BOARDROOM BOUND

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

In a better world than ours in which plum roles were awarded solely on merit, Matthew Broderick probably wouldn't have landed the lead in Broadway's buoyant revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. New York City's army of unemployed actors must include a number of winsome unknowns who can dance more crisply and sing more surely than he can.

But in the world we live in, where multimillion-dollar productions rarely find funding without a star's name on the marquee, it is hard to begrudge Broderick the part. To the role of J. Pierrepont Finch, the World Wide Wicket Co.'s window washer turned mailroom clerk turned rising executive, he brings the same quizzical intensity of gaze and naturalness of gesture that carried him to stardom in everything from Neil Simon comedies like Brighton Beach Memoirs to the Civil War epic film Glory. As an actor, Broderick has a gift that is almost impossible to fabricate: an unforced freshness.

Likewise fresh--surprisingly so--is this 1961 musical, which has more verve than one would expect from a satire of modern business written a third of a century ago. Frank Loesser's music and lyrics, reorchestrated by Danny Troob, retain their brisk propulsion, as does Abe Burrows' book, somewhat realigned and streamlined by director Des McAnuff.

How to succeed with a musical such as this one? By playing it straight. This is no update. We're still back in 1961, and the World Wide Wicket Co. continues to be a domain of rigid sexual roles, where men are the executives and women the secretaries. The plot remains a complementary blend of monomanias: Finch has eyes only for the top of the corporate ladder, and Rosemary, his secretary (winningly played by Megan Mullally), has eyes only for matrimony.

The social revolutions of the past three decades are acknowledged only through minor modifications. In Wayne Cilento's reconceived choreography for A Secretary Is Not a Toy, the secretaries give their bosses a fine comeuppance, and the all-white cast of the original (which in the 1967 movie version managed to bleach even the streets of Manhattan) has been racially integrated. A black woman (Lillias White as Miss Jones, the boss's formidable secretary) broadens the "brotherhood" in the last big song, The Brotherhood of Man, turning it into a rousing gospel number. These small touches enhance the show's charm. If blacks were kept out of corporate boardrooms in 1961, such injustices can now be symbolically amended; this nostalgic production recalls a fairer era than the one we lived through.

McAnuff has called How to Succeed a "scathing attack on everything." But as satires go, this one is an amiable, toothless lion (although a lion with quite a roar: the music is occasionally amplified to the point of muddle and distortion). The truth is, we are not far from P.G. Wodehouse country--especially those American fairy tales of his where the hero can hardly take a tumble without landing in a pot of gold, and the distance separating the egghead from the bonehead is minimal. Equipped with a book of maxims, or a new cravat, the Wodehouse hero--like Finch--is ready for anything.

Ironically, in an age proud of its toughness, this new production lacks even some of the mild bite of the original. Robert Morse, who created the role of Finch, was an equivocal presence. With his gap-toothed, tilted grin and his air of scrounging narcissism, Morse was simultaneously magnetic and faintly unsettling. You had to sympathize with his fellow executives, just a little, when they sang, "Got to stop that man . or he'll stop me." Broderick, on the other hand, is so beguiling that you are delighted when he becomes chairman of the board and heartened to hear him announce, at the final curtain, that his next goal is to become President of the U.S.

In this old-fashioned show, McAnuff and his team have made splendid use of computer-graphic wizardry: buildings rise and fall on screens in the background, rockets climb, clouds swim past--there is even an erupting volcano. It must be spewing some kind of happy dust in the theater, rendering all but irrelevant the fact that many of the jokes still fall flat and that the story's resolution, even by fairy-tale standards, comes too easily. Will today's theatergoers let such things bother them? This appealing production urges us all--whether we are pursuing business success or just a couple of hours' entertainment--to make light of every obstacle.