New Musical in Manhattan

Plain and Fancy (music & lyrics by Albert Hague and Arnold B. Horwitt; book by Joseph Stein and Will Glickman), a folk musical about the Pennsylvania Amish, ought to prove popular. A good part of the time--thanks to Broadway as well as Amish industriousness--it is refreshingly lively; the rest of the time it seems--as the Amish themselves might--refreshingly dull. The whole thing has about it a nice country smell of ripe apples and respectable oddity.

The book is an agreeable one with every so often a really funny line. By bringing to Pennsylvania a sophisticated young New Yorker (with a farm to sell) and his acidly vivacious girl friend, Plain and Fancy achieves some entertaining contrasts between plain and fancy living, country and city ways. When the Amish aren't donning their buttonless clothes, "shunning" a miscreant or putting up a barn, the city gal is being ogled by six frighteningly silent Amish youths, or is trying to pump water, churn butter, cook rice and grind sausage all at once--which makes the gayest five minutes in the show.

Shirl Conway, the harassed New York visitor, is also the show's gayest figure. Richard Derr is engaging as her city beau; and Gloria Marlowe and Barbara Cook make two fresh and appealing Amish ingenues. Tamiris has devised some dances hat have lure as well as local color, and Raoul Pene du Bois some pleasant sets.

The show's great weakness--which puts Pennsylvania's rusticities miles behind Oklahoma !'s--is its uninspired score. This ack of musical verve--there isn't too much dancing, either--helps explain why Plain and Fancy has a lot of sociological charm but very little social gaiety; why it smells of apples that seem uniformly destined for pie rather than cider.

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