Looting for Fun

By L.M.

MUSIC! MUSIC! A Revue

The idea has a sort of grandiose simplicity: loot the 20th century for its best popular music, thread the songs together with briskly stylish "footnotes" by Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, have them sung and danced by some of the live liest talent in New York City. The result is theatrical nostalgia as it ought to be done--a delightful musical blowout.

Minute for minute, Music.t, which opened last week at Manhattan's City Center, contains as much fun and entertainment as anything on Broadway.

The first few minutes are inexplicably lifeless; then the whole elegant business simply takes off on a dazzling trajectory, from turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the Basin Street Blues through World War I, the '20s, the Depression and on and on. It is an anthology of Cohan and Gershwin and Lehar and Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein and Bernstein and seemingly a few hundred others. Every number is a jew el from the national treasury.

With the orchestra arrayed behind a scrim at the back of the stage, Gene Nelson presides over the evening as master of ceremonies and song-and-dance man. Larry Kert is exceptional--especially in Maria, which he sang in the original cast of West Side Story.

Karen Morrow belts like Merman. Rob ert Guillaume and Gail Nelson do a stir ring duet from Porgy and Bess. It is all nostalgia, perhaps; yet most of the songs sound as fresh as opening night.

L.M.

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