Supremely Sophisticated Lady

By T.E. Kalem

WOMAN OF THE YEAR

Book by Peter Stone; Music by John Kander; Lyrics by Fred Ebb

In ballet, elevation means the height of a dancer's leap and seeming suspension in the air. In a musical comedy, elevation could mean a playgoer's inner leap for joy while suspended in an evening of sheer pleasure. Except for Lauren Bacall, Woman of the Year is a show of hazardously low elevation.

Bacall is a tigress of a performer, and she stalks through the musical like a supremely sophisticated lady who would never dream of sheathing her claws. From that growly, smoky voice, seemingly filtered through bourbon and cigarettes, to the lightning stride and the imperiously tossed head, she is a creature of animal grace and jungle danger. Bacallelujah!

But what about Peter Stone's book?

The flimsy substance of it is a reshaping of the 1942 Hepburn-Tracy film. Instead of a journalistic pundit patterned on Dorothy Thompson (Hepburn's role), Tess Harding (Bacall) is now a TV panjandrum a la Barbara Walters. Tracy's no-non sense sportswriter, Sam Craig, has be come a syndicated cartoonist (Harry Guardino) whose creation, Katz, is a kind of common man's alley cat sociologist.

(KATZ is flashed on a back-panel screen from time to time for sardonic wisdom and minor laughs.) Tess and Sam do not meet cute; they meet silly. She launches on a TV diatribe about how cretinous the "funnies" are.

Outraged, he caricatures her in his cato-rama as a snobby imbecile. They meet to fence and soon mend fences. Admittedly, Guardino is a palpable charmer and could probably break the social ice at the North Pole. Sporting bar-buddy camaraderie with Sam's poker-playing pals, Bacall romps through One of the Boys. Inexplicably, inevitably, the pair weds, spats, splits and reknits -- how old-hat can you hope to get?

On Broadway, of course, every fossilized retread can take a privileged bow once a rainstorm of box-office cash has sanctified it -- and Woman of the Year has been showered with a $3.5 million ad vance. As it happens, the evolution of a dramatic form is not that easy to repeal.

Four musicals of the past decade -- Company, Follies, A Chorus Line and Ballroom -- give a show like Woman of the Year the ashen patina of Pompeii. Those musicals released themes and prompted questions of resonance. Whence came the ravaged joys of marriage? How may one survive the illusions of youth and the disenchantments of middle age? Did the dance of life do for me what I did for love? And how may one dance under the pin drift of mechanical Stardust without the pipedream of romance?

Let's settle for smaller favors and find out just how small they are. The Kan-der-Ebb music and lyrics are amiable but pallid. Still, they do offer some comic relief. In It Isn 't Working and / Told You So, Tess's secretary (Roderick Cook) and her maid (Grace Keagy) team up to pepper below-the-salt potshots at Tess and Sam's splintering love life. The evening's high spot consists of Tess and a humble housewife (Marilyn Cooper) agreeing that The Grass Is Always Greener -- a lowlife, high-life duet. Cooper makes this sequence as tart as vinegar and twice as puckish.

Like the computer, dance routines have become phenomenally sophisticated. Tony Charmoli's dances in Woman of the Year are distinctly derivative and nearly obsolescent. But then, this show's staying power is not in its gypsies but in the dame with "legs."

-- T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.