New Play in Manhattan

Say, Darling (by Richard and Marian Bissell and Abe Burrows; songs by Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green) is a sort of part-time musical made from a book (Say, Darling) that described how a big-time musical was made from a book (7-c- Cents). This carrying The Pajama Game into extra innings works out fairly agreeably on the whole. Compared to its bookform pokes at show business, Say, Darling is now using a softball. But as a popular-entertainment monkeyshine on the making of musicals, and as the decidedly unspiritual autobiography of a fledgling librettist, the show bumps and bounces along cheerfully enough.

The hep, sharp-tongued fledgling of the novel becomes, despite David Wayne's attractive playing, somebody far less individual on the stage. The show is most fun as a kind of production trek--producers' offices, lady stars (Vivian Elaine), auditions, rehearsals, feuds, hotel rooms. With the high dudgeon and the low language, with much of the action reduced to caricature and much of the dialogue delivered in wisecracks, even what is not authentic show business makes breezy vaudeville. Really fresh and funny is a very young coproducer, a long-on-argot but short-on-savvy brat-about-town, delightfully played by Robert Morse.

Say, Darling is otherwise no more than reasonably good entertainment, partly from a failure of nerve--there are far more cliches about show business than genuine touches. But this is partly, too, a failure of verve; Say, Darling needs scenes where hilarity really snowballs and nonsense mounts. It needs, for the show-within-the-show, either far better music, or far worse. If accuracy was no touchstone, lunacy should have been.

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