New Musical in Manhattan

The Vamp (music and lyrics by James Mundy and John Latouche; book by John Latouche and Sam Locke) goes to the early silent-film days for its fun, and comes back emptyhanded. Considering the many experienced people involved, this constitutes a kind of feat in reverse.

Comedienne Carol Channing alone should, at the very least, give an aura to defeat. And The Vamp often seems to be Carol Channing alone, but however well or hard she works, she herself seems a little defeated. The show itself, for the most part, just lies on its side and stubbornly refuses to move.

The all too movielike story of The

Vamp--laid in the era when moviemaking shifted from East Coast to West--turns Carol Channing from a lummoxy farm girl to a reigning screen vamp, while getting in her way or following in her wake are up-from-corsets movie producers snakehearted ingenues, oriental shenanigans and Biblical films. But what chiefly ails the story is that it never really evokes 1914, or early Hollywood, or actual vamps; there is no fondness to its memories or sharpness to its stings.

A juiceless book is not the only culprit. The music is chiefly loud, and at their best Robert Alton's dances are just conventionally lively. Actress Channing is only intermittently victorious. She has her real moments, with her round, seemingly lidless eyes or her rumbling subway of a voice; she can pronounce a word as though bending it in two or rush feverishly about her various farm chores as though running bases in some mad game played on Mars. But her large-limbed wackiness. so wildly wrong for Gladiola Girls and Lorelei Lees as to prove wonderfully right, is not quite suited to spoofing high-powered vamps.

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