No Heart

No Strings opened on the Ides of March, and forgot that old musicomedy soothsaying: beware the book. Librettist Samuel Taylor takes two not very appealing people, has them fall in love for no particular reason, and gives playgoers no special cause to fall in love with them.

David Jordan (Richard Kiley) is an expatriate ''Europe bum,'' a permanent house and party guest on the Paris-Monte Carlo-St. Tropez axis. He once wrote a Pulitzer Prizewinning novel and now has trouble whisking the dust off his typewriter. Barbara Woodruff (Diahann Carroll), tall and graceful as a flamingo, has taken a long-legged step from a Harlem fire escape to a high-fashion perch as the best-paid model in Paris. Her philosophy: "I just want money, and then some money, and loads of lovely love.''

Can the lovely love of a good top model make an honest writer of David again? Barbara takes a furlough from her career and her rich French would-be lover and wine coach (''Remember, the red wine must never be chilled") to find the answer. "My head is full of you," says David, ignoring his typewriter. "That's wrong," says Barbara mock-sternly, "it's supposed to be full of beautiful words and declarative sentences." It takes a heap of declarative sentences, including several inverse cliches that are almost as good as cliches ("Love makes the world go square"), to establish the fact that David and Barbara are less soulmates than checkmates. At musical's end, he is going back to his native Maine to quarry more durable prose, and Barbara is going to "wait" in Paris, presumably for David's next Pulitzer Prize sabbatical.

To bolster this piffling book, veteran Tunesmith Richard Rodgers, 61, has fashioned a score of romantic witchery--most hauntingly, The Sweetest Sounds. Doubling as his own lyricist after four decades with the late Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodgers is less assured, more studied than spontaneous, less caught up than caged in his own words.

Quite apart from the tactfully undrawn color line of its interracial love affair, No Strings arrived on Broadway with a fanfare of anticipation about new musical comedy techniques. The orchestra has been hauled out of the pit, the bulk of it invisibly placed at the side of the stage and seven men planted downstage. Some of the time these minstrels wander about, some of the time they huddle around a table like displaced poker players. The cast and chorus nimbly change settings, rotating panels and moving other airily designed scenic props. The dances bear Joe Layton's inventive signature, but excessive leg, arm, and hand signals threaten to turn the chorus into a platoon of animated traffic cops. As director, Layton has used all these devices to generate motion, at best the poor relation of action.

Among the show's svelte pickings, Noelle Adam plays a prancing photographer's helper of endearing blonde charm who might have been poured into her black nylon tights by a Playboy Santa, and Bernice Massi, as a Texan millionairess, nearly pops her gleeful tonsils as she whoops, hollers, and hog-ties men. While the evening really belongs to no one, Diahann Carroll wears her share of it like a tiara. She glides into a song, or a breath-catching gown, with pantherish zest and grace. She struts, she pouts, and her grave-gay eyes cry happy. No Strings is Diahann Carroll's first strand on a potentially brilliant musicomedy future.

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