Theater: New Musical on Broadway

New Musical on Broasway

Carnival! (book by Michael Stewart, based on material by Helen Deutsch; music and lyrics by Bob Merrill) sets to music the traditional Continental world of the small, bedizened, sad-eyed circus troupe—a world not of popcorn but of pony ballets, with a touch of childlike innocence redeeming its tawdriness. Carnival! is, in fact, out of the movie Lili, with a faint echo or two of Liliom; it celebrates a milieu whose romantic lure is born of its realistic hardships, a milieu almost symbolically touching for its way of suggesting the loneliness in crowds, the heartbreak in gaiety, and the homelessness of perky circus wagons.

Carnival's whole atmosphere comes charmingly to life at the very outset when, at dusk, first one trouper and then another straggles onstage. As the stage fills with proprietors and performers and roustabouts, as tents go up and booths slide into place and flags flap and sway, the bright lights come on, the lilting music soars, and the multicolored mongrel troupe parades. Then Marco the Magnificent appears, and the gal he forever two-times; then Paul, the lamed, embittered puppeteer, and the pal he forever snaps at. Soon, a wispy, skinny-limbed, wide-eyed Lili (Anna Maria Alberghetti) turns up in search of a job, falls madly in love with Marco, is unwillingly loved by Paul. She gets a job holding the placards while jugglers and dancers and magicians perform, almost queers the performance, and then finds her right niche with Paul and his amusing puppets, and in time with the right man.

With its brilliant stagecraft and its enlivening circus turns, its vividness of movement and its deference to mood, its expertise in creating a down-at-heels troupe by keeping it smartly on its toes, Carnival! proves a pleasant and colorful show. Though it is part of a familiar enough tradition, it manages a certain freshness and appeal by veering sharply from the prevailing tradition of Broadway. If the evening suggests limitations, it may partly be because the subject matter itself has limits. As the title proclaims, Carnival! is first and last milieu; it keeps offering, a little redundantly, all sides of what has really no center. Sometimes the charm of Carnival! is real, sometimes synthetic. Sometimes the show expresses a circus world, sometimes it merely exploits it. Love, again, comes to seem more of a refrain than a reality, a happenstance that can make it peculiarly sweet in places but also quite mawkish in others. A famous axiom holds good in Carnival!: the audience's heart is most touched when least tugged at.

Gower Champion has staged and danced the show expertly, as has Will Stevens Armstrong designed and lighted it. There are some nice Bob Merrill songs; Miss Alberghetti has an engaging voice; Jerry Orbach is a deft puppetmaster; as Marco and his gal, James Mitchell and Kaye Ballard have amusing scenes, particularly one where she is locked in a box through which he plunges swords. But the evening's peak comes with a whirling and jubilant "Grand Impérial Cirque de Paris" dance number, paced by the memorable little man of La Plume de Ma Tante, Pierre Olaf. Fetchingly nimble and stylish as a dancer, mime and clown, Olaf—except for this number—is reduced to a colorless speaking part. Had his face, his feet and his engaging Frenchness been oftener used, Carnival! might have seemed oftener magical.