Mediocrity into Success

Here is a musical to remember other musicals by. Promises, Promises is slick, amiable and derivative. No playgoer will feel gypped if he attends the show, nor will he miss a thing if he skips it.

Broadway hails fair-to-middling work as genius so long as it succeeds. Along Shubert Alley, the ultimate critic is the box office, and Promises, Promises will doubtless satisfy that arbiter of taste. The show follows all the hallowed tac tics for promoting mediocrity into success. One does not gamble with $500,-000; one invests in the imitation of past successes. That means: Don't create --crib. Thus the plot line of Promises, Promises is derived from the Billy Wilder--I.A.L. Diamond film The Apartment, which was far sharper in lancing U.S. sexual hypocrisy, and the structure of the show has been borrowed from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The evening is not so much viewed as deja vu'd.

The musical's tall, gangling antihero, Chuck Baxter (Jerry Orbach), is an underling at Consolidated Life and looks suspiciously like a poor insurance risk. His arms seem to dangle somewhere close to his knees, and his face bears the gasp-jawed incredulity of a deep-sea diver whose air supply has just been cut off. What makes him mildly appealing is that he confides his utter lack of confidence in self-abasing little asides to the audience. It is hard to think ill of a man who thinks so ill of himself.

Cure: Love. By happenstance, Chuck discovers "a way to be thought better of. The key to his modest pad may unlock an executive suite for him. Commuting senior executives with one night of illicit in-town love on their agendas barter promises of future advancement for the use of his apartment. One night Chuck finds the girl (Jill O'Hara) he worships in the bed he rarely makes. She has taken an overdose of sleeping pills after discovering the perfidy of the company Don Juan. Cure: the love of a good --well, fairly good--man.

The book's comic tone is bland rather than pithy, a little disappointing coming from Neil Simon. The rhythms of the Burt Bacharach score sound like sporadic rifle fire, and aside from one melodic lament, I'II Never Fall in Love Again, the songs are interchangeably tuneless. In the first-act finale, a Christmas office-party number produces a vigorous choreographic commotion, except that it obviously attempts to duplicate the volcanic Brotherhood of Man sequence in How to Succeed.

While Jerry Orbach is splendid, his performance lacks something of that subtle manic hysteria with which he fleshed out a man as well as a part in Scuba Duba. The acting gem of the evening is the bit part of an amorous alcoholic pickup played by Marian Mercer. Vocally, she slithers through her lines with the glissando of a soprano trombone. Her timing is perfect. She braces her body as if she could be pushed over with a swizzle stick, and she convicts the show of mere competence by her own distinction.

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