New Musical in Manhattan

Wish You Were Here (book by Arthur Kober & Joshua Logan; music & lyrics by Harold Rome) is a big musical blow-up of Having Wonderful Time, Arthur Kober's tender 1937 look at life in an adult Jewish summer camp. In Wish You Were Here, not only a group of fun-clutching, romance-seeking, would-be genteel New York vacationers have come to the Catskills; Broadway itself has joined the party. The suitcases are loaded down with Main Stem gimmicks and tricks, but the Joshua Logan touch has killed off the Kober ability to be touching.

What in the play seemed based on warm personal memories now seems based entirely on memories of show business. What was a wistful, sometimes funny, and very special comedy of manners is now a large-sized musicomedy of monkey-shines.The humor has hardened into gags; there are mechanical props and malaprops at every turn. The Social Director of Wish You Were Here is working too hard at brassy entertainment; the Athletic Director (John Perkins), with his honest-to-God six-foot-deep swimming pool, is muscling in too conspicuously.

The swimming pool, and a basketball game of sorts, and real hot dogs, and what looks like real rain are but incidents--and not very imaginative ones--in a never really gay evening. Harold Rome's score is agreeable but commonplace; except for Comedienne Sheila Bond, the cast, though youthful, is colorless. One trouble is with the people--or with the fact that there are none. Only in an occasional phrase, or in a song called Tripping the Light Fantastic, does the show stoop to the level of mere fumbling human beings.

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