Mike Celizic

TURIN, Italy - I’m a sucker for opening ceremonies, which is strange, because I’m not really a big fan of Broadway plays, which are pretty much the same thing only done every night and twice on Saturday.

I guess the difference is that a Broadway show is a money-making enterprise written solely to entertain, while opening ceremonies, while eager to please, are trying to do something more.

In the 90 minutes or so that are the actual show — the rest is taken up by the parade of nations — a country presents itself to the world. And in that ceremony we get a glimpse into how an entire nation views itself.

In the United States, it’s usually a Hollywood-style production, big on flash. In Barcelona, it was phantasmagorical. In Seoul, it was the spectacle of thousands acting as one in traditional garb. In Greece, it was myth and legend.

In Italy, it’s “Passion lives here.”

At least that’s what the motto of the Turino Olympics claims. But after watching the show, I wasn’t sure what Italy thinks of itself or what the motto is other than confusion.

Eclectic. There’s a nice, neutral word for what went on in the Olympic Stadium on Friday night when Italy presented itself to the world and kicked off the Games of the XX Winter Olympiad.

We had sequences that were a fetishist’s dream with dancers dressed in vinyl and leather harnesses. We had lyrical interludes. We had circus-style acts, one of which was a vertical floor show that ended most impressively with climbers dressed in something resembling white haz-mat suits forming a dove hanging on black netting above the stadium.

Plastic was very much in as a fabric, with the show opening with hundreds clad in skin-tight red vinyl darting around on roller skates — some wearing helmets that made them look like an embarrassed version of the bad guy in the first "Spider Man" film — doing calisthenics and writhing on metalwork frameworks.

An imaginative section on Italy’s history, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the Empire period devolved into a bizarre ballet led by a man in flesh-colored tights and Mohawk.

Slide show   Taking gold Check out the best images from the 2006 Winter Olympics.

But every time you were ready to throw in the towel and switch to something comprehensible, the Italians would come through with a real crowd pleaser. One involved a red Formula One race car that turned screeching donuts on the stage, engulfing the stadium in engine whine and smoke.

Another gave us Sophia Loren, who still looks good enough to lust for, leading seven other remarkable women who carried the Olympic flag into the stadium. Along with her were Nawal El Moutawakel, the first Muslim woman to win an Olympic gold medal; Italian Olympian Manuela DiCenta; American actress Susan Sarandon; Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maatha; Chilean author Isabel Allende; Maria Mutola, the first person to win a gold medal from Mozambique; and Somaly Mam, fighter for women’s rights from Cambodia.

But immediately after Sophia and her sisters, elegant in white coats, brought in the flag, for reasons known only to the organizers, Yoko Ono appeared on stage, wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night and reading something childish about peace.

It was moments like this, moments that tried too hard to be avant garde, that if you had stumbled upon them by accident while surfing channels, you’d have sworn they were coming from France.