New Musical on Broadway

Destry Rides Again (book by Leonard Gershe; music and lyrics by Harold Rome; direction and choreography by Michael Kidd) ups curtain on the Last Chance Saloon with the lady that's known as Frenchy (Dolores Gray) sashaying forward in a red-sequined gown to treat some of her plug-ugly admirers to a song. Within minutes she shoots the hat off one heckler, wraps a whipstalk around the skull of another. Then her saloonkeeper boy friend (Scott Brady) proceeds to give the sheriff an incurable case of lead poisoning. It is obviously high time for law and order to come to the town of Bottleneck. And it does, with no-gun Deputy Tom Destry (Andy Griffith) fresh out of law school and full of wide open spaces in his speech.

What follows would breed theatrical enchantment if the musical Destry had any of the human appeal of the 1939 Jimmy Stewart-Marlene Dietrich film. The current Destry is expense-account entertainment. The songs are brassy, the girls are all chassis, and the mood is about as prairiefied as a subway rush hour. The electrifying exceptions are Michael Kidd's imaginative dance sequences.

Musicomedienne Gray can line-drive a song to the exits, Merman-fashion, but her Frenchy never travels more than one block west of Broadway. Griffith's Destry is immensely likable but far too much the Arkansas traveler to suggest any purpose deeper than palaver. Everyone works hard to prove that everything, except the performance, is a joke. But Destry Rides Again only for the gold in them thar box-office tills.

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