Entertainment: The Year 2000

The Entertainment Around the World, Ancient and Modern Creations

Beneath the cacophony of exploding fireworks, there was music and dancing around the world on Friday night as entertainers of every stripe, and their fans, set about proving that art, if not eternal (who knows?), at least provides a worthy human tribute to the last, and the next, 1,000 years.

Yes, there was a disappointment here and there. The Javits Convention Center extravaganza in Manhattan, with the headliners Andrea Bocelli, Aretha Franklin and Sting, was canceled, a casualty of poor ticket sales. And in Jerusalem, a performance of Handel's ''Messiah'' was canceled as well, after a rabbinical ban on public celebrations that would violate the Sabbath.

But from the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, where the passage of a millennial moment is old hat (this is the sixth) and 50,000 people attended a new opera by Jean-Michel Jarre, a French composer of New Age electronic music; to the ancient temple at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where traditional ballet dancers performed in the company of 2,000 prayer-offering Buddhist monks; to Rio de Janeiro, where three million samba dancers packed Copacabana Beach; to Berlin, where 60 bands played on 10 stages for a three-mile-long party that stretched across the once divided city; to Istanbul, where in Taksim Square, the Turkish band Athena rocked the casbah; to Las Vegas, where Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand made diva lovers swoon, the new era clicked over to a sometimes hopeful, sometimes wistful but generally joyful noise.

In New York, where the 24-hour celebration in Times Square saluted the cultures of the world in hourly performances that reflected the year 2000's incremental arrival around the globe, Billy Joel, a hometown boy (well, O.K, a Long Island boy) rang in the occasion at Madison Square Garden with a nostalgic medley of his best-known pop ballads.

''I wrote this for my first ex-wife,'' said Mr. Joel, beginning a rendition of ''Just the Way You Are.'' His show infused good times with wry melancholy, including a particularly yearning version of ''New York State of Mind'' and even the dolorous opening measures of Beethoven's ''Moonlight'' Sonata. The fans in the not- quite-full house did not seem to recognize the melancholy, but they took it well and patiently; to every other number, they sang along.

The atmosphere of pleasant familiarity was repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, in myriad clubs around the city, as it doubtless was in cities everywhere.

In Sunnyside, Queens, on a stretch of Queens Boulevard where halal meat markets, Turkish grocers and taquerias sit side by side and the newsstand sells papers in eight languages, Avenging Disco Godfather, a five-piece Celtic rock band, made its weekly appearance at Tailors Hall. In the one-room pub with a roaring fire and a candlelit chandelier, 75 regulars gathered for an Irish new year. The band covered classics by the Beatles and Janis Joplin with a lilting Irish skew.

Meanwhile, in the distinctly less intimate Florida Everglades, 80,000 people gathered for a midnight-to-dawn concert by the rock band Phish on 500 acres on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, home to a tribe that first had contact with European explorers half a millennium ago. Amid oak, cypress and palm trees, the party included hot-air balloons, two Ferris wheels and a ballet troupe, not to mention a handful of nudists and men on stilts. Many in the crowd had traveled from around the country to hear the band, which has achieved the kind of cult following that once adhered to the Grateful Dead.

Last summer, the city of Chicago commissioned a millennium line dance, the ''milly,'' sort of a Midwestern macarena, from a local choreographer, Harrison McEldowney. Set to a tune by another Chicagoan, Wade Hubbard, it was danced just before midnight Friday by the 3,500 celebrants at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center for a dinner presided over by Mayor Richard M. Daley.

After the millennium turned, the milly gave way to a more conventional boogie and in the end, a series of conga lines, with Maggie Daley, the mayor's wife, leading one.

In Las Vegas, in the 20th time zone to enter the new year, Barbra Streisand gave a rare performance at the MGM Grand, the same place she last appeared in six years ago, when the hotel opened. Then, an anxious Ms. Streisand took the stage for the first time in 20 years. This time, appearing confident and excited, she sang to a sold-out house of 13,000 people and repeatedly brought them to their feet during the two-and-a-half-hour show. They all carried flashlights they had been given as they entered in case the power failed, which it didn't. At the stroke of midnight, silver, white and gold confetti dropped in the arena as Ms. Streisand sang her final number ''People,'' of course.

Nowhere was there an extravaganza to match ''The Twelve Dreams of the Sun,'' a three-hour song cycle staged as an opera, with more than 1,000 musicians, dancers and singers and based on an ancient Egyptian myth about the daily dusk-to-dawn journey of the sun and the gifts it bestows on humanity during its passage: time, protection, wisdom, eternity, fidelity, memory, courage, space, innocence, celebration, purity and freedom. The anthemic work by Mr. Jarre melded electronic music with Western jazz and Arabic rhythms and melodies, and the music and dancing was augmented by a spectacular laser show against the backdrop of the pyramids and the great Sahara.

'I hope the new millennium will witness international understanding,'' Mr. Jarre told the crowd. A sentiment grand and bland, perhaps, but appropriate, no? Somehow, everywhere, grand or grandiose, glorious or gloomy, maudlin or moving, artists rose to the occasion because they had helped define it. That was the case for the lonely practitioner as well as the celebrated star. To wit, Not long before midnight Friday, Donald Green sat at a card table on West Third Street in Manhattan peddling his poems, as he has done almost daily over the last decade. He has bound some of his poems, handwritten, into a volume. He had only 13 of them; well, 12 now. Asked for a millennium poem, he chose ''Hope,'' reprinted here for the first time: