Hark, the Israeli Skylark

By * T.E .K.

Americans tend to think of Europeans above the peasant level as highly sophisticated. Still, season after season, Broadway imports some foreign shows of such pristine simple-mindedness that they could not be fobbed off on a shut-in from Cucamonga.

This season's imports began with The Black Light Theater of Prague, which as entertainment was on a par with a little boy doodling on the ceiling of his darkened bedroom with a flashlight. Now we are offered, direct from Israel, To Live Another Summer, To Pass Another Winter. True, Israel is in the Middle East, but the tastes of most Israelis are conditioned by a European heritage going back many centuries. As a musical, To Live is about as advanced as ring-around-a-rosy and decidedly less diverting than Sunday in Central Park.

The book is sort of an instant history of the Jews, from Abraham to Moshe Dayan. It is pretty damned skylarky for a people that wept beside the waters of Babylon and have undergone agonies of tribulation throughout their existence. The music is homogenized rock international, and the dances are United Nations hora. The girls are smashingly good-looking, probably the most fetching chorus line we are likely to see all season. If any one of them opts to stay in the U.S., she can make some deserving swain a very happy man.

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