Moon Over Buffalo. - Martin Beck Theatre, New York, New York - theater reviews

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Robert Sandla

It's 1964 on Broadway, the year a charming young singer named Julie Andrews shot from stage stardom in My Fair Lady and Camelot to widescreen superstardom in Mary Poppins. It was the year a rubber-faced young comedienne named Carol Burnett had a whole new musical, Fade Out, Fade In, created just for her. She promptly bailed out to star in a television series created just for her. It was also the year singular sensation Carol Channing freed herself from Lorelei Lee and "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," getting a new theme song in Hello, Dolly! It vied with Beatles songs for the top of the charts in 1964 - a great divide had opened in American culture.

Andrews arrived following out-of-town tryouts of Victor/Victoria, the stage version of her 1982 hit film written and directed by husband Blake Edwards. Burnett brought in Moon Over Buffalo, a new farce about show business by Ken Ludwig (which toured nearly as much as do its fictional protagonists). Channing made good on her promise that "Dolly'll never go away again" by pulling in with a bright revival of Hello, Dolly!

Thrilling as it is to see three show-biz legends live! and in person! - they look great, they are as deft and dexterous as ever, and their star power is intact - a slight malaise still hung in the air. One of the very few new musicals around, Victor/Victoria is a moderately entertaining stage version of a movie. Moon Over Buffalo feels like an extended Carol Burnett Show skit. Hello, Dolly! verges on the surreal as its seventy-four-year-old star emits her giddy-ingenue squeals. Broadway believes in recycling; the Great White Way has gone green.

There is still a huge hunger for popular musical entertainment and lyric drama - audiences still throng Cats and Les Miserables - but commercial theater finds it increasingly difficult to connect with pop culture; it's hard to picture Smashing Pumpkins writing a musical comedy or Bjork crooning Sondheim tunes. And talk about cognitive dissonance, one New York City magazine plunked Channing and rapper Heavy D on its cover: two outrageous personalities wearing similar Swifty Lazar-style spectacles. Last time she was a cover girl, rapper would have sounded like someone who was working at the customer-service desk at Macy's during Christmas.

As the meddling matchmaker determined to wed wealthy grouch Horace Vandergelder, Channing is precise, hilarious, completely in control. She's also a little scary, a cyclone in the body of a reed-thin septuagenarian. Always highly mannered (that's one of the things people like about her), she is as stylized in the current Dolly as a Kabuki actor. That voice somewhere between foghorn blast and sparrow's cheep hits every note in Jerry Herman's frisky score (reportedly in the original keys), and she milks Michael Stewart's lines for all they are worth (plenty, given the laughs she gets). Channing looks like she's having a great time, even when delivering virtually verbatim the curtain speech she gave during the show's 1978 revival (like this one, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre). Surprisingly, she has added some daft physical comedy, timed to the millisecond, that even the virtuosic Burnett would admire.

Dolly remains a gem of its kind; every gag pays off, songs flow naturally, dances grow out of situations. Lee Roy Reams has mounted Gower Champion's original staging with care and verve. The dances are clean, crisp, utterly clear in intent. It's the kind of dancing we all think we could do, if only our name were Champion.

Carol Burnett is terrific in Moon Over Buffalo (Martin Beck Theatre), and costar Philip Bosco is even more than that, but the play doesn't add up to much; its plot and one-liners feel recycled, although director Tom Moore, set designer Heidi Landesman, and costumer Bob Mackie give the event some zip.

Ludwig's farce, set in June 1953, focuses on a second-rate acting company led by George and Charlotte Hay (Bosco and Burnett), two seasoned hams with dreams of glory. The hook: Film director Frank Capra is scouting for talent, and George might head to Hollywood. Zany farcical complications ensue. People careen in and out, slamming doors innumerable times. A doddering mother-in-law gets very, very confused. Identities are mistaken. You will laugh, sure, but will you respect yourself in the morning?

As she did in Blake Edwards's film of the same name, Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria plays a down-on-her-luck soprano who succeeds by impersonating a female impersonator - she's a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. Blithe, funny, even touching, the film found Edwards and Andrews in fine form. The creative team had planned to turn the movie into a stage musical as early as 1984, but legal wrangles stood in the way. The $8.5 million musical opened at Broadway's Marquis Theatre with a $15-million advance in ticket sales, the largest of any American musical.

Edwards makes his stage debut with Victor/Victoria, as both writer and director - a poor idea, since the director indulges the writer in ways that tax the viewer. Still, there's a lot to like in the show, most of it revolving around Andrews. In "Le Jazz Hot," she's a mysterious lady who keeps appearing and disappearing atop an upright neon piano while choreographer Rob Marshall and dance arranger David Krane set scores of dancers to shimmying and shaking. And in "Louis Says," Marshall, lyricist Leslie Bricusse, and Frank Wildhorn (who contributed additional music after the death of the original composer Henry Mancini) have given birth to the sort of lavishly overproduced, terrible-wonderful number MGM specialized in. Andrews makes it all look good.