Legs Diamond Shoots Blanks

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When composer Frederick Loewe looked back on a career with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner that included Brigadoon, My Fair Lady and Camelot, he reportedly said he could not get over how easy he and his partner made it all seem. Loewe was right, but in retrospect the most startling thing about the team's success is that their creativity was far from unique. In the heyday of Broadway musicals, nearly every season brought a landmark production, often two or three. The 1946-47 season that introduced Brigadoon, for example, also provided Finian's Rainbow. The 1956-57 season of My Fair Lady was, in addition, the season of Bells Are Ringing, Candide, The Most Happy Fella and Li'l Abner. The 1960-61 debut season of Camelot saw as well the arrival of Irma la Douce, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Bye Bye Birdie.

Any one of those shows would seem a godsend to the Wan White Way of the '80s. With three striking exceptions -- Dreamgirls, Big River and Into the Woods -- pretty much every noteworthy musical of the decade has been a revival, a recycling of old songs, an import (generally from Britain) or a critical smash but commercial also-ran. The current season, which by Broadway's calendar began in May, is more miserable than most. Its first American musical, Carrie, actually a slightly postponed holdover from last season, closed within five performances at a record loss of $7 million. The sole entry since, Legs Diamond, a quirky blend of gangster spoof and show-biz biography, opened last week to killer reviews, although the producers launched a $350,000 TV ad campaign and vowed to hang on.

The season's musical hopes now rest almost entirely on material from the past: a Jerome Robbins retrospective; a blues-and-dance collage with no new songs, Black and Blue, from the creators of Tango Argentino; and a Duke Ellington score, Queenie Pie, left unfinished at his death in 1974, that has been touted for Broadway for three seasons. Says Rocco Landesman, a producer who succeeded with Big River and Into the Woods: "With a musical there are 40 ways for things to go wrong and only one for them to go right, which is for everything to come together."

That did not happen for Legs Diamond. Despite five years of development, the show that previewed in late October was, in the blunt judgment of co-producer Arthur Rubin, "a disaster." Librettist Harvey Fierstein apologized to the audience at the first performance. Alluding to the practice of testing a show out of town, which Legs skipped because of its complex sets and lighting, Fierstein said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is New Haven."

Previews continued for nine weeks -- unusually long, but not a Broadway record -- as musical numbers, costly scenery, characters and whole subplots came and went. On some nights more than a hundred paying customers left at intermission or even during the performance. One couple who marched up the aisle during the second act seemed particularly weary of a plot device that has the hero, a tap-dancing gang leader, repeatedly fake his own murder. As the departing woman looked back at the stage, she whispered, "He's alive again." Muttered her companion: "Better he should have stayed dead."

Even so, pent-up public enthusiasm for a new American musical of any kind was so great that despite bad word of mouth, some 90,000 customers came during previews, most paying the full price of $50. Says Rubin: "We made a profit during previews." The show built up advance sales as high as $10 million; they still stood at more than $3 million after opening. The day after the barrage of punishing reviews appeared, the box office sold almost $40,000 worth of tickets.

Whether Legs can survive its critical clobbering depends on what kind of experience theatergoers expect for $50. Genial and inoffensive at worst, occasionally energetic and raucously funny, always lavish and cheerful and eager to please, Legs is an amiable enough way to spend 2 1/2 hours. But it is altogether unmemorable. Its basic problems could not have been altered by a year of previews: the concept and the star. Legs traces the rise of a big-time gang leader in the machine-gun era of Al Capone. No matter how much the script sweetens and fictionalizes its depiction of the short and brutal life of Legs Diamond, the hero inevitably has blood on his hands.

Onstage, Legs tries to sidestep this problem by making Diamond a frustrated entertainer who gets into crime as a way of financing himself on Broadway. The character cannot be taken seriously, and neither can Peter Allen as an actor. A campy night-club entertainer who penned his own single-entendre lyrics for this show ("If you love me, let me see your knockers"), he brings a pervasive tone of self-mockery to every moment and is ludicrously dispassionate as a roguish ladies' man. Like most performers who customarily work solo, he seems unable to engage the audience in any guise but his own.

The one surefire moneymaker on the current musical scene is Andrew Lloyd Webber, the British composer whose shows have been about felines, religious figures and monsters -- anything but old-fashioned romance, conventional boy meets girl. In hopes of matching Webber's profits, today's producers imitate his preference for way-out concepts, the loopier the better. Part of the reason such masters as Lerner and Loewe made it look so easy is that they did not feel compelled to contort themselves and their stories. Maybe they knew something worth rediscovering.