Marx's Revenge

Flora, the Red Menace. The idea of spinning a musical comedy around a Manhattan Communist Party cell in the Depression '30s bears out Marx's warning that history repeats itself as farce. The era resists the prevailing modes of musical comedy: satire and nostalgia. The '30s are not close enough for slashing satirical gibes, and not distant enough to be bathed in a glowing forgetfulness of things past. Half the audience is too young to care, and the other half is too old to wish to be reminded of it.

Though filled with plot-happy cartoon Commies, Flora is strangely plotless. A stammeringly angry young Red (Bob Dishy) sweet-and-sour-talks a guileless fashion illustrator (Liza Minnelli) into carrying a card. When she surprises him with a half-undressed, wholly unabashed, free-love enterpriser (Cathryn Damon) and discovers that the chip on his shoulder is his head, she rips up both card and cad.

Any attempt to re-create a period must be laved in memory and affection, but Flora looks down on rather than at the '30s. The show's parodies of parlor-pink dance epics, and the "knock knock" pun craze are too self-consciously silly to be funny. A tune-drab, dance-starved, lead-witted musical is scarcely the dream debut for a star, but Liza Minnelli puts vocal muscle and wistful appeal into her spindling role. She has the wide famished eyes of a waif, that vulnerable little-child look of hunger and wonder. Like her mother,Judy Garland, she produces the Big Sound spontaneously, though she phrases her songs with a dramatic intensity more like that of Barbra Streisand. At 19, Liza Minnelli is a star-to-be, a performer of arresting presence who does not merely occupy the stage but fills it.

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