tomorrow and Monday.

*** Picture this -- an paradise island where everybody's foreign and they all want to leave.

It's totally unrealistic -- but, you know, somehow it works.

And the 150th anniversary of the Harvard Hasty Pudding Theatricals lives up to its low standards -- of humour at least.

Scandinavians, Cubans, mermaids -- and probably worst of all, Englishmen, line up for a fitting tribute to a century-and-a-half of high camp and low humour.

And if anyone from Yale ever had any doubt, they really are a bunch of fairies at Harvard -- sorry, Havud.

This year's Hasty Pudding Show is truly a tour-de-force with flair, flounce and a touch of double-cross dressing to add a bit of spice to the traditional pudding mix.

The humour ranges from Bermuda tourism -- rip them off for all their money and then get them into a `sweat shop' -- to Island fever and how to get away for a bit.

The plot centres around an English theatre troupe shipwrecked on Bermuda -- and the accidental tourists spare nobody's feelings in their bid to reach the new world.

But Island Finance Minister Maximillian Aday -- no resemblance intended to Harvard alumni Grant Gibbons intended, one feels sure -- has other plans.

He has a plot -- involving regicide (which isn't killing someone called Reggie), a Mae West prototype called Terrell McClothesoff, of Scottish ancestry, presumably, and the Bermuda volcano goddess, Moanalot.

Evil Captain Hook-style Maximillian, who sports a spoon rather than a hook, for reasons I can't imagine, has a plan to bump off the heir to the Bermuda throne, Troy Zarus.

Troy is on the verge of an arranged marriage with Terrell McClothesoff when Cupid strikes and he falls in love with Lady Pudding-on-Airs.

The scene is set on Troy's 23rd birthday, when Viking warrior Gilda Wabbit gives him an axe -- "it's not much, something I stole from the military base.'' And the songs, ah, the songs. `A Fish out of Water' by Ethel Mermaid and `Trouble in Paradise' -- which includes the line "there's no more perfect place to be (or not to be)'' -- make the evening a night Shakespeare would, ah, probably run a mile from.

And the finale -- a bunch of Tinkerbelles in blue -- swings along to 70s classic Amy Stewart's `Ring My Bell.' Raymond Hainey MERMAN OR MAID? -- A character in the Harvard Hasty Pudding Theatricals 150th anniversary show "Paradise Lost -- and Found'' which is showing at the City Hall this week.

THEATRE THR