Frieze Dried

By S.K.

ODYSSEY

Book and Lyrics by ERICH SEGAL Music by MITCH LEIGH

Robert Fitzgerald has advanced a plausible theory: not only had Homer never written anything before the Odyssey; he had not read anything before it. This puts Erich Segal way ahead of any preliterate Greek singer. Segal has not only written other works, including Love Story; he has apparently ransacked every Homeric adaptation from Aeschylus to James Joyce for this musical production, Odyssey. "Why copy when you can steal?" he asks in a program footnote to the execrable production at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Without waiting for an answer, he and his fellow conspirators proceed to annihilate a classic. The epic adventures are turned into a few friezes reminiscent of a sixth grade pageant: Polyphemus, the Cyclops, bears a strong resemblance to a Sesame Street Muppet; Telemachus (Russ Thacker) might have escaped from a G-rated Disney film. The celebrated dancing and fighting is reduced to a series of galvanic gestures and deafening groans. The groans may be distinguished from the songs easily: the songs have words. Those lyrics, which act upon the mind like nepenthe, are also by Segal, a classics scholar who is driving without a poetic license. The music proves again that Composer Mitch Leigh (Man of La Mancha) is a man of parts--part Leonard Bernstein, part Tchaikovsky, part '40s movie scores.

Even epic disasters have redeeming notes. Here they are provided by Yul Brynner, the worn adventurer who never comprehends that it is not his reign but its interruptions that grant him stature. With a strange accent that suggests all nations and an abiding virility, Brynner gives the musical its few seconds of truth and vitality. Lest they endure, Joan Diener, as Penelope, always manages to shriek them to a close. In Homer's Odyssey, the goddess Circe changes the hero's shipmates into swine. In this Odyssey the manufacturers have exceeded her feat; they have taken a masterpiece and turned it into a dog. -S.K.

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