Promising Promises Unfulfilled

YES VIRGINIA, there really is a Helen Gurley Brown, and her Cosmopolitan girl thrives wildly these days at Agassiz Theater. Radcliffe-Grant-in-Aid plays the part of the protective mother who can't hold back her ambitious child in its current production of the Burt Bacharach-Hal David-Neil Simon office party, Promises, Promises.

Ann Landers warns us that lascivious girls come to a bad end--so, in the same way, do undisciplined musicals. Radcliffe-Grant-in-Aid has been producing musicals for eight years, and has earned a lot of scholarship money in the process. It should know by now that organization and cohesiveness are essential to musicals.

Promises, Promises involves a struggling insurance company clerk, C.C. "Chuck" Baxter. Baxter wins his way to happiness and a key to the executive washroom by loaning out his $86.50 a month apartment to libidinous vice presidents and their ambitious secretaries. In the process, Baxter manages to fall in love with the very cafeteria waitress who is involved with the almighty Director of Personnel. Aha! Complication! Misunderstanding! Humor! Agony! Unfortunately, we don't get all that.

We don't get it because of the damning lack of discipline. The plot doesn't build because all the elements of the play--the acting, the singing, the music, the set--don't come together into any sort of a strong, whole work. These parts remain separate, and give us a very fragmented evening.

To begin with, Alan Symonds set is a disaster. It is far too bulky for the small Agassiz stage, and its dingy color does nothing to enliven the worn-out backdrop already there. Symonds concerns himself with unnecessarily minute detail that involves complicated scene changes. The changes are all made by the actors, who really don't know what to do with their characters during them. The result is annoyingly sloppy.

All the actors look their parts perfectly--the sexy secretaries, the aging insurance salesmen. But they rely too much on their characterizations. Michael Ricardo's portrayal of Chuck Baxter has in both face and manner a beautifully apt combination of Superboy and kewpie doll. But this is carried no further than his face; as a result he creates a one-dimensional character. Ricardo deserves praise for being able to survive this demanding role--although he doesn't really build a great level of intensity that needs maintaining.

Richard Bangs as the Personnel Manager has the same problem--a face chiseled out of granite and a characterization that stops there. What should be carefully calculated indifference as he conceals his affair from his wife becomes merely indifference.

SOME OF THE smaller characters illustrate the quality that Ricardo and Bangs lack. Paul Seltzer as the disbelieving doctor, Hope Brokman as a jilted secretary and Dorothy Meyer as a barroom pick-up all have flamboyantly intriguing people holding up their perfect faces. These personalities can support director Steven Glovsky's fetish for unneccessarily broad and stylized gestures, which hang ridiculously on most of the other characters.

Although the singing doesn't always warrant the effort, special credit should go to Paul Schommer's orchestra for accomplishing the difficult feat of keeping the music at the right volume. Choreographer Ricardo and those four charcoal grey executives a glorious sense of the absurd, prancing around the stage in the Act One showstopper: "Where Do You Take a Girl".

The scene is evidence of what might have been. But all the different elements involved never quite jell together. Characters break into deeply emotional songs for no apparent reason, and, until Chuck ran for the doctor, I completely missed the leading lady's attempted suicide. Writers structure musicals carefully, following high crises with dramatic relief. Director Glovsky does not make this structure apparent.

With a little hitting, punching and energy, Promises, Promises could turn into a dynamite of a show. Now it has good laughs, some nice dancing and an awful lot of BurtBacharachmusic. And I am left, finally, with a question for Helen Gurley Brown. Is it really in the style of a Cosmo girl to end an affair with: "When you walked through the door with that distinguished hat, I knew you were a pervert!!"? Maybe Ann Landers was right.