NIGHT MUSIC

“Stereophonic” and Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” on Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

When “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s magnum opus about a nineteen seventies rock band recording an album, débuted last year, at Playwrights Horizons, the Off Broadway venue gave over part of its lobby to a vintage-clothing shop. The theatre knew that spending more than three hours with Adjmi’s characters, each one gorgeously outfitted in the designer Enver Chakartash’s flowing bell-bottoms and deep-cut kimono tops, would turn the audience into groupies. It wouldn’t matter that those same characters had been tiresome or vain or careless with one another—the often dreamy, sometimes electrifying flower-rock songs, written by Will Butler (formerly of Arcade Fire), would make us imagine our own green selves up there, and want the velvet pants to prove it.