WANNA BUY A DUCK--FOR $150?

By RICHARD CORLISS

TIPTOEING PAST THE DANK AND murk of the Manhattan neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen, you walk into a huge tent where Pomp Duck and Circumstance is performed and enter a different world. Inside the bordello-red lobby area, tuxedoed giants and midgets say hello. In an alcove, T shirts and robes with a Matisse monogram are for sale. So are the pieces of Rosenthal china on which you will dine. A bartender pours you a glass of the house Chardonnay. Nine bucks.

It is a different world, all right: Vegas-style glam, with a heavy German accent. Indeed, the show--conceived by Berlin restaurateur Hans-Peter Wodarz and a hit in Berlin, Venice and Paris--is stopping in New York City (through March) en route to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. But the show, which offers a meal, a circus and a lot of comic milling for $150 per person (excluding drinks), means to be the ultimate upmarket version of show-biz spectacle. The decor is suitably lavish. The four-course dinner is ambitious, if too heavily salted. And the entertainment is strenuous in trying to please, offend and astonish all at once.

Dinner theater: the very phrase brightens eyes in this nation of snackaholics. Movie-house owners have long catered to the eat-and-art urge, as the stalagmites of chewing gum and Jujyfruits on the floor of the local Googolplex will attest to future archaeologists. In the past decade, producers of live shows merged foodomania with Disney-style theme attractions (Medieval Times, King Henry's Feast) to create that curiosity known as environmental theater. Song of Singapore was set in a lavish nightclub in 1941. For Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding you went to church, then to a restaurant. When Tamara came to New York, visitors wandered through an armory and were fed by the chefs of the posh eatery Le Cirque.

All that is sissy stuff compared with the shenanigans at Pomp Duck, self-described as "a restaurant out of control." The staff (actors, mostly from Germany) are nuts. They steal your bread, feed you soup, mummify you in packing tape, give you a quick shampoo. When waiters announce the fish course, beware--you will get damp! There are also fat ladies in skimpy costumes, a man who plays Vivaldi on liquor bottles, an opera singer treated rudely by the maitre d' and a food critic who can't stop complaining. "It's like eating at Denny's!" he shouts. The whole thing plays like a Teutonic Olsen and Johnson-Heilzapoppin.

Punctuating the chaos are three fine acrobat acts, in the Cirque du Soleil mode, of which trapezist Helene Turcotte, a muscular beauty, is the champion enthraller. But these oases of grace only underline the frenetic naivete of the rest of Pomp Duck. After 3 1/2 hours of the chef chasing the chanteuse, visitors rush out to inhale that acrid New York air as if it were attar of roses. Even Hell's Kitchen is preferable to hell's kitsch.