Muzhikal

Tovarich is the largest disaster Vivien Leigh has been involved in since the burning of Atlanta. As Scarlett O'Hara, she shrugged off unpleasantness with "I'll think of all this tomorrow." Virtually all that will bear thinking about in Tovarich is the age-resistant loveliness, piquant charm, and skilled show-womanship of Vivien Leigh.

In this musical remake of the 1936 play, she is the Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna, a 1920s Parisian exile from the Winter Palace of Czar "Nicky." With her is her consort. General Mikhail Ouratieff, played with the suppleness of a tin soldier by Jean Pierre Aumont. For food, resourceful Tatiana steals artichokes; for fun, the local White Russians have dances in their peasant pantskis--Kazachoks. waltzes, soft shoe, maxixe, tangos, polonaises--name it, they do it. Mikhail carries around 4 billion francs that the Czar gave him "as a sacred trust." come the counterrevolution. As of 1927, a sly Bolshevik commissar (Alexander Scourby) is trailing Mikhail for the money, and Tatiana proposes that they give the Red the slip by signing on as maid and butler to an oil-rich American family.

It was a mild comic conceit at best, and time has made the resulting camouflage and persiflage dimly dispiriting. In 1936, Russia was remotely terrible but not dangerous, still exotic enough for period romance and period humor, attitudes no 1963 playgoer can sustain. Tovarich needed a boldly inventive face lifting, but its book and lyrics sadly sag. Its tune-shy music may please any metronomes in the audience. Sample wit: "Let's go down to the kitchen and get a potato and make our own vodka." Sample lyric:

I go to bed, I go to bed

I pull the covers up around my head . . .

Just when a playgoer wishes he could do the same, Vivien Leigh divertingly peps up the proceedings. She shimmies a madcap Charleston that ought to be recorded on a film strip of memorable moments from forgettable musicals. She torch-sings an affecting lament for lost first love (I Know the Feeling) in a bistro baritone that huskily recalls early Marlene Dietrich. In party scenes, she alone does not resemble a fugitive from a Vat 69 ad. Although her eyes seem candlelit with some private poetry of grief, she plays the regal scamp all evening, ornamenting with a playfully aristocratic touch the shoddy show goods with which Broadway's indomitable pitchmen hope to mulct the theatergoing muzhiks.

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