On Stage

...When this question is applied to musical comedy, tempers really flare...

...It is a familiar singing and dancing excursion, with the usual assortment of impossible American tourists on a British liner...

...And to its own self, the Follies was true...

...Like Kwamina, Milk and Honey attempts to capture the atmosphere of a distant state—Israel this time...

...In Kean, another superb lyric theater performer, Alfred Drake, captures some of the volatility that we associate with the actor Edmund Kean...

...The old ship (the Coronia, not Coward) is kept afloat mainly by the solid playing of Elaine Stritch...

...Yet mixed osculation has been going on in the New York theater for years...

...Robert Lewis, author of Method —or Madness?, directed Brigadoon, Regina and, most recently, Kwamina...

...Even the Ziegfeld Follies had a message: "Glorify the American girl...

...Now it is hardly possible for a group of creators to tell a story on a stage without conveying some message...

...Why should a musical, of all things, have a message...

...Or, best of all, why not a popular message...

...The fear that coming to grips with the chosen subject matter might result in loss of "entertainment value" for the ticket-buying public seems to afflict the whole crop...

...With show business' need to "water down" in the name of entertainment, we are treated here to the spectacle of Kean's agonizing humiliation by a Drury Lane audience in the presence of his lady love, followed shortly by a frivolous number with Kean and the lady which immediately erases whatever feeling may have been built up...

...that's not fair...

...How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, probably the "hottest ticket" in town, is a goodnatured spoof of the advertising world...

...In musicals with more serious themes, an attempt to avoid disturbing the audience does not necessarily make for joyous entertainment...

...In that way, you can satisfy your conscience and your box office in one stroke...

...It is fine to do a musical with "significance," if the good intentions are coupled with a sense of responsibility to the content and to the form which expresses it...

...A line of dialogue from the show reveals the formula for its success today...

...Whether they tackle serious or trivial subjects, life seems tame in all of this season's early musicals...

...Hedy, the brassy secretary, says, in a spat with her sugar-daddy boss: "Don't start getting sincere...

...This was strange behavior for a musical comedy: It must have had something to do with the fact that the leading man was Negro and the leading lady white...

...When one aims high, the miss is more than a mile...

...How can an audience adjust its ears to unaccounted-for "pop" lyrics and tunes in a West African locale...

...ON STAGE How to Succeed Without Really Trying By Robert Lewis One of the dreariest disputes of show folk centers around trie old wheeze, "Should the theater deliver a 'message' or just be a place to entertain...

...Serious or frivolous, something is going to come over to a patron, whether he is present for entertainment, enlightenment or because he is stuck with a benefit ticket...

...Kwamina's pussy-footing was matched by its artistic confusion...

...With a wide palette of humorous colors at their disposal, from innocuous to savage, the talented creators, Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows, are careful never to offend anyone, not even the targets they satirize...

...In Kwamina, a huge production about the emergence of a new African state, which opened and closed within a month, none of the show's built-in problems was faced...

...The leading man had an affair with the leading woman, embraced her throughout the evening, and never once kissed her...

...But it travels quickly from Israeli situations (farmers devoting themselves to the land, passing references to Arabs at the border) to some business about marriage problems that is close to the Broadway formula...

...The production has its entertaining moments when Molly Picon and Tommy Rail are singing and dancing...

...Shouldn't it just try to be popular...

...But wasn't there as big an audience for West Side Story as for Do Re Mi...

...One more example of escapism (I have tried to avoid the word, but it's just not possible) is Noel Coward's Sail Away...

...Someday Miss Stritch will get a part that will exercise her insides as well as her ability to deliver a song or a line with expertness...

...In theater, as in life, the avoidance of pain does not guarantee pleasure—although it often seems to have a good market...

...What is missing is any hint of Kean's acting genius and its relation to his personal tragedy...