On Stage

...Very little, alas, can be said for the wholly gerontocratic smugness of Lillian Gish, however disguised as girlish cuteness...

...The lyricists are Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Jerry Leiber, Lenny himself, and, above all, Comden and Green, who also supplied the unsparkling connecting text, spoken by Jack Bittner as a bartender-MC...

...regrettably, the effort is more salient than the results...

...As it turns out, much of the early material is not American but Viennese or British, a good handful of songs are not of theatrical but of folk or military origin, and there are even a couple of unfunny and irrelevant British revue skits...

...The best number is "Captain Hook's Soliloquy," written especially for Lawrence Tibbett, who had promised to appear in a revival of Peter Pan...

...Between The Norman Conquests and Habeas Corpus, I rather prefer the latter, if only because it is less pretentious and shorter...

...when she sings, we wish her back in the silents...

...John Raitt was once, along with Alfred Drake, one of musical comedy's two leading leading men, but he has acquired a forced youthfulness while his voice sounds unyouthfully forced...

...but he is still game as well as gamey, and he benefits from his clipped British (or, at least, Australian) tones and from his early apprenticeship in Noel Coward musicals...

...Show tunes register much more effectively when surrounded by story, dialogue and dancing...

...Janie Sell has a certain unstoppered effervescence that works in specialty songs, but she is not someone I enjoy looking at, any more than I now do at Patricia Elliott, once so pleasing...

...The four-man, three-woman cast, albeit of a considerably lower average age than that golden Jubilee one, is not much longer on allure...

...Miss Elliott works sedulously at being lovably gauche or forlorn...

...Yet those Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill goodies did eventually surface...

...There is his pectorally underdeveloped sister who summons the services of a falsie salesman, who gets involved with both her and the doctor's neglected but irrepressible wife, who is about to have an escapade with an old friend-the eminent, dwarfish London physician, Sir Percy Shorter-who gets involved with oh, well...

...When she tries to dance, it hurts us more than it seems to hurt her...

...Most of them lavished extravagant praise on this infravaganza...

...It consists of Leonard Bernstein songs that for various reasons-but allegedly, not qualitative ones-had to be jettisoned from several shows, starting with On the Town and ending with a mercifully never realized musicalization of The Skin of Our Teeth...

...Except for June Havoc and Celeste Holm, an Anglo-American cast headed by Donald Sinden, Rachel Roberts and Jean Marsh is captivating...

...Moreover, if you see the three plays in one grueling day, as the critics did, you feel clobbered on top and sore below...

...Still, with a good British cast the thing may work better...

...and one or two other grotesques...

...What both Jubilee and By Bernstein demonstrate, by God, is that barren as the musical theater may be at the moment, making the desert bloom with slapped-together congeries of old material is almost harder than coming up with something viable and new...

...or they may be dropped into a time slot between scenes covered in the others...

...Still, from the "Song of the Vagabonds" to "Hallelujah," and including a few vaudeville and even nontheatrical pop songs, quite a tuneful bagful is spilled at you pell-mell...

...Whether because of her operatic background or despite it, she turns a splendid song like "Love Me or Leave Me" into incomprehensible mush...

...The small onstage band under Clay Fullum performs his and Thomas Pierson's arrangements engagingly, and the evening could be adjudged merely pallid were it not for the aforementioned Skin of Our Teeth songs (lyrics by Comden and Green), and the more dismal songs from a musicalization of Brecht's The Exception and the Rule (lyrics by Jerry Leiber...

...There is quite sufficient wit here for one funny farce-not, despite the ingenious manipulation, for three...

...On Broadway only Carole Shelley is British and quite wonderful...

...I take habeas corpus to mean here "thou shalt have, and be cursed with, a body," i.e., subject to a thousand malapropos nudgings of lubricity, continually caught with thy material or moral pants down, bungling in love, lust, life and even death-for Purdue's best-planned suicides misfire, whereas Dennis's absurdly far-fetched imaginary disease proves real and lethal...

...The years have been even less kind to Patrice Munsell, who, trying for a flipper look, emerges maladroit and misshapen...

...It is not until the last part of Act I that we get into what is labeled as "Early Broadway," only to run into a new problem: Irving Berlin (wisely, whatever his actual motives) refused to grant permission for the use of his songs, and there are other, explicable or inexplicable, lacunae...

...True, any buff can name great songs that were dropped from some show or other, like "Bill,' "Lover Man," and "Lost in the Stars...

...A Musical Jubilee, devised^ by Marilyn Clark and Charles Burr, is supposed to be a representative survey of songs from the entire history of American musical theater, and exudes a strong, opportunistic Bicentennial odor...

...There lies the difficulty...

...Wicksteed-physician, philanderer and cynical philosopher in a British seaside resort...

...The songs are, for the most part, undistinguished-some of them poor...

...Under Frank Dunlop's ultra-farcical direction, this untidy, uneven play nevertheless marches on gallantly-deceitful but undauntable like an artificial bust...

...Even the usually dependable British imports are on the shaky side this season...

...Norman's wife is efficient and sardonic yet also vulnerable, Norman himself lecherous, jovial, infantile, and fatuous, yet also clever and, by the default of the other men, seductive...

...gradually we find out otherwise...

...All this in the house of his tyrannical mother-in-law, invisible in her sickbed upstairs, but casting a further pall on the comically sordid proceedings...

...Tibbett reneged, and there was no revival, but this "aria"-for it very nearly is one-is delightfully in Bernstein's Candide style, with a lyric straight out of Barrie...

...Eric Thompson, the bright British director, works steady wonders, but against Prentiss and Benjamin not even a miracle can prevail...

...One would need singing actors of either substantial talent or great personal charm, and Dick Shawn and Larry Kert flunk on both counts...

...At any rate, these songs, in these orchestrations, with these performers, cannot...

...Corpus was written by Alan Bennett, the only member of the Beyond the Fringe foursome who went on to become a playwright...

...From her we move to the ancient Cyril Ritchard...

...The sister is engaged to a libidinous Anglican clergyman, Canon Throbbing...

...they are not so potent as art songs and cannot so readily fill out, unsupported, a whole evening...

...The highly deserving Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn has turned its uptown Westside Theater into a kind of '40s nightclub, complete with bar, tables, papier-mache palms, and what is essentially a club show, By Bernstein...

...Among the British contingent, only Ian Trigger is a bit dull as Sir Percy Shorter, but he is as short as they come...

...the songs in By Bernstein needed this trumped-up showcase to come out of the trunk...

...This is the story of a disastrous family weekend, seen from the dining room in the first play, from the living room in the second, from the garden in the third...

...He is surrounded by his comically tormented family, patients and other visitors...

...Wicksteed and his severely hypochondriacal son, Dennis, vie for the favors of a dippy and pregnant damsel, eager to wed the son whom she believes to be doomed...

...The battle-ax sister-in-law has an apathetic husband, the repressed sister a colossally obtuse platonic boy-friend...

...Three others are middling, Richard Benjamin is a charmless Norman, and Paula Prentiss is not only rotten but comes across demented, too...

...a comic charwoman who is both narrator and chorus...

...The scenes in each play are near-concurrent and partly overlapping with corresponding scenes in the other two...

...It takes place mostly in the house of Dr...

...Although Tammy Grimes has a sort of droll doggedness, she is not always well used- even she is not quite masculine enough to sing "They Didn't Believe Me," which makes sense only coming from a man...

...if on three separate evenings, as the public does, you forget too many details whose permutations you are supposed to follow...

...The conclusion imposes itself that, whatever the ostensible reason for their original omission, the real one was plain inadequacy...

...We follow, in little jerky movements, the progress of a big jerk, Norman the assistant librarian, alternately trying to seduce his wife's spinster sister and his sister-in-law, when not obliged to placate his own wife by seducing her...

...During the first play, we think him a total sexual failure...

...It is all Feydau a I'anglaise, with an undercurrent of proper British dismay at the capers of the flesh...

...The Norman Conquests is a trilogy by Alan Ayckbourn, the top British boulevard humorist, who plots his plays with the most elaborate spatial and temporal strategy...

...Mediocre costumes by Donald Brooks, penny-pinching and other-wise impoverished scenery by Herbert Senn, and scarcely discernible choreography for a remarkably unchic singing-and-dancing ensemble round out a show for squares, tourists and, apparently, New York critics...

...She sings without grace or understanding and, what is most distressing, without clear articulation...

...The ground covered is, after all, always the same, and there are not that many revelations from play to play...

...Then there are Purdue, the patient who keeps unsuccessfully trying to commit suicide...