Warmed Over and Not So Hot

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Bertolt Brecht, who plucked plots from Shakespeare, Moliere and Farquhar, reportedly said the best writers never borrow; they always steal. Brecht's error was limiting his dictum to the best writers. The rest are equally ready to find inspiration where someone else found it before. This is especially true of writers of musicals: attempts at original stories have become all but unheard of. With six weeks left, the '80s have yet to yield a noteworthy American musical not derived from another source, whether fiction (Big River), folklore (Into the Woods), movies ("Nine") or a painting (Sunday in the Park with George).

This adaptations-only rule has been in full force as five song-and-dance spectaculars in rapid succession have reached the Broadway stage. Grand Hotel, which opened last week, and Meet Me in St. Louis are influenced by films that were in turn based on books. Gypsy, which also opened last week, stars Tyne Daly of TV's Cagney & Lacey in a revival drawn from the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Prince of Central Park, which quickly closed, derived from a book that had also prompted a made-for-TV movie. Brecht's own The Threepenny Opera, featuring rock star Sting as the seductive villain Macheath, is freely filched from British satirist John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera. Sad to say, although each show could boast ingenious design and staging or beguiling acting, far from the best writers have been at work.

Gypsy, a slapstick but chilling portrait of the ultimate stage mother, faithfully evokes the original Jerome Robbins production, including, alas, the cutesy, numbers-strung-together Arthur Laurents libretto. If Daly cannot quite dislodge from memory the performances of Ethel Merman and Angela Lansbury, particularly not as a singer, she rivals them as a force of nature. Coarse, thoughtless, unscrupulous and fierce, her Mama Rose is nonetheless just likable enough to explain why two daughters and a surrogate husband stick around so long and forgive so much. Among supporting players, only Jonathan Hadary, as Rose's agent and lover, excels.

Meet Me in St. Louis lacks the main asset of the 1944 film, Judy Garland, while shouldering its burden, the wan, uneventful plot. It seeks not only happy endings but also happy beginnings, happy middles, happy everything in between. Yet its charms include six songs from the film plus eleven more from the same team, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane; a Disneyesque confection of Victorian houses; ice skating on a real-looking pond; a trolley that moves; and a lighted-up 1904 World's Fair.

The Threepenny Opera originated as a leftist diatribe, and is even more of one in John Dexter's snarly, airless staging. Michael Feingold's translation claims to reflect more authentically the 1928 Berlin debut than the Marc Blitzstein version popularized in the '50s. It is surely less effective. For example, it freights the naive scrubwoman anger of Pirate Jenny with sophisticated detail that is out of character, and enervatingly transforms the last syllable of the second-act finale from a strident long vowel to a swallowed short one. Jocelyn Herbert's cumbersome set obstructs movement, draining energy. But emotion intensifies after a dozy first act. As a singer, Sting needs the help of a recording studio, although he summons at least a shadow of the requisite cavalier charm. The main virtue is Kurt Weill's indestructible score.

Grand Hotel is set in the poshest spot in Berlin in 1928, the very year that Threepenny premiered. In this rarefied place, even victims are privileged: a bankrupt baron (David Carroll), an embattled industrialist (Timothy Jerome), a ballerina in decline (Liliane Montevecchi) and her dogsbody, a closet lesbian (Karen Akers). A dying accountant, played by Michael Jeter with a dazzling mix of febrile weakness and life-grabbing gusto, has enough money to live out his waning days in luxury, while a typist (Jane Krakowski) who moves from man to man always has her looks to fall back on.

The libretto depends too heavily on whether the industrialist will turn crooked to save his neck (anyone can see he will) and on a love match between the baron and the ballerina that ends almost before it has begun. Director- choreographer Tommy Tune provides a pretentious last-minutes ballet between characters introduced as love and death. Despite these shortcomings, Grand Hotel is the musical winner of the season, bringing to mind, if not quite matching, the kinetic narratives of Harold Prince, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett in their heyday. Tune takes a set more cluttered than Threepenny's -- fluted columns, a revolving door, dozens of chairs -- and weaves around it a ceaseless flow. If some of the wizardry is borrowed from bygone auteur directors, that is in keeping with the real meaning of Brecht's dictum: know enough to take the best from the best.