They call them “spirits” for a reason. On a dark stage, a beam of light shines down on a silver tray loaded with drinking paraphernalia: glass, ice, sugar, the bottle. As the beam grows brighter, the contents of the bottle cast an eerie greenish glow on the table and the man who now appears, just tall enough to catch the reflected blush. Say hello to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He is brought to you, quite literally, by the otherworldly powers of absinthe.

Martha Clarke and Charles Mee’s “Belle Epoque” wants to conjure the breadth of Toulouse-Lautrec’s world, from the brothels to the cafes, the painters and the performers, from Parisians addicted to absinthe to those merely addicted to wine. In this sometimes-entrancing dance-theater piece, which opened last night at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse, every fist looks naked if it isn’t wrapped around a bottle.

Ms. Clarke and Mr. Mee are renewing a partnership that dates back nearly 20 years. Like “Vienna: Lusthaus,” which derived visual and spiritual inspiration from Schiele and Klimt, this impressionistic show finds its essence in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. Figures from his paintings are visible here, like the Montmartre dancers La Goulue (Ruth Maleczech) and Valentin the Boneless (Robert Besserer). The chanteuse Yvette Guilbert (Joyce Castle) turns up, as does the painter’s dour mother (Honora Fergusson), and of course, the unhappy, strung-out, syphilitic, genius dwarf himself (Mark Povinelli).

In “Moulin Rouge,” Baz Luhrmann infused turn-of-the-century Paris with a seedy glamour. Ms. Clarke and Mr. Mee attempt no such glorification. Set mostly in an unnamed bar (backed by two oversized mirrors), the company performs swirling dances that visually echo the gaiety of the paintings. A four-piece band at the back of the stage plays music from the period, nearly two dozen songs.

Still there’s an undercurrent of disquiet. Mr. Mee’s fragmentary texts, which flow in and out of Ms. Clarke’s dances, give voice to what the characters are feeling. Some, like the painter’s lover Suzanne (Vivienne Benesch), talk about heartache; others, like his friend Francois (Michael Stuhlbarg), rhapsodize about ab sinthe. What many of them are feeling seems to be rage.

Two women describe their daily lives of drinking and its consequences, “day after day, feeling not quite pleasure, not quite pain, but a lingering, hazy sense of rage.” Toulouse-Lautrec himself talks about wanting to cut people’s faces open. He has a pent-up “unreasoning rage” that exhausts him. A lover’s quarrel turns into a battle royal, with everyone onstage punching, kicking, throwing somebody around.

Ms. Clarke and Mr. Mee have succeeded in showing how anger flows into lust, and vice-versa. Like “Vienna: Lusthaus,” naked figures sometimes adorn the stage.Toulouse-Lautrec has a consuming passion for frilly underthings, but the authors and Mr. Povinelli, who plays the painter with keen sensitivity, emphasize his loneliness and broken heart. As the 70-minute show wears on, and he declines into absinthe-fueled dreams, we see the cost his lifestyle exacted.

But there’s no dream like an absinthe dream, at least not as depicted here. As the excellent Mr. Stuhlbarg tells us how best to take the drink, a fleshy slattern begins to dance around the stage. Skin and more skin.The sinister, omni-jointed Mr. Besserer slinks into view. He wears tails and top hat, and is 10 feet tall. It looks, and feels, like the world immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec.

You only wish it would deliver this sensibility with more force. Mr. Mee has done some of his sharpest, most focused writing here. It’s the staging that sometimes goes awry. Ms. Castle’s songs (with English lyrics by Michael Feingold) should be a centerpiece of the show, but they tend to get lost amid the dances. Even for an impressionistic show, the wandering can grow wearisome. Like its subject, it is too dissolute for its own good.

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When our grandchildren ask, how will we explain the extraordinary appeal of Dame Edna? Here is an Australian man of healthy proportion who glides across the stage in a riotous dress, purple wig, plummy British accent, and the most outrageous eyewear this side of Elton John. She calls everyone “possum” and cracks a few jokes, but mostly humiliates her audience. And her audience can’t get enough.

It is always orange alert at a Dame Edna show. In “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance,” a whole new Broadway audience enters the line of fire.Though she has a small company behind her (pianist Wayne Barker, plus the Gorgeous Ednaettes and the Equally Gorgeous Test Ednaerones), the real fun comes from the audience, and what she wrings out of it. Half a dozen theatergoers will become very familiar to the room before the night is through. They will be relentlessly mocked – their clothes, their jobs, their looks. She will collect people’s shoes and perform a “psyching reading” on them. “The manufacturer had the effrontery to make two of these, did he?” she asks, holding a particularly atrocious sample aloft in her purple tongs.

Somehow the act never grates, and only sporadically gets old. Dame Edna (known to some as Barry Humphries) has an absolutely sure sense of how to work a room.She bears no ill will,so the punches never sting. At one point she brings some very game senior citizens to the stage and enlists them in performing the story of her life, “The Girl from Oz.” She invites a married couple onstage for counseling, which involves making a surprise phone call to the wife’s mother in Philadelphia. She is making it up as she goes, more or less, but her approach never varies: She turns reality itself into a comedy.

The show opened last night at the Music Box, where it ought to enjoy a long, ridiculous life. How they’ll get the gladiolas out of Irving Berlin’s chandeliers, I have no idea. At the end of the show, she tosses handfuls of her signature flower all over the room, flinging them like manna at her abused, adoring crowd. She assures you they’re grown organically, “with my own manure.”

“Belle Epoque” until January 9 (Lincoln Center, 212-239-6200).

“Dame Edna” until March 13 (239 West 45th Street, 212-239-6200).