THEATER : Generation Veneration : The stage is far more enamored of older actresses than Hollywood is, the more tenacious and outsized the personality the better. Case in point: the current New York theater scene.

Julie Andrews is back on Broadway after 30 years. Her comeback vehicle, “Victor/Victoria,” is a lackluster musical, but it is a standing-room-only lackluster musical. Carol Burnett is also back on the boards after an almost-30-year absence. Her show, the Ken Ludwig comedy “Moon Over Buffalo,” is no more substantive than an episode of the star’s old TV show, but the fans are coming in busloads. Off Broadway, “Mrs. Klein,” the story of a famous psychoanalyst and her daughter, is breaking house records at the Lucille Lortel. People are lining up to see Uta Hagen, who, at 76, is making a rare appearance in Nicholas Wright’s absorbing psychological drama.

In the East they’re calling it the Year of the Divas. Andrews, Burnett and Hagen are joined on New York stages this fall by Carol Channing, still vamping on the orchestra runway in “Hello, Dolly!” exactly as she did 31 years ago when she created the role. People are flocking to see Zoe Caldwell repeat her Los Angeles triumph as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s “Master Class”; the show recouped its investment in a month.

It’s too late to see Ellen Burstyn play a crusading nun (the poorly reviewed “Sacrilege” closed last month) or Elizabeth Ashley in two Tennessee Williams one-acts, but if you’re going to New York for the holidays you can still catch Blythe Danner, Eileen Heckart, Anne Meara, Rita Moreno, Phyllis Newman and Betty Buckley, to name a few more divas onstage this season.

In theater it’s just a darn good year for actresses, particularly older actresses, the kind who routinely can’t get a cab in Hollywood. In Hollywood, it’s usually the male star who carries the picture, to the point where Harrison Ford was the first actor signed for the Paramount remake of “Sabrina,” as if the casting of the female title role was merely secondary. In the theater, the financial and popular success of a big-budget musical or play can be based almost solely on the adoration of a long-established female star--even if her vehicle is wobbly (but not, apparently, if she’s a crusading nun).

Of course, the New York stage isn’t always crowded with incredible women. These things happen in waves. Embarrassingly, last year’s Tony nominations for best actress in a musical included only two women: Glenn Close (for “Sunset Boulevard”) and the I-don’t-have-a-chance nominee, Rebecca Luker (for “Show Boat”). Even so, I think it’s fair to see this year’s bounty as tangible proof that the stage is more enamored of, respectful of, adoring of, its female icons.

People love to see history onstage in the theater. Theater is such an ephemeral thing that devotees worship its living tradition. Hollywood may cart out Deborah Kerr at the Academy Awards and give her a standing ovation, but it is simply not going to star her in a film.

On the screen, we prefer to project fantasies of our lives onto unblemished beauty, the kind that can withstand the withering scrutiny of a close-up. A fresh crop of ingenues is harvested every year to feed the hungry god of cinema. Some of the current crop will make it to the next tier. The ones smart enough to hang on and accumulate power will start production companies, as Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan, Demi Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster have done. Consider it age insurance; if they’re not going to be welcome before the camera, they will make sure there’s a seat for them behind it. Let’s not forget Collette, the desperate, aging ingenue in John Patrick Shanley’s play “Four Dogs and a Bone” (which just finished a sold-out run at the Geffen Playhouse). Collette rightly fears she’s going to be playing “somebody’s aunt with cancer or somebody’s crying sister.”

In the theater, we love to see women of a certain age and an out-sized personality in a starring role. People are waiting in line in case of cancellation to see Uta Hagen, who represents a lifetime of acting, of teaching acting, of writing about acting, of theater. And she’s still here. Strength, guts, endurance: these are virtues highly cherished by theater-goers.

“The stage is a bit of a refuge from male-dominated film culture,” notes director David Schweizer, who is in Washington directing his Los Angeles hit, Lisa Loomer’s “Waiting Room,” at the Arena Stage. “A large contingent of the theater world is gay,” he continues, “and gay culture celebrates women who overcome odds in some way. It also celebrates insane determination, heightened stakes and the need to be known as oneself, for all of one’s blazing personality.”

Schweizer’s description perhaps best applies this season to Carol Channing’s performance as Dolly Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” In her mile-high red headdress and flashing a smile wide enough to engulf a small automobile, Channing stretches her white-gloved arms to her fans, as if to gather in their adoration. She exudes a crazed show-biz energy, the kind that says, “Applause is oxygen to me and I will have it,” the kind often spotted at Liza Minnelli concerts.

When Channing sings, “Dolly will never go away again,” she is indulging a willful illusion; this will almost certainly be the 74-year-old’s last turn on the runway. On the screen, an aging woman might, god forbid, remind someone of mortality. Onstage, Channing, whose performance remained virtually untarnished by any critic, cannot be ignored. She demonstrates what sheer force of will can get you. (The producer John Hart offers a unique reading of the Year of the Divas: “These are primal truths onstage,” he notes. “Julie Andrews is the mother we wanted, and Carol Channing is the mother we got.”)

Julie Andrews offers a much more stately show of her famous wares. As a woman masquerading as a celebrated drag queen, she is desired by men and women alike. The beloved star does, however, ask her fans to ignore the fact that the musical she is gracing is hopelesslyquaint, with a score so generic it would make the songwriters of her former glory--Lerner & Loewe and Rodgers & Hammerstein--fall asleep in their graves. Thus far, her fans have ignored it. The advance ticket sale is $16 million. “Victor/Victoria” is expected to pay back by the time it has run a year, which is very good for a show budgeted at a hefty $8.5 million.

In “Moon Over Buffalo,” Carol Burnett plays an actress from a mid-level theater dynasty frantically performing in two plays in repertory. Her husband (Philip Bosco) may be sleeping with the much younger ingenue, but she always retains her dignity, even while kicking him in the groin. She has an ardent suitor waiting in the wings for her vigorous company. The scripted jokes may be mostly groaners, but Burnett gets off several priceless facial gags, such as when her wig comes off mid-performance and she stares at it as if she’s never seen it before.

If the vehicles designed for Andrews and Burnett are rickety papier-ma^che houses constructed with the knowledge or hope that their stars would hold them up, other actresses have taken matters into their own hands and fashioned better vehicles for themselves.

At the Manhattan Theater Club, Mary Louise Wilson recently repeated her terrific portrayal, begun at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, as Diane Vreeland in “Full Gallop,” a play she coauthored. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone exorcised her demons after being publicly rebuffed by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the part that Betty Buckley now plays in “Sunset Boulevard.” LuPone opened down the street from Buckley in her own show, a funny and also moving musical celebration of her show-biz life, sung with gusto and told with heart. Anne Meara is currently starring with her husband Jerry Stiller and the fabulously chic Rita Moreno in a play Meara penned, “After-Play,” in which she and her cohorts show off a lifetime of comic timing honed in TV, film and on the stage.

Other familiar actresses have excellent parts in new plays. Dressed in a cool white suit and doing needlepoint next to her ailing husband, Blythe Danner demonstrates that the crossing of a leg can tell an enormous amount about a woman. She executes the move in Harold Pinter’s “Moonlight” (Roundabout Theater) when her husband (Jason Robards) mentions the name of her old lover. In Nicky Silver’s comedy “The Food Chain” (Westside Arts Theater), Phyllis Newman is a no-nonsense telephone crisis worker, whose practicality collides hilariously with the impractical and suicidal young poetess she is trying to advise on the phone.

Over at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, the wonderful Eileen Heckart is riveting and touching as a nasty, stubborn mother-in-law to a crusading Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. In the play, Tom Donaghy’s “Northeast Local,” we watch Heckart grow to be a touching and bewildered old woman over the course of 30 years. At the Minskoff Theatre, Betty Buckley cannot quite match her predecessor Glenn Close in dementia as the zonked-out silent movie queen Norma Desmond, but she sings the bejesus out of the role, and makes it her own.

But all in all, Uta Hagen as Melanie Klein and Zoe Caldwell as Maria Callas have the best deal going. They are in well-written plays. They both play real women, women at the top of their resources, formidable women with power, women whose command of their own personalities rivets everyone around them. What a joy to see these actresses merge their own power with that of their characters. Audiences have concurred: Business at both shows is exceptional.

“Madame’s a living legend” sings the loyal butler Max in “Sunset Boulevard.” “She’s immortal/ Caught inside that flickering light beam/Is a youth which cannot fade.” The lovely thing about the stage is that it need not create a Norma Desmond, a 50-year-old woman hoping to play the part of a teenage girl. The stage is willing to acknowledge that youth does fade, and that age is something to glorify. All in all, it’s a crucial lesson for a culture to teach.