Pilgrims' Regress

There is something innocent, sweet, and perhaps inaccessible about Geoffrey Chaucer. He regarded sex as one of God's blessings. His devout and lusty pilgrims wending their garrulous way to Canterbury have an easy intimacy with natural odors, natural functions and the natural affections of men and women. The seamless unity of faith and flesh creates an abyss between the 14th century and the 20th. Chau cer's people are not paralyzed by self-consciousness in the act of love. They possess none of modern man's neurasthenic haste to import trouble in paradise. They export joy.

Unfortunately, the Chaucerian spirit is largely missing from a British musical called Canterbury Tales, which has not thrived on a sea change from London. Surprisingly commercial, it treats sex as a commodity and faith as an epilogue, in the manner of a Cecil B. DeMille devotional epic. Nothing is mod est about the show except its quality.

The amplified sound of the incongruous pop-rock score may reach the moon ahead of the astronauts. The chorus boys' codpieces are ample, but they scarcely camouflage the empty boisterousness of both dance and bawdry.

Four of Chaucer's tales are told: the Miller's, the Steward's, the Merchant's and the Wife of Bath's. The dialogue is all in rhyming couplets, which is rather like spending the evening on a date with a metronome. The stories mainly feature an aging cuckold, a harridan somewhat uglier than sin, and a blonde mini-bombshell named Sandy Duncan, whom nature has cunningly fashioned for everything except acting. In the key roles of the Steward and the Wife of Bath, George Rose and Hermione Baddeley are formidable contenders for a much-needed Hammy Award.

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