Word: kismet
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Stage Struck (Fri. 9 p.m., CBS). Backstage tour of the Broadway musicals, Kismet and Almanac, with Mike Wallace...
...Kismet (book by Charles Lederer & Luther Davis; music by Alexander Borodin; musical adaptation and lyrics by Robert Wright & George Forrest) seems to have mistaken itself at times for a supercolossal film. The production cost $400,000, and thanks to Lemuel Ayres's eye for color and sense of medieval Bagdad, a great deal of Kismet could not be more satisfactorily sumptuous. But Kismet is too weighted down with finery to be at all fast on its feet, and even with Alfred Drake to pace it, most of it is just resplendently tedious...
...figure to please even the most myopic in the second balcony. With comic relish, she joins Drake in the slaughter of a little horrer called "Oasis of Delightful Imaginings." ("The breeze that cools the dunes there has an opposite effect on the pantaloons there."). Doretta Morrow is piquant as Kismet's sole ingenue, particularly in "Stranger in Paradise," the most successful hybrid of Borodin and tin Pan Alley...
...Baghdad music, which permit the "Princesses of Ababu" to cavort around a palace pool obviously built in manual training class. At best, there are agreeable melodies with out-rageous lyrics, and two lively numbers, "He's In Love" and the first act finalo. In any case, the music helps Kismet to whirl with amiable vulgarity through thirteen scenes, and the New York businessman will probably find the show a godsend for entertaining a Big Account...
...Kismet", the charles Lederer musical, opened last night at the Ziegfield with Alfred Drake, Doretta Morrow, and Joan Diener. The opinion of the local man is elsewhere on the page...