Heel's Progress

What Makes Sammy Run? is the musical saga of Sammy Glick, who progresses, like a good heel should, from cutting corners to cutting throats. But since the book came out in 1941, something unsettling has happened to the heel; now the question is whether he should be scorned for his gall or admired for his How-to-Succeed spunk, shunned as a social leper or respected as a social dynamo. When the Sammy Clicks and Harry Bogens (I Can Get It for You Wholesale) first appeared in novels, the socio-economic climate was troubled, and heels were regarded as products of "the system," whose hardboiled inhumanity they reflected and whose boils they were. But a healthier social order, not needing to seek someone to blame, absolves the heel of ultra-contemptibility and sees him as merely ultracompetitive. This dates Sammy more destructively than its period-piece spoofing and cigar-chomping producers. One cannot do Once in a Lifetime thrice in a lifetime.

People are consumer products to Sammy Glick, and when he has consumed enough--script writers, girl friends, studio chiefs--he reaches the projection room at the top of World Wide Studio. At musical's end, he is faced with the topman cliche: "You're all alone, Sammy Glick." As Sammy, Steve Lawrence moves with the wary savage grace of a jungle cat, and when he claws, he claws. Bernice Massi, the banker's daughter Sammy marries, matches him in velvety ferocity. In a subplot romance, Robert Alda and Sally Ann Howes seem to be going through motions rather than emotions. The two best songs in the score are sexy: A Room Without Windows ("a room without doors") and The Friendliest Thing ("two people can do"). Too many of the lyrics sound like alliances between words that should never have met ("raison d'etre . . . et cetera").

Two months before curtain time, when Sammy was "in trouble" on the road, Abe Burrows was called in to direct. The Burrows touch has undoubtedly whipped up the pace and flipped up the quips, but the old play doctor was called in too late.

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