Splash But Less Than Smash Singin' in the Rain

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

At 1:30 p.m. last Wednesday, the producers of Singin' in the Rain, daunted by poor advance sales and disheartening reviews, said they were closing. That decision would have made the show, which had consumed well over $4 million, the costliest one-night stand in Broadway history. About ten minutes later, however, as some 300 ticket holders were trickling into the 1,992-seat Gershwin Theater, Producers Maurice and Lois Rosenfield and Cindy Pritzker changed their minds. Said Maurice Rosenfield: "The others persuaded me the show deserved at least one more chance." That night, the same melodrama unfolded. Only just before curtain time did the three backers decide to proceed with Singin', a genial and generally faithful remake of the beloved 1952 MGM movie musical, for a still sparse crowd of about 700.

Then they vowed to go for broke. Believing they had an "audience show" -- theater parlance for an entertainment critics don't like but the public does -- they asserted they would invest an additional $1 million to pay for TV and print advertising and to cover an expected shortfall between operating costs and the box-office take. The show's creators accepted pay cuts. Rosenfield acknowledged that such salvage tactics often fail: "Our target is a five-week trial run. But we will have to rethink things if we don't see improvement."

Singin' had been dogged by conceptual confusion. Was it to echo the movie, like an unrelated version that has been running in London for more than two years, or be new yet preserve the spirit of the original? The opening was delayed for more than a month while numbers were reworked and Play "Doctor" Albert Marre tightened draggy dialogue scenes.

Director Twyla Tharp, an able and idiosyncratic choreographer of modern dance but a theater novice, determinedly did not meddle with the film's trademark moments. Said she: "Surely what we all most wanted was to see % Lockwood (the lead character) flip umbrellas, stomp in puddles, douse himself under rain pipes, then as now." That decision proved right: the dancing in the downpour, which floods the stage with several tons of water, remains as lighthearted as Gene Kelly's in the film. Yet it also stuns the audience with the danger of the slippery footing and the sheer spectacle of the flood. Tharp imaginatively transformed the film's grand comic solo, Make 'Em Laugh, into a precision drill of mass slapstick. At weaker spots, she interpolated homage to early movie musicals. A second-act succession of novelties -- animated wooden soldiers, balletic rag dolls, a brush-stepping horse -- is nostalgic and charming. A faintly surreal French peasant sequence, which may be all a dream or drug-induced delirium, has a more brooding, spooky quality reminiscent of Cocteau.

Slinkily costumed and swankily decorated in a blend of art deco and high tech, the show varies in energy yet looks so expensive that when compared with other recent musicals, it amply justifies the steep price of Broadway tickets (a $45 top). But it was fated to be compared instead with its brilliant progenitor. As exuberant, entertaining and eye-catching as the remake is, this Singin' is not nearly so extraordinary.