New Musical in Manhattan

Goldilocks (book by Walter and Jean Kerr; music by Leroy Anderson; lyrics by the Kerrs and Joan Ford) takes place in 1913, in pioneer cinema days when redskins were swarming all over Fort Lee. The show itself concerns a short-on-cash, long-on-ego moviemaker and a sizzling-tongued actress he corrals for shotgun movie heroics on the eve of her society marriage. Communicating by insult, the two keep throwing knives at each other without for a long time realizing that they are actually Cupid's darts.

Goldilocks has a professional air, from the period brightness of the Peter Larkin sets and Castillo costumes to the sound showmanship--hers all energy, his all ease --of Elaine Stritch and Don Ameche. Dancer Pat Stanley is piquant, and the best of Agnes de Mille's dances and ballets are stylish. No One'll Ever Love You is a sassy duet, The Beast in You an amusing ditty. Walter Kerrs staging is lively and firm, and here a quip and there a crack bears Jean (Please Don't Eat the Daisies) Kerr's dewy, screwy touch.

The show's large-scale professionalism is a mixed blessing: it tends to put the packaging above the product, and to substitute mere method for point of view. Jean Kerr's daisies bloom more bountifully in suburban soil than in Broadway asphalt. And early bang-bang Westerns and supercolossal Near-Easterns have not only had their tales pulled all too often, but also time and television have made the nickelodeon a cherished relic like the model T, fitter for nostalgia than satire. Out of early films Goldilocks fetches up some indulgent laughs, but never any period lure. And Goldilocks rather fits the formula it at one point joshes: it is "first of all a love story, a tale of two lovers in love with each other." The Stritch-Ameche romance has none of the sogginess of musicomedy librettos, but it has their dogged, round-the-mulberry-bush complications. Despite nice up-to-date frills and out-of-date furbelows, Goldilocks has neither a 1958 freshness nor a 1913 charm; it has chiefly Broadway know-how.

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