Word: supermans
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Faster than a tall building. Able to leep speeding locomotives at a single bound. That's Superman, at least as rendered in the musical of the same name...
Camp it certainly isn't. Bookwriters David Newman and Robert Benton have resisted the temptation to play Superman entirely for heckles; but if they have some larger purpose up their collective sleeve, they never reveal...
...When Superman is enjoyable, as it sometimes is, the overall lack of cohesion matters little. When the multi-colored super-hero gets introduced to someone and he says "Glad to meet you, I'm Superman," what difference does it make if the character he meets appears in one scene, fails in love with Lois Lane, and is never heard from again? But after a while, so many plot points and characters are introduced only to be dropped or ignored, that the musical loses all of its continuity and most of its interest...
...score much of a help, Lyricist Lee Adams and composer Charles Strouse did Bye Bye Birdie and Golden Boy, both of which realized more talent than Superman hints at. Even the notions behind the numbers are uniformly uninspired. "Doing Good," "We Need Him," and "The Strongest Man in the World" are poor ideas gone nowhere...
...moment, Superman fears that he cannot fly, which would leave the show with no visible means of locomotion, since the dance numbers are few and feeble and the music forgettable. In the end, right and good prevail, though not to the hearty horselaughs that Superman's arch-minded book-bunglers intended. George S. Kaufman once dismissed theatrical satire as "what closes Saturday night." He did not foresee a day when it would run amuck...