Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 118

rtfst tsbeater reviewS ihging dancing By Allan Wallach IT YOU can create musicals about chorus dancers or runaway children why not a musical about ordinary Americans talking about their Why not an adaptation of Studs book in which all sorts do for a living and jobs9 oi the best-selli of people describe what how they feel about it? the hew musical at 46th Street Theatre demonstrates the difficulties It is a show that deals intelligently with interesting source material but it is undermined by its premise If there is a single strand that runs through taped interviews and through the show it is the sense of boredom and JuliniiMiniMtiim felt by so many of working men and women In his introduction Terkel writes of "the automated pace of our daily jobs that wipes out name and and in many instances feeling The show which strives valiantly to be lively is constantly at war with this inescapable fact: hard to be lively about people who are made nameless fhceleBS and devoid of pos positive feeling the primary creator Stephen Schwartz he did the adaptation directed this show and wrote some of the music and faced other problems One is book which is formidable competition If we can read oral histories what need have we for actors who mostly recite excerpts from the book? Another is the sense of sameness that pervades many of the 42 accounts and the impossibility of sustaining a story or mood for more than a few minutes Just as we become interested in a waitress we move on to- a truck driver Just as we begin to feel empathy for him we are switched to a telephone operator The effect is like eavesdropping briefly an lives like to know more about but never will Schwartz and his collaborators have provided some first-rate elements we get from the book He Craig Camelia Micki Grant James Taylor and the composer-lyricist team of Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead have contributed to a i ally attractive score The performances are good with several that are much better than i And enormous visual interest is added by sections of offices cabs of trucks slices of factories pieces of supermarkets and the like all moving into place in front of slide projections of Studs Chicago On the negative side are Onna choreography winch fails to rise about the level of routine dances about routine lives a few commonplace songs and a couple of caricatured portrayals As a first-time Broadway director Schwartz (best known as the composer of "God- The cast of 'Working at the 46th Street Theatre and The Magic has done creditable work The transitions from worker to worker are smooth and a few touches are deft Among the 17 cast members Matt Landers is a standout as a tough-talking fireman and as a gas meter reader who gets a kick out of surprising housewives Patti LuPOne is briefly arresting as a call girl who equates her job with other and Rex Everhart is touching as an insecure executive and a lonely ataman Much of the singing reaches the same satisfying level: Joe Mantegna as a migrant worker singing Taylor's gentle folk-like Mqjor Dia Lenora Nemetz as a waitress proclaiming in a song by Schwartz that her work is an art David Langston Smyrl projecting the humor in Micki paean to a parking-lot attendant and Lynn Thigpen touching the pathoa in another song by her about a cleaning woman At the end all the voices join in a song suggesting the desire for "Something to Point The inspirational tone makes us aware that despite all the talent involved works against its material trying to celebrate everyday people who themselves are unable to find much to celebrate in their working lives treater moves uptown (resulting from the collaboration of director and cast) These lapses are minor Swados who wrote composed and directed may not be tolling us anything new about troubled children But she has created a show that is buoyant and affirmative even as it touches on overwhelming problems reaches us with its picture of children who cope with real and imagined terrors by being hard funny imaginative and triumphantly alive Swados best known as a composer succeeds most fully with her an eclectic shopping bag filled with the pop rock salsa disco and other sounds that surround city children For the Broadway production she has added a reggae number actually a reworking of the lovely "We Are Not that closes the first art The music returns in an altered tempo as the singers form a circle in the playground setting of Douglas Schmidt and Woods Mackintosh to perform a Latin-flavored basketball ballet Among the holdover highlights are the propulsive "Where Do People sung by the entire company "Senoras de la a piercing lament for a murdered girl sung by Jossie de Guzman and the haunting "Lonesome of the that ends the show Elizabeth picked up a few uptown trappings on its way to Broadway: some colorful new props a few more musicians a sparkling new musical number a chorus of kids to supplement the young featured performers More important though is what the show has retained from downtown: the beguiling blend of toughness and innocence burning anger and melting sweetness that makes the show so exhilarating which had its second opening of the season Saturday night at the Plymouth still pulsates with the feelings of children who fled intolerable homes achievement was to transform these emotions into an appealing collage of songs speeches and musical numbers The Plymouth stage is a playground alive with the sight of dancing skateboarding basketball-dribbling kids and the sound at young voices that sing and speak directly to our hearts As it did when it opened at the New York Shakespeare Public Theater in March has some elements that succeed A few of the speeches are overburdened by their message of parents whose indifference sends children searching for makeshift new families on the streets There are one or two segments with forced humor and some uninventive choreography There has been one significant loss in the transfer to Broadway: Rachael Kelly has replaced Diane Lane as the child prostitute and because die does not yet speak as clearly or aflectingly as her predecessor the Bpeech is not as heartbreaking as it had been And a faster tempo for a song about imaginative ripofls loses a bit at its mali-" cious humor Most of the performers (whose ages range from 11 to 25) are as endearing and accomplished as they were downtown Pint-sized Carlo Imperato is an energetic bundle of bravado as he explains why he had to leave his squabbling parents Nan-Lynn Nelson is an intense profoundly disturbed black girl telling of her terror at hearing footsteps and a spaced-out onlooker making the terrible connection between runaway children and stray dogs Evan Miranda becomes a street-comer comic fantasizing about having famous parents and relatives These and other talented cast some of whom contributed material during improvisational sessions were recruited and trained by Swados over a 10-month period The effort has paid off handsomely in a show that is bringing Broadway the sights sounds and feelings of children running toward an uncertain future and pausing on the way to gather up the last vestiges of childhood Wallach.