The Theater: New Musical on Broadway, Dec. 21, 1959

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Saratoga (adapted from Edna Ferber's novel Saratoga Trunk; music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) is a gorgeously decked-out period musical, moving from a plush New Orleans in the '80s to a palmy Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The handsome sets and costumes by Cecil Beaton are much the brightest part of the show. Despite some lively Ralph Beaumont dances, some pleasant Harold Arlen music and some neat touches in Morton Da Costa's direction, Saratoga has all the animation of a tableau and all the narrative interest of something written 50 times on a blackboard.

The chief trouble is once again book trouble, and the sense of a period musical in treatment as well as subject matter. Saratoga tells a tale of two young fortune seekers: an illegitimate New Orleans beauty and a ranchman gypped out of his inheritance, who unromantically team up to get ahead in the world but become the victims of romance. In telling its tale, Saratoga snows cliches, trips over its own gaudy furnishings, and interminably keeps a heroine who was born out of wedlock from entering it. An added trouble: lacking all freshness and zip, the show possesses no compensating charm or style. Everything that Saratoga Trunk scattered with a lavish hand, Saratoga lays on with a heavy one.

The Arlen score, despite good rhythmic effects, never really gets its beat off the ground. The two or three times the dancing turns lively suggest a last two or three rounds of ammunition desperately fired at the advancing battalions of boredom. Carol Lawrence and Howard Keel are agreeable leads, but to little avail. With none of the succulence of a great big old-fashioned dinner, Saratoga induces all of the somnolence.