New Musical in Manhattan

Love Life (music by Kurt Weill; book & lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; produced by Cheryl Crawford) can boast the Best of Everything--the producer and the librettist of Brigadoon, the composer of Lady in the Dark, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, the choreographer of Finian's Rainbow, the leading lady of High Button Shoes, the leading man of Annie Get Your Gun. But whether so many top-notchers are like too many cooks, or whether some of them have slipped a notch or two, Love Life is not really a good show; it is only a show with good things in it.

It gives itself two chances to win by alternating a tale about the decline of domestic happiness in the U.S. with a succession of vaudeville acts. Between variety turns featuring magicians, quartettes, octets, horrifyingly clever children, crooners and mock madrigal singers, Love Life chronicles the marriage of Sam and Susan Cooper (Ray Middleton & Nanette Fabray) from 1791 to the present. The Coopers are a couple who never grow older, but the Cooper union is one that constantly grows worse. Love Life's argument is that steam, speed, materialism and greed have slowly wrecked connubiality. (It might be retorted that even allegorical couples were not meant to live together for 150 years.)

The show has its very real assets: Nanette Fabray who, without losing one whit of her looks, keeps gaining in versatility and charm; and Ray Middleton, who has both voice and personality. It has some admirably lively and stylish Michael Kidd dances. It has one of Kurt Weill's most attractive scores, ranging from satiric little ditties like Progress to the full-throated tunefulness of Green-Up Time.

But, even with Elia Kazan's helpful direction, Love Life cannot hold to a really bright level, or have any real lure for long. It is always calling time on its own fun to try something else. Furthermore, in illustrating the decline of domestic life, it goes in for some pretty childish and cheesy spoofing. The interpolated vaudeville show is not on the whole a very good show or a very good idea. It does not seem quite consistent that Love Life --which so deplores the modern spirit of commercialism and greed--should itself be the stage equivalent of a double feature.

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