Fairy Tale with a Wink

All plays and musicals are rather like bedtime stories for grownups. But they rarely resemble the fables, fairy tales and romances that one remembers as a special delight of being very, very young. A new musical called Celebration dwells in just that land of enchantment. It is a charmer for sophisticates who have never quite forsaken the magic realm of childhood.

A handsome blond Orphan (Michael Glenn-Smith) has been expelled from a celestial garden, but he has brought with him the stained-glass eye of God, his personal token of hope in the essential goodness of things. He meets an Angel (crestfallen) with grave dark eyes. This lovely girl (Susan Watson) tells the Orphan that she is tired of being a Nobody and wants to be a Somebody. Together they meet Potemkin, a master of ceremonies and revelers, played with winning guile by Keith Charles. Potemkin tells the Orphan that he has read that God is dead, so survival has become his only creed.

To survive, they must all deal with Mr. Rich (Ted Thurston). Old Rich has the classic ailments of age and wealth: he is impotent and bored. On New Year's Eve, Potemkin arranges for a love scene to be played between the Orphan and the Angel with the hope of restoring Rich to youthful virility, after which the old man is supposed to get the girl. Naturally, it does not turn out that way.

Treat by Contrast. This story line could have been as sticky as a candied apple, except that the co-creators of The Fantasticks, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, have used a favorite device of Bertolt Brecht's. Brecht traded on the sentimentality of a song or story while ironically kidding it. Thus an audience could feel emotionally stirred and intellectually superior at one and the same time. What Jones and Schmidt have done is to write a fairy tale that knowingly winks at itself.

Simplicity, spareness and clarity are the order of the evening, and that alone makes the show a treat by contrast to most other Broadway musicals. There is no piston-pumping chorus testing the floorboards in Celebration, only a small gentle band of masked dancers decked in the costumes and spirit of a carnival. The straight melodic line and unpretentiously apt lyrics of the songs appeal to the ear without assaulting it. Celebration is intimate and beguiling and it has a distinctive personality rather than a powerhouse complex. It is one of those good things that come in small packages.

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