New Musical on Broadway

First Impressions (book by Abe Burrows; music and lyrics by Robert Goldman. Glenn Paxton and George Weiss; choreography by Jonathan Lucas). Take a masterpiece. Tear out half its pages. Stuff the empty places with songs and dances. Rebind in expensive period finery. Open on Broadway, and pray that it is another My Fair Lady.

That prayer was not answered last week as the current theatrical bibliomania engulfed Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. If First Impressions resembles any fair lady, it is Jenny, the girl who could not make up her mind. The show wavers between Austen, Burrows and music-hall burlesque, and only the elegant Regency settings and costumes of Peter Larkin and Alvin Colt seem serenely self-assured.

The plot is still basic Austen. The aristocratic Mr. Darcy (Farley Granger) falls in love with Elizabeth (Polly Bergen), one of the five Bennet sisters. She dislikes his arrogance as sincerely as he dislikes her middleclass, mercenary mother. It is a classic case of love at first slight. As Darcy, Hollywood's Farley Granger is the stuff telephone poles are made of. TV's Polly Bergen makes a winning Elizabeth, but the ex-Pepsi Cola Girl seems to be selling her part rather than playing it. As Mrs. Bennet, the huntress of five carriage-trade husbands, Hermione Gingold growls, minces and struts through her endless matrimonial campaigns. She would be fiercely funny if First Impressions were a bedroom farce, and not a genteel domestic satire. As it is, Comedienne Gingold breaks up the house, and shatters the tenuous Jane Austen mood. The musical's key failure is that of scoring one of literature's string quartets for the theatrical equivalent of two brass bands.

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