The Theater: New Musical on Broadway, may 9, 1960

Christine (book by Pearl S. Buck and Charles K. Peck Jr.; music and lyrics by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster) is a tedious romantic musical, despite an out-of-the-way romance. The lady is Irish; the man is Hindu, and is also her widowed son-in-law. But even this unhackneyed relationship involves believing that beautiful, young-looking, redheaded Maureen O'Hara could be a grandmother; and everything else in the little town of Akbarabad is all too exotically familiar and reminiscently rusty. Once again East is West and West is West; and Mother-in-Law, in the end, knows best. But the renunciatory end takes forever to reach in a prosy, flat, humorless libretto that, if often social-minded in intention, is simple-minded in effect. And though Actress O'Hara has a nice voice and personality as well as rare good looks, she is not altogether at home in a musical. And despite a nicer voice, Morley Meredith acts like a wooden Indian.

Sammy Fain's score is only mildly helpful—his Irish and Indian love calls are tuneful but commonplace. Christine's most sustained asset is its choreography.

Hanya Holm's festival dance, cobra dance and plate dance have a vivid grotesquerie and color; and the chief dancer, Bhaskar, has skill. And when Actress O'Hara and two solemn, native-costumed Indian servants suddenly whip into an Irish jig, they provide the evening's one real moment of gaiety.