New Musical in Manhattan

Great To Be Alive (music & lyrics by Abraham Ellstein & Walter Bullock; book by Mr. Bullock & Sylvia Regan; produced by Vinton Freedley in association with Anderson Lawler & Russell Markert) boasts a very pleasant cast, has a fine, expensive look, leads a busy, active life. It is ingenious in some places and expert in others. Yet it seems, to an almost depressing degree, like just one more big Broadway musical--and at times like a not very recent one.

The story concerns an old, unused Pennsylvania mansion, and the resentment of the family ghosts who haunt it when they learn it is to be inhabited again by living people. What alone cheers them is that there is to be a wedding in the house, for now, after 87 years, a pair of dead lovers can be married, too. The weddings are interrupted by murder, which turns the second half of the evening into a whodunit. The whole evening is tethered to a gag which makes ghosts visible only to virgins.

Without being a bad show, Great To Be Alive somehow manages to become an insipid one. It starts out with an idea of its own; it ends up slopping over with all the dead seaweed known to musicomedy. The show gets no farther on sex than it does on spooks, and on murder it gets nowhere at all. More crucially, it doesn't get far on its music, either: Composer Ellstein's score is just agreeably banal, and the Bullock lyrics are not much fun even when clever. As for the gifted cast, Valerie Bettis is used monotonously, Vivienne Segal rather shabbily, and Stuart Erwin too seldom. Tamiris' choreography gives the show and the ghosts their happiest break.

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