Autopsy

By T.E. Kalem

I REMEMBER MAMA Music by Richard Rodgers Lyrics by Martin Charnin and Raymond Jessel Book by Thomas Meehan

Whatever frantic doctoring occurred during / Remember Mama's arduous journey toward opening night, the patient is dead on arrival.

Apart from Sweeney Todd, this Broadway season has been a musical bone yard Uttered with seemingly logical decisions. It must have seemed logical to cast Liv Ullmann as the indomitable mother of a struggling Norwegian immigrant brood. Unfortunately, the only thing she gets right is her accent. Ullmann is no singer, and she croaks out her numbers with nary a trace of that speechifying grace that Rex Harrison brought to My Fair Lady. With her disconcertingly low voice and brisk delivery, it sometimes seems as if she is barking out orders, like some displaced storm trooper.

Ullmann's dancing is even more embarrassing. Her dance numbers make up in nervous tension what they mercifully lack in length. She watches her feet as if they were about to trip her up, and they almost do. This is true even in a simple folk dance that consists of kicking to the left and then kicking to the right.

One might expect Ullmann's acting to be a redeeming feature, but it isn't. Partly to exonerate her feeble efforts, it must be said that the role of Mama has not been written or developed. It is not even scribbled in. However, the mark of a professional is to be able to make something out of nothing. Instead, Ullmann lapses into a series of alternating smiles and frowns. There is no sense of emo tional conviction: it is as if she were making faces before an imaginary mirror. Too many years before the camera, perhaps, where her superbly expressive face, particularly her eyes, have been her fortune. A deeper defect is that she projects no wifely warmth or maternal affections. She treats Papa (George Hearn) like a stagehand who has wandered onto the set, and acts like a coolly efficient career woman with five pressing memos in front of her instead of five adoring children.

Ah, the children. How more saccharine than a sweet tooth they are. Pity the poor darlings. All they do is beam and fawn on Mama. Exempt the tiniest tot, Tara Kennedy, 7, who puts on a sizzling display of stagewise expertise in a song-and-dance duo with George S. Irving. A born hamster, she's good enough to wake up the audience. So is Irving. As Uncle Chris, a cigar-chomping, whisky-swigging lecher, he, at least, colors the stage something other than its prevailing gray.

Contemplating the rest of Mama is like reading a casualty list. At 76, Richard Rodgers is presumably too old to retire, and only he can tarnish his own honor. In recent years he has given us such faded flowers of his once gorgeous talent as Two by Two and Rex. None of the songs in this show need to be pressed in anyone's memory book. As for the lyrics of Martin Charnin and Raymond Jessel, they are, in Hamlet's words, weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.

There must be something good to say. Let us say yea for the way Theoni V. Aldredge has turned back the decades with the gracious flow of her costumes. And a resounding yea for David Mitchell's set, with its misty evocation of San Francisco and the ability to structure a home that looks lived in. But, alas, a frame doth not a picture make.

-- T.E. Kalem

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