Word: kismet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that Broadway scarcely ever engenders a totally new musical these days. It rehashes old ones or injects old plays with songs and dances. The most popular recent marketing device is to turn originally all-white musicals into all-black musicals. In the current instance the show is based on Kismet, and the locale has been changed from Baghdad to Africa, though the basic beat and mood of the musical are Caribbean. That is not too surprising, since Director-Choreogra-pher-Costumer Geoffrey Holder was born in Trinidad...
Holder throws bolts and bolts of gaudy cloth over a production, possibly to hide its flaws. With The Wiz it worked, since the show had a story line that could be playfully transposed to a jazzy urban-ghetto setting. But Kismet was a fable, and fables are too fragile for Holder's broad, jumping, visceral style...
Even the real 1953 Kismet probably could not stand up in 1978. A simple damsel (Melba Moore) with a poetic thief for a father (Ira Hawkins) ascends, through incredible accidents, to become the bride of the king of the realm (Gilbert Price) despite the machinations of the Wazir
...career, the world has functioned on the principle of predestined and even tragic inevitability. Most of the planet's religions are steeped in a fatalism that teaches acceptance of dira necessitas, the fearful inevitability of things. The Greeks' Moira, the Romans' fatum, the Muslims' kismet-all enforce the will of an otherworldly plan, against which it is useless to exert a defiant or creative will...
...whiz who made The Wiz is now turning Kismet into Timbuktu!-and bringing it to Broadway. Borrowing eleven songs and the plot from the 1953 hit musical, Director-Choreographer Geoffrey Holder has cast the colorful show with blacks and set it in the fabulously wealthy capital of 14th century Mali. Eartha Kitt plays the wife of the wicked Wazir who wrongs Melba Moore, a sweet young country girl. Moore, whose face is dotted with Holder's notion of tribal markings, says that she loves the chance to "kick up my heels a bit" and "to get the prince...