Arrivederd Broadway

Bravo Giovanni offers a great voice in a tiny void. Metropolitan Opera Basso Cesare Siepi gets the chance to sing a menu. As a display of the conspicuous consumption of talent, this might have staggered Thorstein Veblen. What playgoers will find themselves conspicuously consuming at this musical comedy is their own time.

Bravo Giovanni is not intolerable, just interminable. Its plot, its songs and its dances go on and on, but they never really GO. The hero, Giovanni Venturi (Siepi), operates a homey trattoria in Rome. Next door, a flossy branch of the Uriti chain of restaurants opens up and threatens him with bankruptcy. A sly friend (David

Opatashu) gives Giovanni a Machiavellian idea. By tunneling from his basement to the Uriti basement kitchen, Giovanni can lift food off the Uriti dumbwaiter, serve it in his own place at cut rates, and not only stay competitive but ruin Uriti.

Siepi booms out this amiably imbecilic libretto with Mozartian brio, but his face is as unbending as Alan Ladd's. As the girl in Giovanni's life, brunette beauty Michele Lee owes all her best lines to nature. Though only 19, she seems to have acquired the false vivacity and hackneyed mannerisms of generations of musicomedy ingenues. Swooping about the stage like a benign witch out of a child's storybook, fortyish ex-Ballerina Maria Karnilova, who plays a mate-hungry widow, is remarkably agile and refreshingly comic.

She gambols through the tango, the twist, and an agitated bit of neo-'20s dance nonsense called "the kangaroo." After his appearance in this wan swan song of the Broadway season, Cesare Siepi can always go back to the Met; Karnilova will dance again. In Rome's palmier days, the rest of Bravo Giovanni would have been thrown to the lions.

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