Fukasaku’s ‘Black Lizard’ Is Due at the Nuart

The Nuart follows its one-week run of “Singin’ in the Rain” Friday with a revival of Kinji Fukasaku’s bizarre 1968 “Black Lizard,” starring female impersonator Akihiro Maruyama. A bravura work of camp pathos and a tribute to a vanished age of screen innocence, it approaches its flamboyant heroine compassionately so that we may recognize her essential loneliness and humanity, although she’s as much a monster as Dracula.

Caught up in a plot that’s pure Maria Montez, the Black Lizard is the proprietress of a private Tokyo club lined with blow-ups of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” A jewel thief sans pareil--she’s after the fabulous “Star of Egypt” diamond--she’s also the proprietor of an island grotto museum specializing in human statues. One of them is none other than the late novelist Yukio Mishima, who had adapted Rampo Edogawa’s novel to the stage and persuaded Maruyama, a close friend, to star in it.