Yoo-Hoo, Boo-Hoo

By T.E.K.

MOLLY

A Musical

At a time when advanced military technology is rendering certain traditional weapons obsolete, Broadway continues to rely on older and older bombs. The latest nostalgia dud is Molly.

Everything that could possibly go wrong with a show has gone wrong with this musical. The score sticks in your ear like wax. The lyrics consist of ditties that a fifth-grader would not dare to pass in to his English teacher. The star (Kay Ballard) spins through her numbers like a treadless tank. She lacks the remotest trace of that sweetly enveloping maternal musk with which Gertrude Berg so winningly invested her creation, Molly Goldberg, in the vastly popular radio and TV serials spanning the years 1929-1954. Alan Arkin has directed the show the way a bartender jiggles a martini shaker, apparently hoping that agitation will pass for action. As for the Great Depression during which Molly ostensibly takes place, traces of it are visible on the brows of the audience, but it effectively eludes the men who wrote the show's much-doctored but uncured book.

When things get messed up on this scale, the real trouble is rooted in the initial conception of a show. Molly obviously hoped to capitalize on the large Jewish theatergoing audience in the New York area by offering that audience homey ethnic humor. While ethnic humor is indestructible, it goes through varying phases. The cozy gemuetlich atmosphere that originally made Molly Goldberg a household charmer is simply not in the air we breathe now. The current vogue in Jewish humor is pinpointed in the astringent, highly self-conscious comic imagination of a Philip Roth. Better they should have made Portnoy's Complaint into a musical, though nostalgia it ain't.

qed T. E. K.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.