SUGAR: The Girls in the Band

Book by PETER STONE

Music by JULE STYNE

Lyrics by BOB MERRILL

This Sugar is not organic. It has been so thoroughly processed, refined and filtered that it has lost the natural energy that makes a good musical strong and healthy.

The story line is rather faithfully adapted from the Billy Wilder-I.A.L. Diamond film, Some Like It Hot. Two Depression-era musicians (Robert Morse and Tony Roberts) inadvertently witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. Scurrying for cover, they don women’s dress and sign on with an all-girl band headed for Miami. Neither Morse nor Roberts tries to be a female impersonator. They are clearly men attempting, with no little difficulty, to masquerade as women. Thus the show relies not on drag jokes but adjustment-crisis humor—how to cope with broken straps on padded bras or keep one’s ankles straight on high heels.

Nature’s Geometry. What is dated about the humor is the display of rabbity virility that Morse and Roberts have to put on, as if women were as deliriously mind-boggling and dangerously inaccessible as Farmer McGregor’s lettuce patch. The one who captures Tony Roberts’ fancy is Sugar Kane (Elaine Joyce), the band’s singer and a lovely tribute to nature’s geometry who would have made Euclid blink. Sugar is keen on meeting a millionaire. In a twinkling, Roberts returns to manhood, sprouts a yachting outfit, flashes a Wall Street Journal and woos away.

Morse, to his initial dismay, is pursued by a bona fide rich senior gentleman (Cyril Ritchard). As Morse dances with Ritchard, comes to enjoy being courted and finally announces that he is engaged, the show achieves both its most comic and affecting peak. On a high order of miming, virtually à la Marceau, Morse captures the tremor, tenderness, coquettishness and vulnerability of a girl’s first love. Morse is an enormously personable stage presence, and he knows it. The trouble is that he gratuitously does twice what he has perfectly done once. He is a child of excess and needs a sterner and more containing director than Gower Champion.

High Gloss. As a choreographer, Champion is admirably disciplined. The execution is flawless, but Champion’s dance imagination is rigid. He favors locomotive choreography in which the chorus chug-chug-chugs around and occasionally wigwags its outstretched arms semaphore-fashion. This is fine for motion, but scanty of meaning. The dances could be inserted in another musical, where they would mean no more and no less than they do in Sugar.

If hummable songs are a plus, Jule Styne’s songs are hummable, though you may not know quite which homogenized number you are humming. As for Bob Merrill’s lyrics, they are the labored products of a man hovering over a rhyming dictionary. Sugar is almost a textbook case of a musical born after its time. It may well enjoy great wads of audience favor. But in the past three years, Company and Follies have altered the critical perspective by providing a musical form that is spare, intelligent, ironic, mature and capable of sustaining three-dimensional characters.

This is not to say that the big, old-fashioned musical is irrevocably doomed, but it must have a singular mood, manner and meaning all its own. Otherwise, all that remains, as Sugar indicates, is a sterile display of high-gloss techniques. · T.E. Kalem