New Musical in Manhattan

Oh Captain! (book by Al Morgan and Jose Ferrer; music and lyrics by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans) stems rather brokenly from the triumphant Alec Guinness movie, The Captain's Paradise. As a musical yarn about a Channel skipper who shuttles between wholesome British wedlock near London and being a bold out-of-wedlochinvar in Paris, Oh Captain! shimmers with possibilities and for a time arouses hopes. Tony Randall comes off well as a starchy captain on shipboard and a stuffy mate in the home, and he has plenty of dash in a love nest. In Jacquelyn McKeever he has a nice blonde English missus; in Abbe Lane, a fetching redhead from Montmartre. There is here a pleasant tune and there a nice dab of satire, an engaging boulevard bit with Ballerina Alexandra Danilova, some neat Jo Mielziner sets. And when the blonde wife wins a weekend trip to Paris, there is a sense of fireworks to come.

Unhappily, as the plot thickens, the fun turns thin, and what should have the naughty lure of Paris has only Broadway's noisy hotcha. The tunes too often have a second-time-round kind of lilt, teasing the memory even when they please the ear. The book and lyrics have a kind of cut-rate sophistication, as though a droll double life could be conveyed in determined double meanings. In time, the show and Jose Ferrer's staging not only lack all taste of dry champagne, there is no longer any gay popping of corks. Oh Captain!, to be fair, is never outrageously bad; it is just almost nowhere as good as it should be.

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