Reviews of Broadway flops, part 1.

“Wild and Wonderful,” The New York Times, December 8, 1971. Reviewed by Clive Barnes.

The new Broadway musical, “Wild and Wonderful,” is wet, windy and wretched. It opened last night at the Lyceum Theater. I shall always try to remember it, and to use it as a yardstick to measure the future.

I don’t want to be gratuitously unkind to the people who perpetrated this — but why did they have the arrogance to imagine that their garrulous wanderings justified two hours of my time, or anyone else’s time? This is a show that insults the intelligence. Producers — even amateur producers — shouldn’t do this. This is the kind of show that sends you back to television — or, if that is too radical, at least back to television commercials.

It is impossible to imagine the precise degree of cultural shock that a show of this type can administer. A musical like this makes critics wonder whether they should ask their publishers for hazardous duty pay for their brains, or, failing that, a precise statement of where they stand with Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

“Wild and Wonderful” is described as a “Big City” fable. Its hero is a West Point dropout who has joined the Central Intelligence Agency. He is assigned to infiltrate youthful radicalism. A girl throws her school books off the George Washington Bridge — it happens every Tuesday, I guess — and he confuses her with a radical bomb-thrower. His C.I.A. chief, who lives in a helicopter, encourages him in this mistake.

The agent radicalizes the girl and takes her to a Roman Catholic shelter. The shelter is managed by Brother John — who wears a turtle-neck and is absolutely groovy — and Father Desmond, who appears to have ulcers and a problem of incipient alcoholism. He also — quite frankly — cannot understand the now generation, or even the youth sub-drug culture. Father Desmond is without it.

The girl — a nice enough kid in all conscience — falls in love, without knowing it, of course, with this young, hippy C.I.A. agent, who happens to be the son of a multimillionaire. But I shall not detain you with the story. The humor — at the performance I saw, people were giggling at the show incontinently but with reason — is so flat that is makes Amsterdam appear like a village at the top of Mount Everest. Indeed, this musical provides a new dimension to flatness.

The music was bad, the lyrics were bad, the book was worse than bad, the choreography unsupportable, the costumes proved singularly hideous and were spectacularly unflattering to every woman in the cast and, in the context, the settings seemed gratefully close to what we think of as professional.

The role of the heroine — who had to carry the most stupid of cumulative gags about late, late show movies — was played with more charm than it deserved by Laura McDuffie, and Walter Willison threw in everything but his kitchen sink, range and refrigerator — to say little or nothing of the air-conditioning — in an effort to make the hero viable. Even Mr. Willison failed, and Mr. Willison is unusually talented. Ted Thurston, who played the priest with something of the gallant air of man about to be defrocked, is also a fine performer who deserves better of life than this.

This was a terrible and witless show. The kind of show where you leave, find that it is raining, instantly feel like Gene Kelly and start singing. At least you are in the street rather than in the theater.

It closed after one performance.