Martyrs To Sin ELMER GANTRY

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The man of God brought low by carnal temptation. The image may seem to leap from today's headlines, but Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are only the latest in a long line that stretches back to the fictional Arthur Dimmesdale, yearning for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. After such falls from grace are revealed, the question always arises: Were the sinners truly devout souls brought to perdition or fiendish fakers from the start? That is precisely the issue raised by American literature's most exuberant portrait of religious hysteria and hypocrisy, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 Elmer Gantry.

The issue, which applies equally to Gantry and his partner in passion, the faith healer Sharon Falconer, is, alas, never resolved in the musical adaptation now at Ford's Theater in Washington. Vigorously staged, tuneful and robustly acted, this ambitious work circles outside the characters and never gives them a chance to look deep inside themselves, except in a pair of oblique, cryptic solo songs. Director David H. Bell has let a number of solecisms slip past, including a raunchy Monkey Song about the secret lustfulness of women that is entertaining but out of character for the men of a traveling revival show. Librettist John Bishop links the story's religious excesses too closely to the economic travails of the 1930s. But in Casey Biggs and Sharon Scruggs as the saints turned sinners turned martyrs, this promising show has lead performers capable of competing with the vivid memory of the 1960 film. -- W.A.H. III