Bacallelujah!

Lauren Bacall is the pearl in a half-good, half-not-so-good oyster of a musical called Applause. Star quality is supposed to be indefinable, but Bacall helps to define it. Just as one does not have to search for Picasso's signature to recognize a Picasso, so Bacall's work bears the indelible marks of style and self. She owns the stage but wants the earth. A bundle of past struggles, future aspirations and present tensions, she is never in true repose. Her presence is a demand--a lot from others and even more from herself. It is also a gift, not of the best acting, singing and dancing, but of the distilled essence of a full life experience poured through those modes of expression. Like her friend Katharine Hepburn, she welds character and personality. Thanks to nature's potter, she also happens to be a striking beauty.

Since Broadway is a trifle short of inspiration these days, the story of Applause is a retread of the 1950 movie All About Eve. A young actress, Eve Harrington (Penny Fuller), carefully masks her ambitions in order to insinuate herself into the friendship and concern of an established theater star, Margo Channing (Bacall). Middle age is the devil's prompter in Marge's mind, popping biting retorts in her mouth about the jeopardy of fame, and chilling qualms in her heart about her love affair with a younger director (Len Cariou). With serpentine guile and horizontal campaigning, Eve slithers her way upward toward Margo's coveted stardom. However, Margo salvages what counts most: her lover, plus the hard-won grace to acknowledge that even unscrupulous youth must be served.

Sentimentality in Reverse. "The bitch-goddess, success" was a phrase coined by William James. What Mary Orr, who penned the original story, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who scripted the film, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote the book for Applause, have done is to reverse James and produce a clever little parable on the success goddess--bitchiness. It may be clever, but it is far from valid. Cynicism is sentimentality in reverse and equally untrue. Of all places, the theater, with its intense critical scrutiny, verifies the copybook maxim that success must be earned and that only merit will sustain it.

The overall merit of Applause is a sleek professionalism that neatly camouflages its shortcomings. The music and lyrics have the glistening utility of railroad tracks carrying the playgoer from station to station of the plot. The chorus numbers, staged by Director-Choreographer Ron Field, belong to the squirrel theory of dance. Everyone scampers, scampers, scampers, but with so much joie de vivre that animation almost qualifies as design. A perky, elfin-like charmer named Bonnie Franklin lends spirited vitality to the song-and-dance title number and is rightly rewarded with a storm of applause.

As the puss-in-spurred-boots, Penny Fuller's Eve is a model feline, but the ultimate irony of the plot is that nobody, but nobody could take a show away from Lauren Bacall. Ticket holders can certainly thank their lucky stars for that.

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