Musical Anesthesia

Pickwick. Charles Dickens is becoming an author in name only. His theatrical adapters are rapidly divesting him of his works. Two seasons ago, Oliver Twist was pilfered and became Oliver Exclamation Mark. Now the musical-forgery squad has cribbed a few episodes from The Pickwick Papers. To vulgarize the dead is bad enough, but Pickwick does something worse--it anesthetizes the living.

If drama were taxidermy, Harry Secombe could scarcely be faulted. Perhaps Madame Tussaud's should put in a bid for him at the end of the run. His Mr. Pickwick is a no-neck John Bull with a jellybelly. He is full of music-hall antics that date, but not back to the 19th century. His fellow Pickwickians are animated period costumes equally devoid of personality.

The dances, familiar Broadway exercises in directionless motion, stem from the King of France school of choreography--"the King of France with 40,000 men went up the hill, and came right back again." Most of the score seems to have been written in invisible notes and dissolving lyrics, although two numbers, I'll Never Be Lonely Again and If I Ruled the World, have a plaintive and perhaps durable charm.

In all this tedious mishmash only Peter Bull, as Sergeant Buzfuz, shows an authentic Dickensian flair. Like a Daumier-lawyer print brought to life, he knows the precise satirical boiling point where caricature reveals character, where broadness of humor acquires the beef of wit. He is an estimable and melancholy measure of the show that might have been.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.