Wheeze-Bang

All-American is a crazy mixed-up dodderer of a musical. The first act is a throwback to the old-fashioned football college comedy where education consists of numskull sessions and coeducation of necking sessions. The second (and last) act plunks a few blank cartridges into Madison Avenue, the most oversimplified U.S. symbol of evil since George F. Babbitt. To compound the sense of the archaic, the hero tumbles onstage with a planeload of European fellow immigrants to raise an Ellis-Islandish plea of ''melt us" before audiences that would rather be caught naked than stewing in the common pot of conformism.

As Professor Stanislaus Fodorski. Ray Bolger is as ineptly endearing as sin at the Southern Baptist Institute of Technology, where he goes to teach engineering. To drill a little knowledge into the classroom cementheads he adopts football lingo. Chorus the enlightened mastodons of the monosyllable: "It's fun to think." Soon Fodorski gets a chance to apply his Archimedean magic to the great gridironic decisions of educational life, like defeating S.B.I.T.'s football rival. Texas Mohammedan. Fodorski's human pinwheel and pyramidal enemy line-scaling plays make him "All-American coach of the year" and. together with a display of pectoral muscularity called Physical Fitness, give the show its most rollicking chorus routines.

Alas, once a straw man always a straw man. The onetime scarecrow of The Wizard of Oz meets an advertising mogul played by Fritz Weaver with Mephistophelean glee. Stan, as the love-smitten dean of women (Eileen Herlie) calls him, becomes a be-spatted decoy for the "Fodorski Foundation." At sea in adland. poor rich Stan is eventually faced with a moral question: Should he throw the big game to save his academic integrity?

Absent from Broadway since he gave Charley's Aunt a nimble whirl eleven years ago, Ray Bolger shows the toll of his own 58 years, not only in his froggily croaking voice, but in the dances that he pointedly sits out. Only in a second-act number called I'm Fascinating does he finally take the dance floor (and the house) with his eccentrically masterful specialty, the best-ever human imitation of a drunken penguin on ice. Top supporting honors go to Anita Gillette as a sex-hexed coed with a diaphanous sentence structure ("I desired his body"). Except for her, All-American is an asthmatic wheeze-bang.

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