Beauty Marks Smile Music

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

This season's first four new American musicals all closed the week they opened, continuing a daunting threeyear run of almost unrelieved financial failure for what used to be Broadway's mainstay. Staged with varying degrees of artistry, the ill-fated shows shared one disabling presumption: musicals must be "about" something beyond melody and romance. Rags tried to survey the immigrant experience, Honky Tonk Nights blended music hall with racial conflict, Raggedy Ann was a dying girl's Freudian nightmare, and Into the Light asked whether the Shroud of Turin is Jesus Christ's burial cloth. All suffocated under the weight of their ambition.

One might expect the same fate to befall Smile, adapted from a 1975 Michael Ritchie film that satirized beauty pageants. The narrative, centering on girls who are strangers, inevitably lacks complex relationships and love interest. Moreover, it is difficult to write a parody much funnier than the real Miss America proceedings. And it is hard to keep audiences interested in the climax -- which entrant will win -- after repeatedly telling them it shouldn't matter. Curiously, Smile works. It is a swift-paced, skillfully performed and thoroughly professional entertainment that balances amusement at the shallow ambitions of the characters with respect for the depth of their feelings. Composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and Author-Lyricist Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors) have written touching songs for the stars, Anne Marie Bobby as a sweet, awkward A student who realizes she is out of her element at the pageant and Jodi Benson as a wanderer who is prematurely wise in the ways of selling herself, including a talent-show "dramatic reading" that turns into a striptease. Smile may not be a landmark, but it is a pleasure. W.A.H. III