New Musical on Broadway

Christine (book by Pearl S. Buck and Charles K. Peck Jr.; music and lyrics by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster) is a tedious romantic musical, despite an out-of-the-way romance. The lady is Irish; the man is Hindu, and is also her widowed son-in-law. But even this unhackneyed relationship involves believing that beautiful, young-looking, redheaded Maureen O'Hara could be a grandmother; and everything else in the little town of Akbarabad is all too exotically familiar and reminiscently rusty. Once again East is West and West is West; and Mother-in-Law, in the end, knows best. But the renunciatory end takes forever to reach in a prosy, flat, humorless libretto that, if often social-minded in intention, is simple-minded in effect. And though Actress O'Hara has a nice voice and personality as well as rare good looks, she is not altogether at home in a musical. And despite a nicer voice, Morley Meredith acts like a wooden Indian.

Sammy Fain's score is only mildly helpful--his Irish and Indian love calls are tuneful but commonplace. Christine's most sustained asset is its choreography.

Hanya Holm's festival dance, cobra dance and plate dance have a vivid grotesquerie and color; and the chief dancer, Bhaskar, has skill. And when Actress O'Hara and two solemn, native-costumed Indian servants suddenly whip into an Irish jig, they provide the evening's one real moment of gaiety.

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