Geriantics

By T.E.K.

MY OLD FRIENDS

Book, Music and Lyrics

by Mel Mandel and Norman Sachs

While it tries to rectify inequities suffered by some of its citizens, the U.S. remains an adamantly segregationist society when it comes to the aged. No other culture, East or West, ships its old people off to the Gulag archipelago of nursing and retirement homes with such manifest indifference.

It may not seem like a larky subject or setting for a musical, but My Old Friends manages to sandwich a wedge of pathos between large slices of jollity. The characters encountered at the Gold en Days, a retirement hotel, are spunky individualists eager to savor the last drops of life. True, there is a lady (Grace Carney) who stays glued to the TV set, but that gives her life the dimension of constant fantasy. True, there is someone who dies (offstage), a tie salesman (Robert Weil), but only after he achieves his desire to leave something behind by completing a bench in the craft shop.

The evening is an amiable mixture of songs, dances and wisecracks seasoned with the rueful wisdom of age. Maxine Sullivan, whom one must not refrain from calling ageless, stops the clock and the show with a briskly resilient number called A Little Starch Left. An October-October romance between a carpenter (Peter Walker) and a woman (Sylvia Davis) whose husband is hospitalized and dying supplies the musical's bittersweet plot line. At show's end the pair sashay out of the Golden Days to share their sunset years, and on leaving the theater you may find your own step noticeably springier.

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