For the Geritol Set

By T.E. Kalem

GIGI

Book and lyrics by ALAN JAY LERNER Music by FREDERICK LOEWE

Broadway's favorite pastime this season is unwrapping mummies. Unfortunately, Gigi has been unwrapped once too often and shows stale signs of deterioration. It began as a novel by Colette and was then adapted to play form with Audrey Hepburn in the title role. Next came the charming Lerner and Loewe film musical starring Leslie Caron. Now we have the stage musical as the ultimate anticlimax.

The show is replete with flaws but the chief one lies in the casting of Gigi. Hepburn brought an ethereal child-bride quality to all her roles, and that gave her Gigi a piquant flavor. Caron was a kind of wistful gamine, and that made her interpretation equally engaging in a different way. The current Gigi, Karin Wolfe, is a Barbie doll who has been programmed to sing, dance and fall in love with a chilling absence of presence Daniel Massey is also miscast as her suitor Gaston, a rich Parisian play-boy-about-town who discovers that little girl he used to pat on the head has grown into a young woman with a fierce hold on his heart. Massey displays about as much heart as the hero of a Restoration comedy.

Only Alfred Drake, as Gaston's uncle, is an unalloyed delight though Agnes Moorehead as Gigi's worldly aunt is tartly amusing. As an inveterate and accomplished boulevardier with a mischievously saucy eye for maid or matron, Drake is a shameless charmer with voice that is pure gold. The score-much of it reprised from the film-is far and away the best part of the show. As for the negligible choreography, it seems rather like a course in ballroom deportment except for one cancan number, and anyone who can work up much excitement over the cancan at this date qualifies as a full-fledged member of the Geritol set. That may indeed be the ideal audience for this show. .T.E. Kalem

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