On Seagoing Shows, Anything Goes : Entertainment has evolved from music-hall jugglers to Las Vegas-style productions created just for shipboard theaters.

In the heyday of transatlantic crossings, the only entertainment at sea besides dancing to the shipboard orchestra was that provided by the passengers themselves--masquerades, charades, talent shows, musicales, bingo or perhaps an evening of birdcalls.

But by the 1960s, cruise lines had started to bring entertainers aboard, often requiring them to serve as cruise staff between shows. It was a sort of vaudeville-goes-to-sea, with jugglers, magi cians, ventriloquists, singers, sometimes an adagio dance team.

“When you look back at what we were doing 15 years ago, it was the old-time music hall,” says Cliff Perry, vice president of entertainment for Crystal Cruises and a 27-year veteran of cruise entertainment. “Only the occasional performer got paid; the others sang for their supper.”

Princess Cruises pioneered the multimedia production show more than a decade ago with excerpts from Broadway shows and movie musicals enhanced by soundtracks and projected images. Princess was also one of the first to produce its own shows rather than rely on packaged productions from New York or Miami.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has been producing its own Las Vegas-style revue shows since 1990. “Most of our shows have a three-year run, with the cast changing every six months,” says Peter Compton, program director. Royal Caribbean’s newest productions, “Showstoppers II” and “Get Dancin,’ ” premiered last month on the 1,600-passenger Nordic Empress. Royal Caribbean-produced shows are also currently scheduled aboard Song of America, Majesty of the Seas and Monarch of the Seas, with Sovereign of the Seas set to debut its first in-house productions in October.

London-based Matrix Productions, an outside production company under contract to produce shows for Celebrity Cruises, selects the cruise director, musicians and entertainers for its programs. Al Radcliffe, head of Matrix, and his set designer Tim Wilding say they are trying to move away from traditional theatrical productions and forge a new style for new ships, utilizing more high-tech and multimedia techniques. Their newest production shows have seven set designs and rely heavily on live vocal performances “sweetened” with soundtracks (the so-called “click track”) to amplify and broaden the live performance.

Full or “tab” (shortened) versions of Broadway musicals are rarer on ships than the catch-all musical revue. When the classic ocean liner France returned in 1980 as Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norway, the Broadway musical went to sea in the ship’s Saga Theater, featuring such hits as “Hello, Dolly!” and “Barnum.”

Today, four NCL ships offer full-length musicals aboard. Currently playing on the Norway is “Meet Me in St. Louis,” while “Dreamgirls” is on the bill aboard the Dreamward. The new Windward will feature the show “George M,” while “Grease” is the current production on the Sea ward.

Plays without music are still rare aboard ships. “I could see us going into legitimate plays,” says Crystal’s Perry. “The problem is holding the attention of the audience for longer than 45 minutes.”

Majesty Cruise Line’s new Royal Majesty offers one-act plays on some sailings. We saw a well-produced version of Peter Shaffer’s comedy “The Public Eye” last summer. Murder mysteries at sea are also popular, particularly those staged by former Scotland Yard chief inspector Cecil Saxby aboard the Crystal Harmony.

Multilingual ships usually stick to nonverbal entertainment, with lots of dancers, magicians and jugglers but no comedians.

A show we saw in March aboard Costa Cruise Line’s CostaAllegra is typical. It opened with a chorus line of feather-clad women who molted all over the stage as they pranced to “Hot, Hot, Hot,” followed by a magician whose act relied heavily on props. Other cruise lines that rely on variety act entertainment include Epirotiki, Seawind, Sun Line and two Cunard ships, the Sagafjord and Vistafjord.

So which ships rate highest for on-board entertainment?

On the big ships, we think Crystal Cruises still offers the best and brightest entertainment, because of impeccable production values and frequent updating of material in the Broadway shows. Numbers have recently been incorporated from “Crazy for You,” “Guys and Dolls,” “The Will Rogers Follies” and “Miss Saigon.”

In second place, we’d put Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s in-house production shows aboard the Nordic Empress, Song of America, Majesty of the Seas and Monarch of the Seas.

Longtime front-runner Norwegian Cruise Line is still on the mark close behind Crystal and RCCL, especially aboard the new Dreamward, where a dazzling “water curtain” in front of the stage converts from rain to fountains to dancing waters without splashing the audience. “Singin’ in the Rain” becomes a spectacular number.

Princess Cruises, too, continues in the forefront of big-ship entertainment with its splashy production shows.

While not to our personal taste, we think Carnival’s Ecstasy deserves honorable mention for its driving, MTV-style shows with space-age technical effects swirling around dancers in thong bikinis and Madonna-type pointed metal bras.

On mid-sized ships, taste and refinement often work better than flash and dazzle. For that reason, we’d single out the former Crown Cruise Line ships, now part of Cunard Crown--the Crown Monarch, Crown Jewel and upcoming Crown Dynasty (due in July)--for their intelligent approach to production shows, devoting more attention to interpreting the music and lyrics than to elaborate costumes, sets and technical effects.

The most notable act at sea? That has to be the William Tell bit on Royal Caribbean ships in which a performer sets off a series of rigged crossbows that trigger each other around the stage until the last arrow splits an apple atop his head.

A close second is the Hungarian family of trapeze artists, acrobats and jugglers--father, mother, 10-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter--we saw aboard Celebrity’s Horizon who spun plates, swung on a trapeze and rode unicycles. (Riding a unicycle aboard a moving ship was the toughest trick, 10-year-old Jon confided.)