New Musical in Manhattan

Paint Your Wagon (book & lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner; music by Frederick Loewe; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is the wrong advice. It should be: Grease your wagon wheels. This musical of Gold Rush days has plenty of color, plus agreeable music and lively dancing. But with all these assists, it breaks loose only occasionally from a lumbering stagecoach of a book.

The trouble lies partly in the overall design of Paint Your Wagon, in its concern with the swarming life--the rise, feminization and decline--of an entire mining town. Though fine for choral or choreographic doings, the crowded cast is cumbrous and untidy for storytelling. For half the evening, moreover, it is virtually an all-male performance--and the show needs women almost as badly as the miners. The gals' arrival brightens things up; but, for all that, the town only seems larger, the show longer.

For in the end, Paint Your Wagon suffers less from a shortage of women than from a shortage of wit, from imagining that copious research is a substitute for bright conversation. This defect is an unfortunate handicap for a show that is otherwise a pleasant enough addition to the Broadway scene.

James Barton is likable, whether quietly singing, dancing a soft shoe or carrying on as a drunk. Hollywood's Olga San Juan has a nice Broadway bounce. Agnes de Mille has worked out some attractively obstreperous and even orgiastic dances. And the best of Composer

Loewe's tunes are thoroughly rousing

even though the show itself keeps going back to sleep.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.