New Plays: No-Shows

Two new Broadway musicals offer a boon to the tired businessman — sleep.

Apart from their petrifying boredom, the one quality that unites both these musicals is effrontery. Her First Roman has the gall to take Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and suffocate it in dullness.

This takes inconceivable effort, since making Shaw dull is rather like making sex dull. Shaw’s words sing; this cast singsongs, and a woodpecker on a hollow log would have produced a more tuneful score. Richard Kiley’s Caesar has faint, weary traces of Shaw’s philosopher-king, but Leslie Uggams is a drowned kitten of the Nile without a hint of incipient regality.

The effrontery of Maggie Flynn is to commercially exploit, for purposes of amusement, the oppression of Negroes, draft evasion and the Viet Nam war in terms of a factitiously conceived parallel with the draft riots of 1863. So slipshod is the play that at one point the draft dodgers, who have been presented as militantly antiwar, go racially berserk and are about to burn, maim or kill a dozen Negro orphans. Behind the injected element of fashionable social consciousness lies a cornball ro mance about the orphans’ surrogate mother (Shirley Jones) and her erratic spouse (Jack Cassidy), who went off to play Hamlet and ended up as a circus clown. Shirley Jones looks decorative, and Cassidy is an inexhaustibly beguiling entertainer, but the scenes they have to play are sentimental postcards in need of falling snow. The trouble is that the show won’t last until winter.