Allegro

After two in a row like "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel" a theatrical team must face an awful temptation to dump whatever artistic ambition it ever had and roll on in its lucrative rut. Rodgers and Hammerstein have been so phenomenally successful on Broadway during the last few years that almost no one would have blamed them for letting their triumphs go Midas-like to their heads and for turning out a third musical with nothing new to add to the scope of its famous and profitable predecessors.

What actually seems to have happened in "Allegro" is a powerful renaissance of that artistic ambition, partially smothered by the tenacious formula for a Musical Comedy. According to R & H "Allegro" is, first of all, a Morality Play. The staging, which along with the dances was in the hands of Agues De Mille, introduces startling and effective new devices; and some of Rodgers' music seems remote from anything he has done before. But on top of all this that is new comes a sweet, sticky dose of the conscious, sentimental Americana that was fresh and clever in "Oklahoma!" but too often approached mawkishness in "Carousel."

The Everyman of Hammerstein's Morality is the son of a struggling, intensely moral country doctor. The play watches its hero from birth through incidents of his childhood and college days and of his life as a successful doctor to the rich of Chicago. Finally, it records his return to the faith of his father, as he departs from the big city to minister again to the good people of the land. Money, sex--all the usual temptations--attract Joseph Taylor, Jr., on his journey through Vanity Fair.

This plot plus R & H treatment would have made a musical, but perhaps that wouldn't have satisfied that hungry artistic ambition. The rest of "Allegro" is something altogether original and brilliant: an Impressionist's satire of twentieth century American life. Achieved by a combination of fantastic lighting, expressive ballet, clever writing, and impressionistic music, this satire breaks through in three scenes which should not be forgotten regardless of the rest of the play.

The first of these scenes shows collegiate fox-trotters as they really look, then as they think they do--floating hazily in each other's arms--and then returns to the comically ugly reality. The second parodies a cocktail party: 30 overdressed men and women wiggle about inside an invisible (and nonexistent) wall in the center of the stage, waving long-stemmed glasses, nodding their heads furiously, and shouting in fearful chorus, "Yatata, yatata, boloney, mismosh, rubbish, yatata." The third impressionist scene is "Allegro" itself: the title song, a freudian ballet, and the gyrations of the projected backdrop displaying the tempo of modern life--allegro.

The combination of those superb scenes and a few other high points of dance specialist Kathryn Lee, however, with the usual quota of R & H songs beginning "When a fella ..." "It's a Darn Nice Campus," or "Come home, son, come home," is a little hard to take. The humor is in many places stale--the bewildered freshman was done last year in "Barefoot Boy," for example, and the childhood romance and the rocking chairs of the first set were new in "Our Town." Dead characters moon about the stage in a horrid reminder of "Carousel," and Rodger's brasses blast the hero's wedding into a sentimental colossity.

The conclusion is that Rodgers and Hammerstein should have made up their minds whether to write their Morality and have it done with or else to strike bravely out with a musical that stuck to the "Allegro" theme and hit its audiences with a new punch. As it is, the team will probably recover its *400,000 investment neatly, but it has muffed a chance to create a dynamic new form instead of some elever, but seattered, effects.