Theater: Plop Art

The Apple Tree has brought forth three moldy figs: a musical trio of satirical skits starring Barbara Harris and Alan Alda. Good satire is a difficult form of pertinent irreverence. Flabby satire, with tired targets like Tree’s, is unearned derision full of cartoon comedy and plop art.

Plop No. 1 is a Garden of Eden spoof adapted from Mark Twain’s The Diary of Adam and Eve. Eve chews out Adam before he chews on the apple. She wants the grass “shortened.” She wants their three-board wigwam painted because she hates brown. Their Eden is no paradise of humor. Adam: “I have to empty the four-pronged white squirter.” Eve: “You mean the cow.” Eve discovers love, but the snake must have slipped her the lyrics.

Plop No. 2 brings on a parcel of kitchy-kitchy-koo girls for Broadway’s standard Babylonian revels. Captain Sanjar, who has dallied with the Princess Barbára, is ordered to trial by her father, the King. He must open one of two doors behind which lurk, respectively, a hungry tiger and a nubile damsel. The skit preserves the tricky non-ending from Frank Stockton’s The Lady or the Tiger?, but it scarcely matters. To fill in the non-beginning and the non-middle, the dancing girls thrash around like palm trees in a tropical hurricane. A hurricane has a better plot.

Plop No. 3 feebly splashes a slavey with the sequins of movie stardom in some hollow mockery of the fame-and-success myth. Cinderella should sue.

The myth of Director Mike Nichols, invulnerable up to now, has been that he could bust a comic rib with an onionskin script, but The Apple Tree is too thin for even his nimble touch. While Barbara Harris is as saucily mocking as ever, it becomes clearer with each performance that she is more of a zany caricaturist and mimic than she is an actress. She can do instant impersonations of people and moods, but except for her 1962 performance in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, she has never developed a character. In the past, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick have written beautifully articulated scores for Fiorello! and Fiddler on the Roof. In The Apple Tree, the score, like the show, lacks everything, including earplugs.