So many times we go to the theater and we see a sign in the lobby.

Warning: There will be gunshots at this performance.

Actually, though Fela! deals with a violent era in Nigerian history, there are no gunshots heard, so that particular warning isn’t needed. Yet audiences who attend the new musical at the O’Neill might be warned about some other aspects of the show.

Warning: Those who hate even the slightest amount of audience participation may not be thrilled with the show. Because we’re supposed to be at an actual evening in The Shrine -- the countercultural nightclub owned by Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938-1997) -- Fela comes out and asks you to yell out, “Yeah, yeah!”

Warning: No matter how loud you yell “Yeah, yeah!” Fela will judge your efforts as not loud enough, and you’ll be commanded to do it again. In fact, you’ll be asked to “Yeah, yeah!” quite a few more times before the night is ended. You’ll also be asked to sing “La / La-la-la-la / La-la-la-la / La-la-la” a number of times in a row.

Warning: Only a minority of the lyrics are supertitled. Thus, you might have trouble understanding what the actor playing Fela is saying, because a thick accent is part of who he is. In some cases, though, you’ll have ample time to read the words of the songs, because they’re the type of lyrics that get repeated two or three times in a row.

Warning: Those patrons seated in the orchestra on the aisle should keep their feet solidly in front of them. Many actors run up and down the aisle at the fastest speed I’ve ever seen actors run. Please use the restrooms before the show – for if you gotta go, you gotta go through them.

Warning: You’ll be asked to stand and clap your hands. Cast members will come into the aisle to monitor you. In other words, there’s a lot of forced theatrical fun here. How interesting that a show that criticizes a fascistic government should demand so much obedience and conformity from its audience.

Warning: The sound is set very high – at least in the first act. It sounded less loud in the second act, which could mean that I simply adjusted to it, or that I lost some of my hearing from the first and second act from being aurally assaulted. If “The Shrine” was actually this loud, my heart bleeds for people who lived in the neighborhood. As for the lighting, occasionally the lights are often set to extraordinarily bright levels and then shone right into your eyes. Bring sunglasses.

Warning: You’ll hear lines such as “Bad teachers always try to make sense out of things” -- and then not told why Fela believes that to be true.

Warning: As is often the case in some of the worst musicals, there’s a superficial romance primarily based on physical attraction.

Warning: We don’t get to know much about Fela. Instead of having the book tell us, headlines from (I presume) actual newspapers fill us in. “Fela enflames students,” says one. “Fela arrested for armed robbery,” says another. All that Fela says by way of rebuttal is that “Innocent people go to jail – myself included.” Well, maybe. But we need to hear the whole story before we can believe him. “Arrested for armed robbery” is quite a statement. Was he framed? If so, Fela should tell us his side of the story -- but he doesn’t bother. At the end of the first act, he boldly states that he should be the country’s president. Perhaps he should, but let’s hear his qualifications, shall we, before we cast our votes? I’m sure it’s no fun to live under a government this corrupt, but a good drama would convince us after showing both sides of the story. Here, we must take Fela’s one-sided word for everything.

Warning: To those who don’t like to hear details about defecation, there’s an extended passage late in the first act in which we hear about a few days in the life of Fela’s bowel movements, or lack of them.

Warning: The show is two hours and four minutes long before any genuine drama takes place. That’s when projected slides of police mug shots, both profile and full-face, are shown. Then, in that letter-by-letter-typed-out convention, we read about the atrocities that these people experienced, while a light shines on each of the actors who represent these tortured people. Wouldn’t it be more effective to have these actors do the talking?

Warning: Fans of Lillias White must wait until more than two hours have passed before they can see her do anything of value. Seeing and hearing her sing an Afro-centric 11 o’clock number does offer its rewards, but she doesn’t convince that she’s really Fela’s mother, but seems more of a Broadway performer.

Warning: The final number has everyone marching around carrying small coffins on which some slogans are painted. For those who sit too far away, you may not be able to read such sentiments as “Organized Religion = Organized Repression.” So if you want to see them, sit close.

Warning: There isn’t much artistry in Bill T. Jones' choreography. After Grand Hotel won the Tony for Best Choreography, management was a little worried that tourists might not know what “choreography” is, so they advertised their win for “Best Dancing.” For Fela! the term should be “Best Jumping.”

Warning: Anne Bancroft reportedly said after she saw Zorba in 1968, “It’s like a night in a vulgar Greek restaurant.” Fela! is like a night in a noisy African nightclub. So, just as with a loud club, you don’t get the chance to get to know anyone. Oh, the club ambiance is exactly the intention, and that’s the time the creators and management want you to have. So those who like clubbing need not be warned.

So here’s my final warning: Take my reactions with a shakerful of salt. Just as some people don’t need to be warned about a gunshot in advance, many people won’t need any of my warnings, either. The audience at the performance I attended had a splendid time, and cheered and applauded loudly. So there may be an audience for this show.

On the other hand, the political problems of Nigeria and the brutal information we’re told in the second act may not be of interest to get much of an audience to Fela! eight times a week.

Nevertheless, Fela! is providing Broadway with a fascinating opportunity to see if Ben Brantley and the New York Times have the power they once had. Brantley hasn’t written many reviews as enthusiastic as the one he gave Fela! In olden times, such a review would ensure runs of years and years. Now?

Certainly some people will take Brantley’s advice and buy tickets. But what will be the important word-of-mouth that people dispense to their friends and relatives? Will theatergoers be giving huzzahs -- or warnings?

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com

Bless Howard Sherman and Ben Hodges. They’re responsibly for a stirringly marvelous book called The Play That Changed My Life, which is subtitled America’s Foremost Playwrights on the Plays That Influenced Them. (Applause, 179 pp, $18.99).

Sherman gets the credit for the idea. He saw a book called The Movie That Changed My Life and decided that the same thrust should be made for plays. Under the auspices of the American Theatre Wing, he got together with Hodges to choose the playwrights. Hodges interviewed some, assigned and edited essays from others, and put together this most moving book.

Special thanks to Hodges for getting Horton Foote in before it was too late. Nonagenarian Foote speaks of some of the greatest performances that he’s ever seen, so you know that the words “Laurette” and “Taylor” will soon follow, and they do, but –surprise! – not for the expected The Glass Menagerie, but for Outward Bound. And how about this rave for Pauline Lord in Ethan Frome: “In all the years since,” Foote states, “I have thought about it at least once a week.”

Some of the shows that influenced these playwrights weren’t quite in that league. Children’s theater played a big part. After a Pinocchio performance, David Ives was moved enough to wait around and get the autographs of the actors playing the Fox and the Blue Fairy (both of whom would probably want his now). Lynn Nottage tells of a children’s show she attended in which a refrigerator opened to reveal some talking lima beans – “and that,” she writes, “opened up a whole new creative universe for me.”

As a child, Nottage saw more plays than TV shows, for her family often took her and themselves to musicals -- Hair, Purlie, and Dolly! – long before they got around to buying a television set. And please, dear readers, the next time you buy Ms. Nottage a present, don’t make it a certain landmark play. As she wrote, “The gift I have received most often in my life is a copy in A Raisin in the Sun.”

Nice to see that community theater gets its due, too. Beth Henley gives a stream-of-consciousness list of what she remembers: “Cast parties, BYOB, understudy, upstaging, phoning it in, salmon gel, two-hander, no royalties, goddamn critics, the Scottish play, building costumes, half hour, cue light, callbacks, green room, glow tape, blocking, blackout, places!” The upshot? As Henley says, “It was like a dream being in a production with real adult actors.”

Sarah Ruhl, author of the current In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play, might surprise you with her community theater favorite: Enter Laughing, the 1963 commercial comedy that lasted a year and a day on Broadway. But no matter what the show, Ruhl enjoyed community theater for a more specific reason: “What is more moving,” she asks, “than seeing someone you love on stage?”

Something a bit more professional – but not much more – influenced Nilo Cruz. As a child in Cuba, his parents had planned to attend a nightclub cabaret, but when they couldn’t find a sitter, they took him with them. Because he was underage, he had to watch from under a table, peeking through a tablecloth. Who wouldn’t understand why seeing something under those forbidden circumstances would just have to be the most exciting thing in the world?

A.R. Gurney takes us back to his college days at Williams, and confesses that he played the female lead in The Man Who Came to Dinner. (I assume he means Maggie Cutler. Guess he could mean Lorraine Sheldon. But you know actors: It could be Miss Preen, and Gurney could have seen it as the lead.)

While at school, Gurney was two classes behind Sondheim – whom he judged to be “light years beyond me in talent and experience.” Still, Gurney was interested in the musical form, and wanted to adapt Pygmalion, but “the director of drama rejected the idea as hopeless.” Instead, Gurney channeled his energies into revues, and George Steinbrenner, the future co-producer of Seesaw before going on to other endeavors, played the piano for him.

Some were only able to read the plays that changed their lives. John Patrick Shanley tells who led him into uncharted territory. “No one in my neighborhood had ever gone into the arts. My role model was Cyrano” -- as in de Bergerac -- "because," Shanley says, he’s “a poet who’s the toughest guy in the room.”

Of course, the plays that changed some lives changed their style of these writers when they were just starting out. Jon Robin Baitz fully admits that he mimicked David Hare’s style. And after he saw Aunt Dan and Lemon, Baitz decided of Wallace Shawn, “If this man can write those long, hallucinatory monologues, so can I.”

David Henry Hwang ‘fesses up that Equus was a profound influence on him and his M. Butterfly – right down to the nude scene. It was one of the scenes he wrote late in the process, after director John Dexter had been signed. When Hwang gave the scene to him, Dexter said, “If you have a penis here and the Lunts here, everyone’s looking at the penis.”

Others had an equally rarefied experience at an early age. Says Donald Margulies, “I felt privileged being in a grand Broadway theatre packed with well-dressed adults and being let in on the jokes they so obviously enjoyed; I was thrilled to add my small sound to all that laughter.” How did he get there? His father loved Broadway and cast albums. Writes Margulies, “I was the only kid in the sixth grade who knew by heart the entire score of Happy Hunting.”

From Margulies' writing, one might not infer such an influence. Similarly, who’d expect that Christopher Durang would speak so lovingly about the sentimental ballads in Fiorello!? Of the actress who sang “When Did I Fall in Love,” he writes, “Her character sadly dies minutes after this realization” before he clarifies: “Minutes after in terms of storytelling, I mean. I don’t mean she sang the song and dropped to the floor. Though,” he muses, “I might write something like that.”

Diana Son, growing up in Delaware, was thrilled to find that her class would be taking a field trip to New York to see a Papp Theatre Hamlet –which she found a refreshing change from the usual “Liberty Bell, Dupont Industries and Joe Biden.” Better still, Son had already read the play, adored it, and couldn’t wait to see it – until she heard that a woman, Diane Venora, was playing the title role. Her adolescent mind couldn’t accommodate non-traditional casting, and she went very reluctantly and expected to be outraged.

Then she saw the show. “Venora’s Hamlet,” she writes, “was more faithful to my personal and passionate investment in Hamlet as an adolescent than the iconic performances imprinted by (such old-timers as) Olivier, John Gielgud, and Kevin Kline.”

And then, Son wraps up her essay by delivering my favorite line in the entire book: “It wasn’t just the play that changed my life,” she writes. “It was the play that gave me one.”

And yours, dear reader? Why not tell your story by entering the on-line contest at www.americantheatrewing.org/contest now through Sunday? Win, lose, or draw, everyone's bound to profit from hearing your story.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com