New Musical on Broadway

The Nervous Set (book by Jay Landesman and Theodore J. Flicker; music by Tommy Wolf; lyrics by Fran Landesman) is a wry and indulgent spoof of the Beat Generation. The mood is mock-nihilistic. Instead of Waiting for Lefty, the hipsters of the '50s are waiting for Junkie (the dope peddler); in place of the prewar pacifism of Bury the Dead, the postwar passive-ists Dig the Bird (the late Saxophonist Charlie Parker). And, of course, boy meets girl.

Brad (Richard Hayes) is a Greenwich Village intellectual ("At least. I'm out of work"); Jan (Tani Seitz) is a proper Gramercy Square. Brad is the editor of a far-out little mag called Nerves; Jan has read it, "both issues." When the pair discovers that each has been "in analysis, but not now," they get married and begin making atonal music together. The chief trouble is that Brad's pad is a 24-hour flophouse for his weirdie pals.

"I can't stand these creeps." says Jan. "Those are not creeps, my dear," says one of the creeps, "they are contacts with the heartbeats of a nation in decay." Among the heartbeatniks: Bummy Car-well (Larry Hagman), incipient novelist ("I'm a writer--I'm out there on the periphery handling unexploited materials"); Danny (Thomas Aldredge), a marijuana-fueled poet who mumbles about the "crypto-neo-reactionaries"; and Yogi (Del Close), a stubble-bearded anti-homosexual crusader who gets most of the show's laughs.

This and other musical numbers are strung together like unmatched beads, but some of them have the wicked glint of genuine satire. Party Song stingingly peppers the social climbers of suburbia. Rejection ("that childhood rejection") does the same for the hobohemian set. New York is a cathartic for all the romantic nonsense set to music about the Big Town.

Making his Broadway debut. Radio Disk Jockey Richard Hayes is a personable and vocally authoritative Brad, but the show suffers from a split personality. In Act I, it hunts with the hipsters; in Act II, it dines by candlelight with the squares. By musical's end, the satiric fumes have evaporated, and The Nervous Set has merely settled down.

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