"It is both gratifying and a little frightening when a play you had consigned to the crypt returns as a living prophecy for our times. La MaMa E.T.C.’s highly entertaining new revival of “The Tooth of Crime” — Mr. Shepard’s musical comic-book melodrama from 1972 about celebrity, mortality and good old rock ’n’ roll, set in a sci-fi gangland — may not be the slickest show around. But as directed by George Ferencz, in a restaging of his 1983 concert-style production for La MaMa, this “Tooth” achieves something far more important than professional perfection.

In bringing demystifying clarity to a work often dismissed as a smoky head trip, this interpretation makes a compelling case for “The Tooth of Crime” as one of Mr. Shepard’s best plays (that includes classics like “Buried Child” and “True West”), and perhaps the best American drama on the cancerous nature of fame.?"

But every factor that would seem to be dragging “Tooth” into the shadows of nostalgia instead gives it a new vibrancy. The sense of years having passed, most evident in the face and body of the undeniably middle-aged Mr. Wise, only makes the central conflict more affecting.