Playgoing these days often takes on the creepy feeling of being trapped in a perpetual George Romero retrospective festival. From stage after stage, hordes of resurrected dead celebrities keep coming at you in relentless waves, ghoulishly intent on feasting on, if not your liver, certainly your wallet and your cherished memories.

Recently haunting area theaters have been shows disinterring, in ghostly pale imitations, such performing icons as Sinatra and his Rat Pack, Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, the Andrew Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, and even the very live Chita Rivera doing a tolerable impersonation of her dear departed former self. Previous resurrections have also included Janis Joplin, Hank Williams Jr., the Mamas and the Papas, and Enrico Caruso. Scheduled soon to materialize are John Barrymore, Peggy Lee, Patsy Cline and — Frankie Valli?

So, what brought on these mass exhumations? A sudden epidemic among theatrical producers of archeological interest in ancient idols? A spontaneous outbreak of infectious nostalgia? Then again, maybe we should remember that, as Willie Sutton held up banks because that's where the money was, grave robbers are usually motivated by something more tangible than scholarly curiosity.

In fact, the three most likely reasons for theatrically plundering the past are that these shows are cheap, cheaper and the cheapest to produce. They're frequently one-person affairs, sometimes with an added actor or two quick-changing through a herd of subsidiary characters. If the subject is a singer, musical support generally gets reduced to a small combo or solo piano. The single set is bare-bones, when not merely an unadorned platform, and costumes routinely resemble prom-night tuxes and gowns. Production budgets just don't come more penny-pinched than that.

The inextricable flip-side of this economic coin is the conviction that there are built-in profits to be amassed from ready-made droves of fans just aching to storm playhouses to wallow in past idol worship, if only in dubious facsimile. It's an oft-disproved premise that, however, is hard to quash encountering the sea of grinning faces exiting the Palace after having witnessed the worst Sinatra imitation since Uncle Manny slung the trenchcoat over his shoulder and broke Aunt Molly's Chinese chamber pot.

And that's precisely what inevitably sabotages these commercial ventures into necrophilia. Their subjects gained fame for being unique, which is, by definition, a fairly inimitable quality. Even more fatal is the assumption that such breezy collations are a dramaturgical snap to create. The standard stale format has the celebrity schmoozing directly to the audience about life and career incidents, some occasionally and sketchily dramatized, and if the subject is musical, repeatedly segueing into familiar trademark songs. The difficulty here is that, beyond being exceptional performers, most of these legends led completely self-absorbed, deadly dull lives. Which, when combined with imitations of them lacking anything like the magnetic vibrancy of the originals, makes for a possibly easy-to-do but decidedly hard-to-take evening.

Yet, if these occasions provide an excuse for people to actually congregate non-virtually for the equivalent of a chorus of "Kumbaya," and if they truly contribute to theater coffers in support of worthier offerings, then it's probably a harmless enough phenomenon. The recent marked proliferation, though, is troubling. Let's just hope these ubiquitous imitations don't someday engulf us and leave us babbling, "I can't believe it's not real theater."

arts@freetimes.com

peoplE who died Marc Moritz as Jolson.