Skyscraper and Swizzle Stick

By T.E. Kalem

MY ONE AND ONLY Music by George Gershwin; Lyrics by Ira Gershwin Staged and Choreographed by Thommie Walsh and Tommy Tune

Tommy Tune makes his entrance in My One and Only dangling from the harness of a parachute. In the modern Broadway musical, that kind of stunt has become standard. Sleights of hand and eye dominate such shows as Cats, Dreamgirls, Nine and Merlin. Like My One and Only, these musicals are not more than sheen-deep. Spectacle swamps substance, testifying to T.S. Eliot's verdict that modern man longs to be "distracted from distraction by distraction."

Rather less than distracting is the '20s boy-meets-loses-gets-girl plot line concocted by Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer. Captain Billy Buck Chandler (Tune) is a daredevil aviator who wants to cross the Atlantic nonstop, and his light-of-love (Twiggy) is a world-famous English Channel swimmer. If you want to know how this goofy cardboard comedy romance comes out, see any silent movie containing a bogus Russian prince (played here by Bruce McGill).

As a skyscraper and swizzle-stick song-and-dance duo, Tune and Twiggy are engaging without ever being electrifying. He seems more in love with his feet and she with her flapper finery than either is with the other. Twiggy's plaintively torchy renditions of Nice Work If You Can Get It and Boy Wanted surpass any of Tune's singing, though the pair's shallow-pool splash-dance together in 'S Wonderful reconfirms Tune's inalienably inventive choreography.

Lifting songs from the original Gershwin musicals (Funny Face, He Loves and She Loves, Strike Up the Band) is divine pilferage. For a tap-dance addict, the evening will prove an opium den of delight. Bravo to Charles ("Honi") Coles for his elegant finesse. Unfortunately, as a gauge of the current state of the U.S. musical, My One and Only inhales adrenaline and exhales formaldehyde. --By T.E. Kalem

Question: Why did the troubled Taylor-Burton play, Private Lives, have difficulty finding a new director? Answer: Because all of them were busy saving My One and Only. The Broadway insider's joke is hardly an exaggeration. Last winter the $4.5 million musical was rumored to be a walking (and tap-dancing) catastrophe. Still, there have been many shows that escaped flop status with last-minute resuscitation: among them Hello, Dolly!, the 1971 version of No, No, Nanette and Sophisticated Ladies. So an extraordinary number of show doctors were brought in by the desperately optimistic producers. Five directors, two writers and a battalion of lighting, costume, music and dance veterans labored for three months, cutting songs and characters, changing steps and altering sets. Among the paramedics: Director Mike Nichols, Director Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line), Tony-winning Writer Peter Stone (Woman of the Year), veteran Music Director Jack Lee, Orchestrator Michael Gibson and Arranger Wally Harper, who has worked on musicals from Brigadoon to Nine.

It is hard to believe that the show was once the vision of two men only. Two years ago, Director and Choreographer Tommy Tune, 44 (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Nine), felt like again slipping into his Broadway dancing shoes, empty since his sensational performance in Seesaw (1973). Director Peter Sellars, 25, a Harvard Wunderkind, who once set Handel's opera Orlando in the Kennedy Space Center, wanted to direct a major musical. The collaboration seemed promising: Tune would supply award-winning savvy and Sellars would contribute fresh ideas.

The 6-ft. 6-in. Texan and the pixieish Sellars agreed on a souped-up version of the 1927 Gershwin musical Funny Face. When rehearsals began, however, Tune's slick professionalism and Sellars' loopy intellectualism clashed. A ponderous script by Writer Timothy Mayer subordinated a romance between Tune and Co-Star Twiggy to muddy monologues on the rise of corporations, the Liberation of women and the life of Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey. The sets were complicated Russian constructivist art.

Tune suffered these extravagances in silence. But his frequent collaborator, Choreographer Thommie Walsh, said, "They were all sensational ideas, but in a two-hour musical? Let's get on with the singing and dancing." Paramount Theater Productions, which had invested more than $2 million in the show, agreed, and Sellars, who had just been awarded a five-year "genius" grant by the MacArthur Foundation, was fired. His summary: "It was the forces of Brecht against the forces of The Pajama Game."

The new boss: Tune himself, assisted by Mike Nichols. On breaks from editing his new film, Silkwood, Nichols excised one role, two songs and an hour of running time. He later mused: "What it needed was to be commercialized, yes, vulgarized--if that's Broadwayizing, then so be it." Tryout performances in Boston, however, remained so disjointed that Tune made curtain-call explanations to audiences: "The parts that don't make sense to you don't make sense to us either. That's why we're in Boston."

Now that ticket sales are brisk and daily reviews generally kind to stars and choreography, Tune is singing different lyrics. On the eve of the Broadway opening, he burbled, "The show itself is a metaphor for America. There is a drive to this country, an energy, a fearlessness that is really inspiring." Perhaps Tune prefers to forget the long list of helpers, but Writer Peter Stone has not. "We have this image," he jokes, "that we'll get the Tony, and when they announce it, the whole audience will get up and go on the stage to get it." . This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.