AN OOH LA LA NEW SHOW AT THE LIDO

PARIS â€”  It’s 10 p.m., and near the top of the Champs Elysees, in the huge turquoise-colored, velvet-draped amphitheater, every one of the 1,200 seats is taken. Waiters scurry about filling last-minute orders, usually for Champagne. A burst of fanfare from the 35-piece orchestra off to one side on a balcony, and the chandeliers of baccarat crystal slowly rise to the roof while slim floor lamps sink to the ground and the house lights dim.

A few seconds pass, then a massive illumination reveals one of the world’s largest stages. Tall, bare-breasted girls make their stately appearance followed by bouncy chorines against a background of a sumptuous set. A dazzling vision of feathers and pearls, veils and turbans, sequins and silks, furs and furbelows--the multifaceted spectacle begins. This is the Lido, the world’s best-known nightclub, and the show, titled “Panache,� which has everything but the kitchen sink in it, is the draw.

The Lido hadn’t presented a new show since 1981, which led the show-biz paper Variety to hail “Panache� as “the first good nudes in four years!�

This quadrennial change is an operation that has been compared to repainting the Eiffel Tower. In France, the Lido is to the capital’s night life what Dior and St. Laurent are to style. The Lido’s poster, against a red, yellow and black background, shows high-breasted, long-legged girls in the middle of a Himalaya of feathers, with the line, “Ca c’est Paris!� “This is Paris!�

“Actually,� says Christian Clerico, chairman and managing director, “the Lido is the third most-visited monument in Paris, after the Louvre and Notre Dame.�

Clerico is hardly the Hollywood picture of a nightclub owner. Broad-shouldered, a shock of black hair above a square face, he looks more like an athlete. In fact, he’s a part-time farmer with a Harvard education as an international lawyer. Yet, despite a reserved nature, he plays an important part in the artistic creation of the show as its producer.

Although any European beach resort will have more feminine nudity on display than the Lido, the partly dressed showgirls--sequins and breasts waving in the air--still attract the visitor. Few would think of visiting Paris without coming to ogle the 60 magnificent Bluebell Girls in dizzily expensive costumes against a background of 40 extravagant sets, with costly special effects worthy of Steven Spielberg.

Did “Panache� really cost $3 million? “No expense is spared,� Clerico says. “We use imported leather, selected woods, hand-embroidered velvet. The costumes are as valuable as collector’s pieces. Since the dancers are sometimes only a foot or two from the audience, the dresses must be perfect. Everything is made by hand--the sequins are sewn on one by one. The furs, too, are genuine: from white fox to Russian sable. Every night a corps of artisans repairs the headgear, jewels, costumes, footwear and wigs.�

The show, the centerpiece of the Lido’s attractions, can take three years to prepare, but in the next four years it will dazzle 2 million spectators, mainly Americans.

The Clerico family has been running the Lido since 1946, when it was taken over by Christian’s father and uncle, who came from northern Italy. The name Lido comes from the fact that the first revue in 1946 featured gondolas (even though there are no gondolas on the Lido, an island off Venice). In 1977, the Lido moved up the Champs Elysees to occupy the space of a former movie house, the Normandie. Here it extends four floors underground and eight floors above.

There’s plenty of competition in Paris, with 95 nightclubs, cabarets, music halls and various theaters. The Lido leads the rest: the Crazy Horse Saloon with its stripteasers; the Casino, a kind of alternative Lido; the Moulin Rouge, an attempt to recapture the past; the Alcatraz, a comparative newcomer. But of the lot, only the Folies Bergere, with much of the same format but slower paced, comes close.

Most visitors need no introduction to the Lido or, for that matter, to its competitors. They all blend tack and taste, nudity and entertainment, laughs and leers, drawing mainly tourists and businessmen on expense accounts.

Crowds gathered for the opening of the new revue on the pavement in front of the flood-lit, tented entrance of the Champs Elysees pleasure palace to gape at arriving celebrities. In the lobby, TV cameras focused on the star guests as a Gypsy violin group played them to their tables. Among those passing in full-dress review were actresses and actors like Anouk Aimee, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Sabine Azema (“Sunday in the Country�), directors like Claude Lelouch and Marcel Carne, and Rudolf Nureyev.

Considering theater prices, particularly on Broadway, it’s not too high a price to pay to sit at a table within almost touching distance of some of the most fabulous bodies ever created. If you sit down, there’s a strict minimum of around $40, which includes a half-bottle of Champagne, whether you drink it or not. The show goes on at 10 and at 15 minutes past midnight. Coming at 8, you can dance and try and nurse your half-bottle of Champagne till the show starts at 10. Dancing? The floor is minuscule.

And dinner? For $50, there’s consomme or pate; hamburger, veal chop or chicken; dessert and, of course, a small bottle of Champagne. For $70, you can have the menu de fete with steak or duck and Moet et Chandon Champagne, or even go up to around $100 per person for a meal that includes cold salmon and hot baby lamb, accompanied by vintage Champagne and coffee. With a la carte, of course, the sky’s the limit.

Americans, Argentines and Italians get the tables nearest the floor and more attention from the waiters and hostesses. For instance, their glasses are kept continually filled with Champagne. The most distant tables are usually filled with the more reserved Scandinavians, British and Germans.

The evening’s overture is an explosive preface in which appear the Bluebell Girls, the Bluebell Nudes and the Super Bluebells, together with the Kelly Boy dancers, men with a minimum height of six feet.

Kelly Boys? This is because Miss Bluebell, who directs the dancers, is Margaret Kelly. Gray-haired, tall and slim, although she must be around 70, maybe even 75, Kelly, like the heads of state, never has her age revealed. A gruff woman, she arrived in Paris right after the war. For 30 years, her job has been to recruit, select and train (with military-like criteria) the dancers. She has recruited more than 10,000 girls from 16 to 24 years old.

Explains Kelly: “They must have long legs, be at least 5-foot-10, with high, well-formed derrieres, firm breasts but not too large because, since the demise of the brassiere, dangling, voluminous breasts appear unpleasant, anti-aesthetic. Naturally, the girls must be beautiful . . . very beautiful.�

They also have to be strong. When they wear gigantic costumes with light bulbs, they’re 7 1/2 feet tall, and with a battery hidden in the feathers weighing seven pounds, they must dance and yet appear very, very light.

Somehow the girls all look alike, with ski-lift noses and high-perched breasts held up there who knows how. The dancers are not too coordinated, but no one seems to mind.

They are usually recruited in England, where music halls give a wide choice. After a year, however, many ask to be sent to Las Vegas, where the Lido has a branch, “to see things.�

Once they become mothers, having maintained correspondence with Miss Bluebell, they frequently send their 16-year-old daughters to her. This family spirit is the secret of her success, she says.

The show’s first production number, “From Broadway to Hollywood,� raises the curtain on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Despite the title, the songs all come from movies. In fact, virtually all the music is composed of pop favorites from the last 50 years.

The show continues with sets rising and sinking, moving on turntables, expanding, narrowing, all lit by computer-run lighting. The latter comes into play with “The Legend of Ancient Egypt.� In Cecil B. DeMille style, this includes pagan rites and superstitions and, naturally, scantily dressed slave girls with tushes in abundance. At a certain moment, in prance some Roman centurions, undoubtedly left over from Antony’s visit to Cleopatra. In the background are stained-glass windows, which somebody should tell the Lido didn’t exist until hundreds of years later.

Every number is worthy of being a finale, and all are miracles of scene-shifting. Just getting camels on and off the stage amid more than 100 people is no mean task. It’s obvious that the pace of the show doesn’t give viewers a moment to catch their breath. The scenes pass so quickly that it’s like being on a roller coaster watching the history of the world as told by Fellini.

Every once in a while, a variety act appears: Chinese boy and girl acrobats, including a 14-year-old boy who bounces down a flight of stairs and then back up--on his head; chimpanzees who mug more than their human counterparts; superb ice skaters; a tightrope walker. A standout is American Nathalie Enterline with her clever top-hat-and-cane specialty.

Once the show is over, the guests file out, having already paid the tab that, with striking foresight, the management has collected. Waiters, with choreography matched only on the stage, have moved around the darkened room making out bills with, as a final touch, flashlights tightly held in their teeth.