Stop the World

When bigger bombs are dropped, Broadway will drop them. Dear World is almost in the megaton class (it cost $750,000), and the stage at the Mark Hellinger Theater is a smoldering rubble of tedium.

Plays converted into musicals have a high disaster ratio. In some instances, the plays themselves could not have been successfully revived. The Madwoman of Chaillot, from which Dear World has been rather conscientiously adapted, is 25 years old, and it doesn't take a play doctor to see that rigor mortis has set in.

The Jean Giraudoux original is one of those typical French morality plays cleverly garnished and disguised with wit, world-weariness, and wistfully disenchanted romanticism. In Giraudoux, as in Anouilh, there is also an elegance of manner, a fencing master's play of the intellect, and a sense of historical irony of which few Broadway adapters have the remotest inkling. In Madwoman, Giraudoux conceived of a vicious, filthy-rich, top-hatted capitalist cartel that discovers oil under a bistro called the Chez Franc,ois and is prepared to desecrate all of Paris to pan for the black gold. But the eccentric owner of the cafe, the Countess Aurelia (Angela Lansbury), thwarts these evil malefactors of great wealth. With the aid of two loony cronies and a sewerman (Milo O'Shea), she herds them through a trap door under the cafe into a kind of eternal hell of sewage.

Time has not only blunted the point but reversed it. While capitalism now seems surprisingly benign, the individual who decides to exterminate other people, under whatever pretext, has become distinctly ominous. As a one-madwoman salvage operation, Angela Lansbury saves her reputation if not the show. Looking like a ruefully unkempt Colette, she croons, chortles, and cavorts about The stage with a certain raffish gallantry. The Jerry Herman score is zero, and Choreographer Joe Layton, who once staged dances of tepid promise, has now ascended to scalding mediocrity.

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