Old Play in Manhattan

Lute Song (adapted from the Chinese Pi-Pa-Chi by Will Irwin & the late Sidney Howard; music by Raymond Scott; produced by Michael Myerberg) is the season's loveliest production and most charming failure. A retelling, with music, dances and pageantry, of a 500-year-old Chinese classic, it never quite catches the inner glow of art or the outward stir of theater. There should have been either less spectacle or less story. As it is, the old tale is retold at considerable length, but loses much of its flow and human feeling through gorgeous interruptions and sumptuous distractions. What's more, neither the writing nor the acting has quite the stylized quality it reaches after.

Lute Song tells of Tsai-Yong (Yul Brynner), a provincial young student who leaves his wife (Mary Martin) and parents to make his mark in the world. He becomes a famous magistrate, is forced to marry an autocratic prince's daughter, is forbidden to communicate with his family. His parents die, cursing him, during a famine, but his wife remains staunchly faithful. She is at last reunited with Tsai-Yong by the princess, and remains in the palace as No. 1 wife.

Real hero of Lute Song is famed, all-too-infrequently busy Scene Designer Robert Edmond Jones (Emperor Jones, Green Pastures), whose sets and costumes are often things of splendor. They tremendously enhance the movement as well as the looks of the play--the wedding and burial scenes, the exotic dances, a captivating Imperial March. The best of Composer Scott's incidental music has color also, and one or two of the little songs he has written for Mary Martin have a reedy charm. Actress Martin, straying far from the My Heart Belongs to Daddy sort of singing that made her famous, is attractive and scrupulously unself-indulgent in a role that leaves her, like Lute Song itself, a little lifeless.

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