Theater: A Flavorless Irish Stew

"Loved the set—hated the show," remarked one departing theatergoer on the opening night of the musical Cry for Us All. The set is a wondrous toy, a mammoth turntable, but the show is a sentimental melodrama adapted from the 1966 off-Broadway hit, Hogan's Goat. Its locale is Brooklyn in the late 19th century, when the borough still had its own mayor and power-hungry chieftains scrabbled feudally over a kind of Irish fiefdom. One such boyo, Matt Stanton, becomes a protege of the mayor (Robert Weede), steals his mistress and seems well on his way to the big power grab when a fatal quarrel with his own wife (Joan Diener) totally undoes him.

The play had the rich savor of ethnic origins, of a time and a place recalled with nostalgic exactitude, but the musical is just a flavorless Broadway stew. It is drenched in an operetta-styled nondistinctive score that drowns the story. A dance at a wake is given ardent balletic precision by Tommy Rail but, in the saddest possible sense, all of Cry for Us All is a wake.