Word: camelot
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...American musical theater. Lerner, the librettist, and Loewe, the composer, have already proved themselves worthy of the King. Their last try was My Fair Lady. They also did Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, and the much-Oscared film Gigi. They have now written and are still rewriting on the road Camelot, probably the biggest, most beautifully set, and most complex musical play yet attempted a spectacular effort to compress into one lyrical evening the essence of Arthurian legend...
Tryout Shades. On precarious Broadway, where months of work can end in one morning's disastrous reviews, some shows are too big to be destroyed by the critics and Camelot is bound to be one. Last year Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music had so much pre-Broadway momentum (a then unprecedented advance sale of about $2,000,000) that it crashed through a barricade of unenthusiastic reviews, and will probably run for another two years. Camelot, with more than $3,000,000 worth of tickets already sold, may find reviews ranging from rave to grave...
...coincidence, there is a My Fair Ladylike tone to Camelot's credits. Not only did Lerner and Loewe create the play, but Fair Lady's Director Moss Hart signed on again, along with Julie Andrews as Guinevere, Choreographer Hanya Holm, Set Designer Oliver Smith, Conductor Franz Allers. Beyond that, Lerner's libretto is drawn from one of the best novels of the loth and 20th centuries, T. H. White's The Once and Future King. And Arthur himself is arriving in the shape and voice of Wales's and the Old Vic's Richard Burton, who at 34 is numbered...
...done with Connecticut Yankee, one method would have been to mock the legend with pure comedy. Others have played it straight an impressive list that includes Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace. Layamon, Chretien de Troyes, Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and now Alan Jay Lerner. In Camelot, he necessarily left out some of the legend's great characters: Sir Kay the Seneschal, Tristram and Isolde, Elaine the lily-maid of Astolat, even Sir Galahad, the squarest knight at the Round Table...
...road last week, critics, actors and audiences were wondering if he had left out even more. Did the major themes politics and adultery really come together in the end? In handling the triangle subtly and tastefully, had he lost too much emotional conviction? Some felt that Camelot begins on Broadway and ends in Bayreuth; phrasemakers are already calling the show "Lerner's Parsifal...