Pity the poor critic, knuckling his brain to make serious sense of an artistic jeu d'esprit that is singing, dancing and shooting off colorful sparks for his entertainment.

	Mary Mervis From top left, clockwise, Jeff Davis, Michele de la Reza, Lenora Nemetz and Richard Morris get all tangled up in "Voluptuous Tango." Click photo for larger image. "The Voluptuous Tango Where: Quantum Theatre at The Mellon Institute, Fifth Ave., Oakland. When: Through April 2; Wed.-Sun. 8 p.m. Tickets: $15-$22; 412-394-3353.

Maybe you're like that, too, crippled by the Puritan ethic of exegesis, especially when facing a company with the intellectual accomplishment of Quantum Theatre. But how many times have I told others to have the experience first and think about it later?

This is certainly how to enjoy "The Voluptuous Tango," a pocket opera bouffe, composed by Dominic Muldowney, with text by David Zane Mairowitz, now receiving its world premiere as a fully staged divertissement.

The story concerns the imagined mutual seduction of Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), the visionary American dancer and life force, and E.F.T. Marinetti (1876-1944), the Italian poet who invented Futurism and became an early Fascist. Their comic courtship, complete with tragic premonitions, is indeed a metaphoric tango of erotic thrust and parry.

So there's thematic, historic and aesthetic significance here, but mainly, once you put aside the critical spectroscope, it diverts. Souffle seems to me the right word, about as good an approximation as English affords for opera bouffe, which is to say a bumptious farce, a thing of froth and high spirits.

As any cook knows, it takes skill, good ingredients and impeccable timing to keep a souffle aloft. Here, Muldowney's score is enhanced by the generous and witty direction of Di Trevis, a English visitor with high credentials.

She and Quantum's Karla Boos have further gathered the creative contributions of Peter Kope and Michele de la Reza of Attack Theatre, who supply choreography; set design and lights by Tony Ferrieri and C. Todd Brown; and voluptuously dramatizing costumes by Richard Parsakian. There is also a robust sound design, "consulted" on by Dave Bjornson.

Rarely does a 63-minute souffle get such lavish creative and technical support. The result is one beautiful picture after another. It gains, as so often with Quantum, from the setting deep in the heart of that colonnaded Oakland pile, Mellon Institute.

I've never before been in the building, a monument of brutal modernist classicism. Within, you discover largely chaste art deco. The auditorium's Greco-Roman lines restrain a colorful playfulness; it's both grand and small, soaring but intimate.

This duality perfectly meets the show's mix of frivolous farce and serious implications. Duality is also implicit in Futurism, with its proto-Fascist worship of might and modernity pulling against a performance mode the program calls "zany illogic and sensory riot."

And duality defines the Marinetti-Duncan tango, which plays out like a genteel operatic farce version of a Henry James comedy about sophisticated European meets innocent American.

Marinetti, sung with full sonorousness and a delicious mix of pompous ego and boyish self-doubt by baritone Richard Morris, has the advantage of an attendant four-man chorus. It echoes his thoughts and prepares his seductions, while commenting in humorous detail.

Duncan, acted with kittenish shrewdness and wide-eyed wonder by Broadway Baby Lenora Nemetz, has no other advantage than Nemetz' captivating presence.

She often speaks while Marinetti sings, which enriches the contrast between them. Feminine and masculine spar, but it isn't war so much as the dalliance of the gods -- prettty much like tango.

Meanwhile, de la Reza and Jeff Davis provide parallel counterpoint in actual dance. If Nemetz expresses Duncan's soul, de la Reza is her fluid body, but at times I'd rather have just the dancers or just Marinetti and Duncan and not have to choose which to watch.

The chorus is punctilious in black leather, and leader Andrew Gehling has a glorious solo as the heroes couple in "the kiss that launched a thousand manifestos."

The lyrics are funny stuff, but they are sometimes not clear. Marinetti sings often in Italian (this is opera, after all), and although Morris often convinced me I could understand, I did feel I was missing a lot.

But as I say, I was working too hard. I want to go back a second time and just have fun, which is ultimately what "The Voluptuous Tango" is all about.