Newsday from New York, New York • 185

THEATER REVIEW Leaving Broadway 'Black and Blue' BLACK AND BLUE. Revue conceived, directed and designed by Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli. Including singers Ruth Brown, Linda Hopkins, Carrie Smith. Dancers Bunny Briggs, Ralph Brown, Lon Chaney, Jimmy Slyde, Dianne Walker, Cyd Glover, Savion Glover, Dormeshia Sumbry. Musical supervision by Sy Johnson.

Minskoff Theater, 45th Street west of Broadway, Manhattan. OW DO YOU spend $5 million on a simple variety show meant to celebrate the great jazz and blues tradition in music and dance? If you ask Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli, whose "'Black and Blue" opened at the oversized Minskoff Theater last night, the answers are painfully and inexplicably obvious: You overmike the gorgeous music so it sounds loud and canned; you overdress everyone, relentlessly, and make the hefty performers look like chandeliers from "The Phantom of the Opera;" you overutilize stage machinery so that gigantic velvet drapes, elevators, platforms, swings, curtains, backdrops are frantically doing everything but roller skate. Along the way, you betray the emotional depth of the music, distort and distract from the sense of the lyrics, and underestimate an audience that, surely, comes to such a show for something besides happy feet and rhinestone tonnage. If it is possible, perhaps, to see how a few zillions were spent, it is far more difficult to understand why. These are wonderful performers Ruth Brown, Linda Hopkins, Carrie Smith, an orchestra of old pros worth hearing despite the spectacle that is being made of them.

There also are generations of great tappers: such legendary solo stars as Bunny Briggs and Jimmy Slyde, such new stars as the space-eating acrobatic Savion Glover, and wittily choreographed ensembles. If the dancers in "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" Ruth Brown sings 'St. Louis Blues' in 'Black and Blue'; below, dancing to 'After You've Gone' Mismatched ed Pair of Bank Robbers THREE FUGITIVES. (PG-13) Paroled bank robber Nick Nolte strolls innocently into a bank robbery in progress, becomes a hostage, then a fugitive, then an accomplice. Innocent little timekiller co-stars Martin Short, James Earl Jones, Kenneth McMillan, Sarah Rowland Doroff.

Written and directed by Francis Veber. At area theaters. By Mike McGrady THREE FUGITIVES," the first American film from France's Francis Veber, is a throwback to another era a childlike film that gets its excitement from a never-ending chase, its sentiment from a cute 6-year-old girl mixing it up with bank robbers, and its humor from a series of sight gags, some of which work flawlessly. As well they should. "Three Fugitives" is, after all, Veber's second goround with the same story in France it was a commercially successful Gerard Depardieu comedy titled "Les Fugitifs." And by this time, Veber understands very well what makes a sight gag work surprise By Linda Winer that relies on flawless timing and his timing is above reproach.

However, when all is said and done, Veber's story is still going to be little more than a lightweight time-killer, an innocently appealing bit of fluff that won't overly tax either one's intellect or capacity for laughter. In refilming his project, Veber picked a star, Nick Nolte, who is an American approximation of Depardieu in both appearance and technique. A just-paroled convict, Nolte wanders innocently into a bank robbery that's in the process of being bungled by Martin Short and immediately finds himself taken hostage. Naturally, the police assume the robbery is Nolte's idea and the chase commences. The two, Nolte and Short, are soon joined by Short's 6-year-old daughter (Sarah Rowland Doroff), a child of such extreme cuteness as to provoke a communal intake of breath from the audience.

However, she has a little problem, a problem that will seem more than passingly familiar to any veteran moviegoer. As Short explains it to Nolte, "She are anywhere near this good, we should be grateful. Segovia and Orezzoli, the Brazilian set designers who shot to attention here with their homemade little "Tango Argentino," have acquired a disfiguring case of Broadway elephantiasis. Instead of a show about black blues, we get a drapery showroom for black and red velvet. Walls, panels, singers, something is always going up or coming down on that gargantuan stage.

Ruth Brown delivers her bawdy, wry "If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' on It," describing herself as the owner of a second-hand store. The bizarre part is that she happens to be wearing an Inauguration gown with the world's biggest tiara against a spray of starry sky- a backdrop which, when she finishes, swirls to become the train of her dress. Exactly the moment to put the strobe, don't you agree? Then there is Carrie Smith, of the thrilling lowthroated vibrato, who is mummified in a glittering caftan, slid in on a dolly and thoroughly earns the right to sing "'I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues" while being tilted backward on a huge disc. If that were not enough abuse for one big woman, she returns in the second act to sing the beautiful, simple heartbreak of "'Am I Blue" while frozen on a swing, maybe 25 feet above the stage, while yards and yards of flashy dress make a tent to the ground. Nor does Linda Hopkins get off with her dignity, oh, no.

She infuses her stratospheric falsetto gospel streak into the spiritual "Come Sunday" with blinding jewelry up to her considerable elbows. The dancers, in fact, are abused less and much of the tapping is a revelation. With witty choreographers such as Henry LeTang, who did "Sophisticated Ladies," and lindy-hop specialist Frankie Manning, these feet are in good hands. One can take a lesson in their variety, marveling how Jimmy Slyde slides so close to the floor in "Stompin' at the Savoy" and try to count the taps that sad-eyed Bunny Briggs can get while merely seeming to walk. But, again, Briggs is wearing a crazy-quilt suit when he is supposed to be "In a Sentimental Mood." And a trio of good young dancers is dressed like a deck of cards for "Memories of It is hard not to compare the show with "Ain't the revue that epitomized style with just a simple set and few costumes.

It is especially hard not to remember that cast singing a capella the heartbreakingly beautiful "Black and These performers did the song, too, of course, but made it upbeat, jaunty and blaring. They could have been singing about a preference for black and blue jellybeans or black and blue jeans, instead of the pain beneath the skin. The concept, if there is one, seems to be don't-worry, be-happy a dubious position for an anthology of the blues. In avoiding all hint of deeper emotion, this show wastes major talents and delivers another bruise to the American musical on Broadway which is black and blue enough already. doesn't talk.

She hasn't opened her mouth in almost two years, since her mother died." Hmmmm, sounds very much like a temporary condition to me. From this point on, the two men and the girl the three fugitives are on the run. Since Nolte has been shot, the first stop is at a doctor. Well, not actually a medical doctor but a senile veterinarian (a nice dotty last turn by the late Kenneth McMillan) who is under the misapprehension that Nolte is a dog wounded by careless hunters; for a brief while, he even considers putting the big guy to sleep. Martin Short (imagine a cross between Pee-wee Herman and a human being) must be the hardest man in the world to slot in movies.

His unique comedic talents, once regularly showcased on "Saturday Night Live," have brightened films like "Innerspace" and "The Three here he offers his best film work to date and Nolte is at his most earnest. While sentiment occasionally spills over into corniness, there are enough Martin Short and Nick Nolte as two of 'The Three Fugitives' deft moments to keep things from becoming sloppy. All the chases, however, finally do prove a bit exhausting, and I could only nod my head in profound agreement when Nolte tries to break up the fugitiveship with, "I've been on the run too long. I just can't take it any more." mI.