Losing Race

By Gerald Clarke

WINNING ISN'T EVERYTHING by Lee Kalcheim

The good news first: George Abbott, at 91, is still one of the best directors around, and if he walks slowly these days, you would never know it from the staging of this, his 119th production. No one can move actors around faster, get more laughs out of a joke or slide so gracefully over a play's weak spots. The bad news is that the weak spots in Winning Isn't Everything, which opened last week at Manhattan's Hudson Guild Theater, are more like potholes, and even Abbott and an able cast occasionally stumble.

Set in the last days of a campaign for the Senate, Lee Kalcheim's comedy has the stock political characters: a smooth-talking campaign manager with infinitely expandable ethics; a cynical speechwriter; a pretty, blonde volunteer; a hardboiled, right-wing Congressman; and the idiot senatorial candidate. Add to that mix the candidate's wife, who wants her husband to lose and does everything she can to make sure he does, like publicly demanding a divorce.

The wife aside, Winning is sometimes very funny.;Kalcheim, a TV writer who once wrote speeches for John Lindsay, knows the inside of a campaign headquarters, and he is probably familiar with idiot candidates as well. Bryan E. Clark is superbly smarmy as the campaign manager, Forbesy Russell is appropriately nubile as the blonde, and Richard Kuss gives one of the funniest performances of the year as a Congressman who enjoys kinky sex and kinkier politics. For long stretches they make you forget that Winning really isn't. -- Gerald Clarke

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