Grandp

Sail Away (by Noel Coward) is carbon-copy Coward. All it needs is a carbon-copy audience from the dated musical comedies of the '20s and '30s. Sample dialogue: Englishman, in tweeds and monocle: "I've just found a cockroach in my bath." Steward: "I trust it was a British cockroach, sir."

Still, at times, a gallant Broadway cast has a ball among the mothballs. In the role of Mimi Paragon, social director of the S.S. Coronia, Star Elaine Stritch performs comic labors in herding a party of U.S. hicks, stuffy Britons, lushes, lady authors, child horrors and pet dogs (including one named Adlai) through a Mediterranean cruise with stops at Tangiers, Naples and the Parthenon.

By and large, she treats her charges as if they were coated with some brand of human repellent, then falls for a boy in Man Tan. She is the senior partner in the May-September affair, and it is the unlikeliest shipboard romance since the Owl and the Pussycat went to sea.

Comedienne Stritch punches out her lines with the raucous authority of a pneumatic drill, and in a number called Why Do the Wrong People Travel? she is a song blaster in the megaton range. Choreographer Joe Layton paces the show with wryly inventive dance sequences, notably a goofily spastic Beatnik Love Affair. An Italian wedding party that turns into a tourist trap is a hilarious cross-cultural spoof. But the S.S. Coronia is really a ship of the desert, and it is a long dry haul between oases.

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