Soon to Be a Minor Sitcom

By RICHARD CORLISS

DOONESBURY Book and lyrics by Garry Trudeau Music by Elizabeth Swados

Come with us once again to those dear dead days when the world seemed young and in danger of not being able to grow old; when Johnny Jock and Suzie Coed had casual sex and political principles; when their undeferred buddies were spilling blood on foreign soil; when a Republican President could inflame humanists simply by waving nuclear sabers at the Russkies. Ladies and gentlemen . . . the Seventies! All together now: "Up on your feet,/ Press all your points,/ Eat Germ of Wheat,/ Toke on your joints,/ Ev'rybody do the Doonesbury Drag!"

Hip, cynical and defiantly out of place on the comics page of 710 newspapers, G.B. Trudeau's laid-back communards provided a daily recipe for coping with the '70s. The reclusive Trudeau scourged Viet Nam, Watergate, the hostage crisis and every political superstar from Henry Kissinger to Jerry Brown to Elizabeth Taylor regularly and acutely enough to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, as well as a sizable cult following. A year ago, Trudeau gave his strip a sabbatical and set to work bringing the gang from Walden Commune to Broadway. It turns out to have been a big mistake.

Trudeau might have anticipated a few of the problems. Cartoon figures cannot--maybe should not--move, let alone sing, dance and shamelessly mug; and Doonesbury never had the fairy-tale simplicity of Little Orphan Annie or Peanuts, both of which survived their trips to the musical stage more or less intact. Perhaps realizing this, Trudeau streamlined and cutesi-fied his characters. The result is a modest libel on the real Doonesbury. It might as well be called Archie and Drughead.

By the mid-'70s, when the strip had hit its stride, it had pretty much vacated Walden for more pertinent venues: Cambodia, California, Washington. The show, however, mostly stays home to tackle other earth-moving topics. Will Mike Doonesbury (Ralph Bruneau), who is presented onstage as a whiny, pigeon-toed virgin reminiscent of Walter Denton on the old Our Miss Brooks TV series, throw away his prepared speech and just propose to the earnest JJ. (Kate Burton)? Will B.D. (Keith Szarabajka), the beyond-macho quarterback, survive being traded from the Dallas Cowboys to Seattle? Will California Hippie Zonker Harris (Albert Macklin) keep his crazed Uncle Duke (Gary Beach) from "turning our commune into a flophouse for dopeheads and burnouts"? These problems, and the question of how to dramatize them, might occupy a students' lunch break at the High School of Performing Arts; they are hardly worth a year of Garry Trudeau's time, or two hours of anyone else's.

Elizabeth Swados has given Trudeau's lyrics (some of them witty and energetic) rhinestone settings; not one of her 14 tunes offers a memorable melody or a surprising chord pattern. It does surprise that Margo Sappington's choreography is so stunningly inept, that the cast is strident and charmless. In turning some likable icons of the center-left into show-biz brats, this musical Doonesbury emerges as a vision of '70s youth only Richard Nixon could love. --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.