Review

Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Cinderella played last week to an audience that, even discounting CBS's inflated guess of 107 million, was probably the largest in the history of entertainment. The show did nothing else to make history, though it made 90 minutes pass prettily and smoothly. Sweet-voiced Julie (My Fair Lady) Andrews fitted the heroine's role as if it were a glass slipper. The hero of the evening was Composer Richard (Oklahoma!, The King and I) Rodgers, who even imitating Richard Rodgers gives a better imitation than anyone else. At least two songs--Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful? and Ten Minutes Ago--had the lilt to last for a while, and the record of Cinderella --issued well in advance of the show--was selling this week at the clip of a Broadway-hit album. However reminiscent of other Rodgers' works, the score had warmth and plenty of whirl to propel dancers through Choreographer Jonathan Lucas' gay patterns in a slick production handsomely set and costumed by William and Jean Eckhart.

By playing between acts, the music even made the commercials fairly tolerable. But it was no cure for Oscar Hammerstein II's script, which kept shifting uneasily between the sentimental and the sophisticated, and making each seem lamer than the other. The modern approach produced a down-to-earth skeptic of a Godmother (Edith Adams) with sequined eyelids and, for a magic wand, a drum major's baton. The attempt at innocent fairy-tale enchantment was sometimes harder to take: one interminable lovers' dialogue consisted of stilted inanities that sounded like a whole musicom-edy's worth of song cues laid end to end. Hammerstein, a gentle soul, also evidently felt compelled to soften the children's fable for grownups by reforming the wicked Stepmother and Stepsisters into merely pesky comic types. While making one of TV's biggest splashes and giving impetus to a cycle of fairy tales,* Cinderella also displayed the gulf that can still yawn between TV standards and those of the theater, by which Cinderella's authors are usually judged. Although Authors R. and H. are bravely talking of adapting it for the theater, the show offered little reason to believe that it could last much longer on Broadway than it did on television.

*Onetime Cinemoppet Shirley Temple was signed last week as narrator for a series of one-hour fairy tales, and things look Grimm elsewhere. CBS is preparing a 9O-min. musical version of Aladdin for the fall, and NBC has at least six others brewing, including Pinocchio, Hans Brinker and The Pied Piper.

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