Shredded Wit

By T.E.K

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Made into a Musical and Directed by Burt Shevelove

Nature tries to avoid genetic mutations. Broadway will hybridize anything if it looks like box-office loot. Burt Shevelove, a clever and intelligent man, obviously had a dream collaboration in mind when he thought of mating some svelte Cole Porter songs with Philip Barry's sophisticated play Holiday.

What has happened? The Porter score has been excised from several disparate musicals and fitted with procrustean zeal to the Barry play. Holiday has been shred ded, which necessitates a narrator to fill in the gaps. Though he plays this role with guileful urbanity, John McMartin cannot wholly disguise the fact that, except in the case of Our Town, a narrator is the way a show takes a sleeping pill. Those who have seen the 1938 Gary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie version of Holiday will recall that this is the tale of a stuffy rich girl, Julia (played here by Kimberly Farr), with a perky, venturesome sister, Linda (Leslie Denniston), the Hepburn role. Julia gets affianced to Johnny Case (Michael Scott), the Grant role, an up-and-coming stockbroker with the revolutionary notion of retiring and savoring the world while young, and working later. When he sticks to his plan, Julia ditches him and Linda elopes with him.

Vintage Porter numbers always delight, and one torchy lament (After You Who?) deserves to be heard more often Valiant work is done by all acting hands especially by Denniston as the ardently fetching Linda, but this quasi musical is about as happy as a depleted New Year's dawn when it seems to be raining incessantly inside your skull.

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