New Musical in Manhattan

Kismet (book by Charles Lederer & Luther Davis; music by Alexander Borodin; musical adaptation and lyrics by Robert Wright & George Forrest) seems to have mistaken itself at times for a supercolossal film. The production cost $400,000, and thanks to Lemuel Ayres's eye for color and sense of medieval Bagdad, a great deal of Kismet could not be more satisfactorily sumptuous. But Kismet is too weighted down with finery to be at all fast on its feet, and even with Alfred Drake to pace it, most of it is just resplendently tedious.

With a plot that requires virtually the entire population of Bagdad, including Omar Khayyam, Kismet casts Actor Drake as a resourceful poet who is, at different times, not only rich man, poor man, beggar man and thief, but also magician, prisoner, emir, and father of a beauteous maiden (Doretta Morrow) who wins the love of the caliph. Seldom has the path of true love run with so many detours, or so many halts to let caravans go by. Nor is the score notably helpful. Some eerie things have happened to Russian Composer Borodin's brilliantly eerie music, and though one or two of the best-known bits (e.g., Stranger in Paradise) from Prince Igor are already jukebox favorites, much of Borodin's famed 19th century work has been made to sound pretty banal.

Jack Cole's dances and some amusing and skillful dancers prove a help, and Alfred Drake, wherever possible, sings, acts or pantomimes his way out of the doldrums. But even Broadway's best male musicomedy lead often has no choice but to follow.

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