Fossil

By T. E. Kalem

CARMELINA

Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner Music by Burton Lane Choreography by Peter Gennaro

Every so often, watching a Broadway show is like going on an archaeological dig. Unfortunately, these dramatic tombs contain no King Tut treasures. They are stacked with dusty relics that a museum curator might choose to label Homo theatralis, extinct since some time in the early '50s.

Musicals date even faster than plays, and if one pilfers the formulas of the past, as the fashioners of Carmelina have, one has to be lucky enough to find a fossil audience to match. Based on the 1968 film Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, Carmelina tells the tale of Signora Carmelina Campbell, a Southern Italian beauty winningly played by Georgia Brown. During World War II, she made love to three G.I.s and, to one of them, bore a daughter now 17 and ascribed to a dead hero ingeniously named for a soup can. A postwar reunion of the U.S. liberators of the little town of San Forino makes the soup boil over.

An added ingredient is a local restaurateur, Vittorio Bruno (Cesare Siepi), who worships Carmelina and is shunned by her as if he were the prime exhibit in an article called "Italians Are Lousy Lovers." Opera Star Siepi has a voice of hurricane force, but he seems to have graduated from the formaldehyde school of acting. Carmelina's dances look like a jogger's nightmare. There are some songs that might bear rehearing-It's Time for a Love Song, One More Walk Around the Garden, I'm a Woman-but in some other musical. -T.E.Kalem

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