New Musical on Broadway

Juno (book by Joseph Stein, music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein, dances by Agnes de Mille) is a Pyrrhic victory of Broadway talent over an Irish genius. This musical version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock paradoxically mutes O'Casey's inner music with song, fetters his soaring spirit with dance, and deflects the lyric flow of his dialogue into prosy pools of talk.

A modern classic, Juno and the Paycock is fashioned around characters who escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life to the I.R.A. Shirley Booth puts a barbed disenchantment in her lines that neatly deflates humbug and windbag alike. But she carries her tragic life more like extra luggage than a cross.

The songs and dances that punctuate the destinies of the Boyle family often appear to be crashing the show. Melvyn Douglas kicks up a clog with a couple of cronies in a pub, and suddenly all Dublin floods onstage to sing that he's a Daarlin' Man, and hoist him on its shoulders. The intimate numbers are best. An Agnes de Mille solo, powerfully danced by Juno's doomed son (Tommy Rail), makes a poignant moment out of the life-destroying blight of Ireland's "Troubles." Two lovers' laments, One Kind Word and For Love, affectingly sung by Loren Driscoll and Monte Amundsen, highlight a Marc Blitzstein score that is more thoughtful than tuneful. Stars Douglas and Booth have the skill and charm to appear to be singing and dancing while actually talking and jogging. But Juno cannot solve its main problem: how to do O'Casey short of actually doing O'Casey.

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