Theater: Blues for Mr. Wellington

Golden Boy, as Clifford Odets originally wrote it in 1937, posed the conflict of making good versus being good. The young hero, a violinist turned prizefighter, was guiltily aware of the betrayal of his better self. The new Broadway musical version drops that theme and chronicles the racially embittered saga of a kind of Negro Sammy Click.

Joe Wellington (Sammy Davis) is a Harlem nobody who wants to be a Big Town somebody, a punk with a yen for a penthouse and all the other Cadillacto-caviar goodies. His aims would immediately classify him as the crassest sort of bourgeois philistine if the musical were not cloaked in the topical sanctity of racial protest.

Along with his other desires, Joe wants Lorna Moon (Paula Wayne), the white mistress of his married fight manager. The love story fails, partly because lovers must be appealing as lovers, interracial or not. Joe, stung by the white world's slights, is full of hate, and no more winning than any other angry young angry. The girl is not a girl but a soiled and weary woman who admits that men have come and gone in her life "like traffic through a tunnel." Typical of the show's erratic focus is Joe's response when he finally loses Lorna. He and the chorus launch not into a lover's lament but a rousing, anvil-hard hymn of civil righteousness: "I ain't bowin' down no more."

Only the dances, enhanced by some vibrantly lovely chorus girls, take the show out of its doldrums. The opening number in a training gym thrums to a Congo-like beat as Jaime Rogers paces the dancers with kinetic bodily grace, and his closing Big Fight ballet with Davis sizzles with supple ferocity. Sammy Davis, a remarkably versatile entertainer, is hobbled by a show that would rather preach than please.