Gloomy Sunday

Illya Darling is a 15-watt musical with one trace of Greek fire--Melina Mercouri. She plays furiously across the footlights to keep audiences from realizing that there is nothing behind them. Flaccidly adapted by Jules Dassin from his film Never on Sunday, the stage version lacks the three elements that gave the movie a certain credibility as a holiday of the senses, the Greek sea, sky and sun.

The plot is as silly as ever: Puritan bore meets Piraeus whore. Object: education. He gives her a three-week refresher course in the classics which leaves her very sad. She gives him a glimpse of the possibilities of sensual love which leaves him very shattered. It is a distinctly gloomy Sunday all around.

As the gawky American, Orson Bean is a drearily familiar caricature. He has been typecast as an innocent for so long that he has become a professional with no surprises to offer. The part needs an innocent innocent. Alluringly gowned and ungowned, Mercouri has enough dramatic electricity in a finger snap to have prevented the Great Power Blackout of 1965. Her voice is a husky cousin to Marlene Dietrich's, but even amplification does not always make it audible. The character she plays, a kind of ouzo-and-sympathy doxy, is unsalvageable since joyous sweet-souled prostitutes are about as believable nowadays as jolly fat men.

As for the harborside atmosphere of Piraeus and things Greek, Illya need never have left the port of Manhattan. Except for the sterns of a couple of steamers, the sets are routine Broadway. Manos Hadjidakis' diluted bouzouki score is slumberously unvaried, and no number equals the appeal of the repeated Never on Sunday. The dancers spin like zany revolving doors and slap themselves like victims in a mosquito plague, and there is never the faintest hint of those teasingly slow, sinuous Greek male dances that seem to be sculptured out of air.

As usual, the Greeks had a word for shows like this--katastrophe.

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