The Pirate of Life Walks the Plank

Someone forgot to tell Producer-Director Harold Prince that Zorba isn't Jewish. Prince could not resist the temptation to try to fashion a sequel to his own Fiddler on the Roof, thinly camouflaged with a Greek accent. The resulting musical play is sleek, professional and synthetic, a brassy bit of Broad-wayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley.

Quite apart from its total inability to reflect the intellectual nuances of the Kazantzakis novel, Zorba the Greek, the musical is infinitely inferior, point for point, to the 1964 Michael Cacoyannis film, with its powerful evocation of fierce joys and harsh sorrows against the spare Greek landscape. Anthony Quinn was possessed by the title role; Herschel Bernardi merely inhabits the part like a rented room. Quinn had the sexual assurance of a goat; Bernardi talks up lust as if he were a barker for a snake-oil remedy. Zorba has to be--as Quinn was and Bernardi is not--a grizzled Dionysian pagan, a piece of the Hellenic sun shaped like a man.

The casting failure persists all down the line. In the film the part of Nikos, the young scholar who takes Zorba with him to Crete to operate an abandoned lignite mine, was played by Alan Bates with a pale, perplexed intellectuality that was a perfect foil to Quinn's animal magnetism. In this musical's stunted version of the part, John Cunningham acts like a graduate-school grind.

As the widow whom Nikos beds with at Zorba's urging, Carmen Alvarez is an extremely pretty girl who seems to be idly looking for attention, whereas Irene Papas was starved for passion and seething with it. As for the aging soubrette of a landlady who embarks on her last amorous voyage with that pirate of life Zorba, Maria Karnilova simply cannot provide the mixture of girlish coquetry, humor and faded carnality that made Lila Kedrova's film performance such a stunning achievement.

This wholesale miscasting might have been redeemed in part if the songs and dances possessed ethnic veracity and virility. As it is, the bouzouki music sounds as if it was piped in by Muzak, and the lyrics are insipid. The characteristic tone of Levantine lament is scarcely heard, since music that weeps and words soaked in pain might dismay the theater-party ladies. The dances have the look of old folk dances--any old folk. Greek fire is missing. Zorba danced because words could not contain his vaulting spirit. Bernardi clodhops, while the supporting cast dances by a timetable as if it were catching a train.

When Kazantzakis created Zorba, he fashioned a character who defies death.

Far more than a celebration of unfettered instinct, Zorba's heightened sense of existence comes from his sec-ond-to-second awareness of death. That is why the widow is murdered by the puritanical villagers, and why the apparatus that operates the lignite mine crashes in total disaster. Such is, says Kazantzakis, the destiny of man and all his works. This is the Greek tragic sense of life, and from it springs Zorba's credo: to live in, for and by each moment as if it were the first and the last. With this musical, one soon wishes each moment was the last.

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