, in a piece that's a review, an entertaining interview and a poignant elegy all in one. Lahr's essay "Tennessee Williams: Fugitive Mind," combines a review of the revival of "Sweet Bird of Youth" with gossip, a retrospective of the playwright's work and an astute psychological portrait of Williams, who made a truce with his past not in life, but on the stage. "Tony Kushner: Beyond Nelly" raves about the seven-hour production of Kushner's "Angels in America" ("Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika") and interweaves the long odyssey of Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece with a spirited portrait of Kushner engaging in his opening night ritual -- eating Chinese food, a double meal in the case of this doubleheader. Lahr also takes on Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Ira Gershwin, Ingmar Bergman, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jackie Mason.

Unlike New York magazine's mercurial critic John Simon, Lahr approaches each play, playwright and performer with an open mind -- whether high brow, low brow or some brow between. He makes a point of saying he is the only critic who reviews theater worldwide, and he calls criticism a kind of performance in itself. If that's true, "The Light Fantastic" has legs.

-- Susan Shapiro