The Theater: New Musical on Broadway, Oct. 31, 1960

Tenderloin (Book by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman; music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick; based on Samuel Hopkins Adams’ novel) is the work of the same team that turned out Fiorello! Like Fiorello!, Tenderloin is a period musical whose scene is New York and whose subject is reform. Unlike Fiorello!, this yarn of a clergyman of the ’90s crusading against Manhattan’s vast red-light district and colliding with its venal police force proves pretty heavy going. The high-principled minister is no such fighting gamecock as La Guardia, and Maurice Evans makes musicomedy wear a stiff collar where Tom Bosley fit the Little Flower like a glove.

The show has its palpable good points —for a starter, George Abbott’s direction. When the scarlet ladies, decked out by Cecil Beaton with inspired bad taste, stomp the stage, celebrate the flesh and sneer at the clergy, Tenderloin has a fleering, gamy exuberance. Again, when the stage rocks with the round-dance economics of How the Money Changes Hands, or Ron Husmann rolls out The Picture of Happiness, there is sass and to spare. Jerry Bock’s score is better than average, and the Sheldon Harnick lyrics are better than the score.

But Tenderloin’s story, with its uneasy shifts from pulpit to police court and from the choir loft to the girls, upstairs, needs much more adroit handling than it gets. Again and again, gaiety is left waiting at the church door, and even sin turns tedious when it is allowed to talk. More and more, as virtue and decorum triumph, interest flags, color fades, and toughness is deprived of its teeth.