OVER HERE

By LANCE MORROW

A Musical

Not long ago, Kurt Vonnegut predicted that "things are going to get worse and worse and never get better again." That black intuition may account for the compulsive nostalgia that seems to be driving many Americans back into any past that they can contrive to regard as comforting--here the frolicsome joys of World War II. It seems only a matter of time, however, before a corollary to Vonnegut's dictum enforces itself: "Nostalgia is going to get worse and worse . . . " A show like Over Here ought to send audiences screaming out to embrace the '70s.

It probably won't. Over Here is so slick and cheerfully witless that it will doubtless endure on Broadway, not so much on its own merits as on the strength of its public's profound desire to nestle in the world it dreams up. No matter that it is mostly a travesty of the period, of the big-band sound, of the '40s fads and the jitterbug and, above all, the wartime patriotism that seems now so attractive and so unrecoverable.

Over Here, after all, gives us back the surviving Andrews sisters, Maxene and Patty, who despite their thickening middle age perform with a certain agreeable spunk and a vast desire to please. But theirs is a conjuring act: their voices, coarsened with years, merely point to their original sound; what will be applauded is the memory.

Period Piece. The musical is constructed roughly as a troop tram's seven-day cross-country voyage from Los Angeles to New York. Patty and Maxene, costumed in a sort of WAC usherette motif, are lovably running the train's U.S.O. canteen. The 40s collage includes precautionary Army VD lectures, Glenn Miller band impersonations, little jokes about "going all the way," period slang ("cow juice and Java") and a likable fantasy of America's postwar dreams--Esther Williams bathing beauties backstroking across the dry stage.

It is unkind to mention that the best Andrews "sister" is Janie Sell, who enlivens the train ride with a very funny imitation of Marlene Dietrich. Patty and Maxene have taken pains to insist that Janie is in no sense a replacement for La Verne, who died in 1967. In fact, Sell's character, somehow unfairly, turns out to be a spy ("Mitzi, a Nazi?") dragged from the stage before Maxene and Patty, in blinding red, white and blue spangles, sing their finale.

The sheer energy expended here could power every pacemaker in the country for the next 75 years, but it is power spilled back into a void: a silly wartime, a waxworks of the way we really never were. qedLance Morrow

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