A Mishmash Of a Musical

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: THE GOODBYE GIRL

AUTHORS: MUSIC BY MARVIN HAMLISCH; LYRICS BY DAVID ZIPPEL; BOOK BY NEIL SIMON

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Big stars, boffo story, but bad judgments turn a much anticipated show into an amiable disappointment.

A Broadway adage holds that there are 50 ways for a musical to go wrong and only one for it to go right. No musical this season was more eagerly awaited than The Goodbye Girl, Neil Simon's adaptation of his 1977 hit movie about the bumpily blossoming romance between a single mother and a quirky actor forced to share an apartment and a succession of setbacks. Adding to the buzz were Simon's collaborators: Marvin Hamlisch, composer of Broadway's longest-running show ever, A Chorus Line, and David Zippel, whose lyrics for City of Angels were the wittiest in years. Graciela Daniele, a six-time Tony nominee, was recruited to mount musical numbers. The leads were cast with Bernadette Peters, the reigning diva of musicals, and Martin Short, an effervescent TV and film comic making his Broadway debut. So potent was the combination that a year in advance, industry leaders pegged the show to sweep the Tonys.

Alas, The Goodbye Girl went wrong in at least four of those 50 ways. What arrived on Broadway last week is earnest, serviceable yet rarely stirring and almost never believable. It's never outright bad, it's occasionally funny, and twice -- when Peters sings the self-help anthem How Can I Win? and when Short courts her on a rooftop -- it's thrilling. But most of the craftsmanship is humdrum. The narrative lacks suspense and liberating flights of fancy. The production has no style, no look, no distinctive flavor or texture or sound. And it constantly brings to mind better shows: a transvestite Richard III pales beside the Crummles troupe in Nicholas Nickleby; dancers costumed as forbidden foods on a TV diet show feebly echo the You Gotta Have a Gimmick number from Gypsy.

The first big mistake was failing to settle on a place and time. The front , curtain's stylized glimpse of Manhattan evokes the '40s-ish nostalgia of Guys and Dolls, while the main set, a dark framework strewn with irregular cutout boxes of vivid color, recalls the '60s -- and, more precisely, Simon's musical hit Sweet Charity. A carousel-like jungle gym in Day-Glo tones suggests the '70s, as do the male lead's fixations on meditation and macrobiotics. The sexual precocity of the female lead's 12-year-old daughter feels contemporary. Yet the sonorous music and often sentimental lyrics seem straight from the '50s. This mishmash makes it harder to swallow the contrived meet-cute start and melodramatic career twists of the plot.

The second mistake was to have Peters, so good at winsome vulnerability, play a character so hard and snarly. From the opening number, in which she rages at being abandoned by a live-in boyfriend, to the contrived quarrel with her new paramour a few moments before the finale, her angst always outshouts her charm. A third goof was to have Short start out really neurotic, as Richard Dreyfuss was in his Oscar-winning film portrayal, but turn into Caspar Milquetoast (or Ed Grimley) within minutes. The domestic frictions that made the film funny simply disappear.

The biggest goof of all was ousting character-conscious director Gene Saks during tryouts in favor of Michael Kidd, 73, a legend who has had scant impact on the Great White Way for a couple of decades. The politest thing one can say about Kidd's slack, scattershot staging of The Goodbye Girl is that it will do nothing to revive his bygone career.