Theater: Legs Diamond Shoots Blanks

When composer Frederick Loewe looked back on a career with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner that included Brigadoon, My Fair Lady and Camelot, he reportedly said he could not get over how easy he and his partner made it all seem. Loewe was right, but in retrospect the most startling thing about the team's success is that their creativity was far from unique. In the heyday of Broadway musicals, nearly every season brought a landmark production, often two or three. The 1946-47 season that introduced Brigadoon, for example, also provided Finian's Rainbow. The 1956-57 season of My Fair Lady was, in addition, the season of Bells Are Ringing, Candide, The Most Happy Fella and Li'l Abner. The 1960-61 debut season of Camelot saw as well the arrival of Irma la Douce, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Bye Bye Birdie.

Any one of those shows would seem a godsend to the Wan White Way of the '80s. With three striking exceptions -- Dreamgirls, Big River and Into the Woods -- pretty much every noteworthy musical of the decade has been a revival, a recycling of old songs, an import (generally from Britain) or a critical smash but commercial also-ran. The current season, which by Broadway's calendar began in May, is more miserable than most. Its first American musical, Carrie, actually a slightly postponed holdover from last season, closed within five performances at a record loss of $7 million. The sole entry since, Legs Diamond, a quirky blend of gangster spoof and show-biz biography, opened last week to killer reviews, although the producers launched a $350,000 TV ad campaign and vowed to hang on.

The season's musical hopes now rest almost entirely on material from the past: a Jerome Robbins retrospective; a blues-and-dance collage with no new songs, Black and Blue, from the creators of Tango Argentino; and a Duke Ellington score, Queenie Pie, left unfinished at his death in 1974, that has been touted for Broadway for three seasons. Says Rocco Landesman, a producer who succeeded with Big River and Into the Woods: "With a musical there are 40 ways for things to go wrong and only one for them to go right, which is for everything to come together."

That did not happen for Legs Diamond. Despite five years of development, the show that previewed in late October was, in the blunt judgment of co-producer Arthur Rubin, "a disaster." Librettist Harvey Fierstein apologized to the audience at the first performance. Alluding to the practice of testing a show out of town, which Legs skipped because of its complex sets and lighting, Fierstein said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is New Haven."

Previews continued for nine weeks -- unusually long, but not a Broadway record -- as musical numbers, costly scenery, characters and whole subplots came and went. On some nights more than a hundred paying customers left at intermission or even during the performance. One couple who marched up the aisle during the second act seemed particularly weary of a plot device that has the hero, a tap-dancing gang leader, repeatedly fake his own murder. As the departing woman looked back at the stage, she whispered, "He's alive again." Muttered her companion: "Better he should have stayed dead."