THEATER REVIEW; Bea Arthur's Ceremony Lacking All Innocence

In case you haven't noticed, Bea Arthur points out early in the evening that she is barefoot on the stage of the Booth Theater. ''We're very informal here,'' she says in that bass fiddle of a voice that makes small things sound grand and grand things sound ordinary.

Certainly the title of her new one-woman show of reminiscence and song, which opened last night, would seem to confirm an impression of informality: ''Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends.'' Yet there is something distinctly ceremonial in the dialogue Ms. Arthur conducts with her audience, the kind of call-and-response that is found at Friars' Roasts and entertainment award ceremonies.

Ms. Arthur, who is an implausible 78 years old, need only mention certain titles, like ''Maude'' and ''The Golden Girls,'' or certain names, like Angela Lansbury, or the occasional catch phrase, like ''God will get you for that, Walter.'' And sure enough, the sound of many hands clapping answers Ms. Arthur as inevitably as an echo in a canyon.

These applause-magnet words are of course references to high points in Ms. Arthur's career: her two long-running sitcoms (''God will get you'' is from ''Maude'') and her Tony-winning turn on Broadway as the best friend of Angela Lansbury in ''Mame.'' You may find yourself thinking how gratifying it would be to read your résumé aloud at a job interview and have a chorus of cheers greet every line.

Unlike most of us, however, Ms. Arthur has earned the right to have bouquets of applause thrown at her feet with rhythmic regularity. Like Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore, Bea Arthur is known as a one-of-a-kind star who created and refined her own archetype in television comedy.

From the moment she showed up 30-some years ago in a guest spot on ''All in the Family,'' it was clear she was a new sort of gal in television land: deep-voiced, acerbic, confrontational and liberal with a capital L. In a medium that thrives on the exchange of zingers, Ms. Arthur delivered put-downs with a withering majesty honed by years in the theater.

That persona is intact in ''Bea Arthur on Broadway,'' which was created by Ms. Arthur and her onstage pianist, Billy Goldenberg, with the collaboration of Charles Randolph Wright. (Mark Waldrop and Richard Maltby Jr. are credited as production consultants.) Ms. Arthur may have shed her shoes; she has not taken off her comedian's polished armor.

About as close as she comes to soul baring is when she says, ''I was a very shy child.'' And of course her steely gaze dares and expects you to disbelieve her.

In that other current, more ambitious exercise in septuagenarian star power, ''Elaine Stritch at Liberty,'' Ms. Stritch creates at least an illusion that she is, if you will, exposing herself. Ms. Arthur, on the other hand, is mostly doing Bea Arthur.

Her fans, one assumes, would not want it otherwise. (The show has already been extended by two weeks.) Ms. Arthur is no snob when it comes to her audience. She obviously knows what it expects, and she delivers it with obliging, no-nonsense briskness.

For her television fans, she sings and claps along happily with a recording of the theme from ''Maude.'' For the large claque of gay men who have always admired Ms. Arthur's stylish eccentricity, she tells dirty jokes about gay men.

Her television characters were renowned for their outspokenness, and here, free from the censor's scissors, she spikes her vocabulary with lots of four-letter seasoning. It shows up in backstage accounts of legendary performers (Lotte Lenya, Tallulah Bankhead), which have the burnish of repeated tellings and are habitually collected under titles like ''Amusing Theatrical Anecdotes.''

These tales are woven together with transitions like ''Which brings me to the subject of my dear friend Angela Lansbury.'' In the best of them, like Ms. Arthur's recollection of a job interview with Mae West, the joke is not in what is said, but how.

She also performs, rather in the manner of that patter-master Rex Harrison, an assortment of songs, ranging from bawdy Sophie Tucker vaudeville numbers to musical-theater evergreens. She brings an appropriately defiant vigor to Cole Porter's ''I Happen to Like New York'' and is delightfully over the top in the camp ballad ''The Man in the Moon Is a Lady,'' from ''Mame.''

You can sense a current of well-worn comfort running between Ms. Arthur and Mr. Goldenberg, her charmingly crotchety but deferential pianist. Otherwise there's little evidence of unguarded feeling. Even the dissing of famous people with whom she once worked (Jerome Robbins, Tony Curtis) has a carefully calculated quality, as if operating within an invisible fence of propriety.

What Ms. Arthur brings to the crowded field of one-person star fests is the professional sheen of her comic timing. She begins and ends the evening by reciting a recipe for cooking lamb. This is ostensibly to summon a just-folks, at-home atmosphere. But more than anything, it demonstrates how Ms. Arthur's use of a long pause and a few contemplative blinks can make the driest material seem funny.

You are unlikely to leave this show with startling insights into Ms. Arthur, which is probably its creators' intention. ''Bea Arthur on Broadway'' trades on the reassurance of seeing that an old friend has grown older while remaining much the same.

It's easy to imagine a veteran sitcom watcher on the phone after seeing Ms. Arthur live, reporting with immense satisfaction, ''You know, she was exactly the way she is on television, only more.''

BEA ARTHUR ON BROADWAY

Just Between Friends

With Billy Goldenberg at the piano. Created by Ms. Arthur and Mr. Goldenberg, in collaboration with Charles Randolph Wright; production consultants, Mark Waldrop and Richard Maltby Jr.; lighting and sound by Matt Berman; sets by Ray Klausen; technical supervisor, O'Donovan and Bradford; general management, Stuart Thompson Productions/ James Triner. Presented by Daryl Roth, M. Beverly Bartner and USA Ostar Theatricals. At the Booth Theater, 222 West 45th Street, Manhattan.

Photo: A shoeless Bea Arthur delights her fans, many of whom remember and love her television routines. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)