Carnage at Coney

I Had a Ball is a misaddressed musical mailbag. Buddy Hackett, a droll fellow of manic and mournful mien, should be readdressed to oldtime burlesque, where his earthy urbanisms could blue the air like cigar smoke. The frenetically agitated dances should be restored to the speeded-up silent film. The nondescript music should be sent back to recompose itself. The book has never left its natural state--pulp.

The inanimate star of the evening is Sam, a crystal ball that tells the future incorrectly. Hackett, a Coney Island sharper turned pseudo-Freudian mind-sweeper, has great faith in Sam ("it comes from Bombay, the farfetched East"). Under Hackett's lunatic gaze, Sam's face turns red, as well it might, since in Act I the crystal ball mismatches two pairs of lovers: an arm-twisting loan shark (Steve Roland) with a taffy-sweet Ferris-wheel operator (Karen Morrow), and a glib but honest-hearted Coney barker (Richard Kiley) with a roundheeled golddigger (Luba Lisa). In Act II, Hackett second-guesses Sam; the baddies and the goodies mate up.

Since plot is nought, Ball relies on Buddy Hackett for a nightlong transfusion of comic relief. He can fire a salvo of laughter with the whites of his eyes, and step on a dud line so that it explodes, but he has to work so hard to be playful that it kills the fun. Apart from Hackett, only Luba Lisa comes out of this Coney Island carnage with talent and personality arrestingly intact. Moving like a sexy-hexy wind-up doll, with the voice of a Jewish Chatty Cathy and the body of Salome, she gives the impression of being cheerfully in debt to the whole male race as she waits for the next man to garnishee her itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, pom-pom green intime bikini.

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