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

Vi Fo 1. 117 By Allan Wallach YOU can create musicals about chorus dancers or runaway children, why not a musical about ordinary Americans talking about their jobs? Why not an adaptation of Studs Terkel's "Working," the best-selling book in which all sorts of people describe what they do for a living and how they feel about it? "Working," the new musical at Broadway's 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 Terkel's taped interviews- and through the showit is the sense of boredom and dehumanization felt by so many of America's working men and women. In his introduction, Terkel writes of "the automated pace of our daily jobs wipes out name and face- in many feeling The show, which strives valiantly to be lively, is constantly at war with this inescapable fact: It's hard to be lively about people who are made nameless, faceless and devoid of positive feeling.

Stephen Schwartz, the show's primary creatorhe did the adaptation, directed the show and wrote some of the music and lyrics- -faced other problems. One is Terkel's book, which is formidable competition. If we can read Terkel's 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 show's 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 on lives we'd like to know more about--but never will. Schwartz and his collaborators have provided some first-rate elements we can't get from the book. He, Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, James Taylor and the composer-lyricist team of Mary Rodgers and Susan Birkenhead have contributed to a generally attractive score. The performances are mostly good, with several that are much better than good. And enormous visual interest is added by David Mitchell's scenery- 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 Terkel's Chicago.

On the negative side are Onna White's choreography, which 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 "Pippin," "God- THEATER dancing, 'Working' The cast of at the 46th Street Theatre. spell" and 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 women's "hustling," and Rex Everhart is touching as an insecure executive and a lonely seaman. Much of the singing reaches the same satisfying level: Joe Mantegna as a migrant worker singing Taylor's gentle, folk-like "Un Mejor 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 Grant's paean to a parking-lot attendant, and Lynn Thigpen touching the pathos in another song by her about a cleaning woman. At the end, all the voices join in a song suggesting the workers' desire for "Something to Point To." The inspirational tone makes us aware that, despite all the talent involved, "Working" works against its material, trying to celebrate everyday people who themselves are unable to find much to celebrate in their working lives. 8461 MAY MONDAY, NEWSDAY, THEATER REVI moves uptown Elizabeth Swados' "Runaways" 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.

"Runaways," which had its second opening of the season Saturday night at the Plymouth, still pulsates with the feelings of children who fled intolerable homes. Swados' achievement was to transform these emotions into an appealing collage of songs, speeches and musical numbers. The Plymouth stage is a playground that's alive with the sight of dancing, skateboarding, basketball-dribbling kids and the sound of young voices that sing and speak directly to our hearts. As it did when it opened at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theater in March, "Runaways" has some elements that don't succeed. A few of the speeches are overburdened by their message of parents whose indifference sends children searching for makeshift new families on the city's streets.

There are one or two segments with forced humor and some uninventive choreography (resulting from the collaboration of director and cast). These lapses are minor. Swados, who wrote, composed and directed "Runaways," may not be telling us anything new about troubled children. But she has created a show that is buoyant and affirmative even as it touches on overwhelming problems. "Runaways" 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 score--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 Strangers" that closes the first act. The music returns in an altered tempo as the singers form a circle in the playground setting of Douglas W. Schmidt and Woods Mackintosh to perform a Latinflavored basketball ballet. Among the holdover highlights are the propulsive "Where Do People Go," sung by the entire company, "Senoras de la Noche," a piercing lament for a murdered girl sung by Jossie de Guzman, and the haunting "Lonesome of the Road" that ends the show.

There has been one significant loss in the transfer to Broadway: Rachael Kelly has replaced Diane Lane as the child prostitute, and because she does not yet speak as clearly or affectingly as her predecessor, the speech is not as heartbreaking as it had been. And a faster tempo for "Enterprise," a song about imaginative ripoffs, loses a bit of its malicious 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 H. Miranda becomes a street-corner comic fantasizing about having famous parents and relatives. These and other talented cast members- 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.