Comic Scrooge, Demonic Shlemiel

By Gerald Clarke, Stefan Kanfer

Dickens updated in Harlem, Singer in a magic shtetl

COMIN' UPTOWN Music by Garry Sherman; Book by Philip Rose and Peter Udell; Lyrics by Peter Udell

Just in time for the holidays, Broadway has a festive new ornament, an all-black musical version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Scrooge is a Harlem slumlord with a goatee and an Afro, Marley's ghost marches through eternity in sneakers, and the three Christmas ghosts are high-stepping disco dancers. Even Dickens' capacious imagination could probably not have envisioned such sequins and flash. Taken on its own good-natured terms, however, Comin' Uptown is a high-gloss package that should bright en everybody's holiday.

The music is amiable rather than memorable, and the choreography is spirited rather than inspired. But Gregory Hines is delightful as a sly, streetwise Scrooge. "Somebody's gotta be the heavy," he sings in his opening number, and old Ebenezer had better be that some body. Hines is well supported by the rest of a large and obviously happy cast, and if all ghosts were as finger-snapping fun ny as Saundra McClain (Christmas Present), being haunted would be more a dream than a nightmare. Yet the highest praise of all has to go to Robin Wagner, whose sets, as clever and as intricate as Chinese boxes, encompass half of 125th Street. Wagner was the unseen star of such mediocre musicals as Ballroom and On the Twentieth Century, and he gives special luster to this Christmas card from Harlem. -- Gerald Clarke

TEIBELE AND HER DEMON by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Eve Friedman

Even for great American prose writers, the theatrical muse has been a bitch. Henry James' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's plays were disappointments; Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis lasted less than a month. Thus Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and Collaborator Eve Friedman find themselves in distinguished company with Teibele and Her Demon, a "fable" for Broadway.

The girl of the title role (Laura Esterman) is a shtetl beauty, eyed from afar by the local shlemiel, Alchonon (F. Murray Abraham). Teibele loathes her admirer -- until he appears in her bed room in the guise of a demon. Under the stars they become lovers, while under the sun they remain strangers, until the night creature persuades his lady to marry Alchonon. But with the public union come private agonies: the alchemic force disperses, leaving two ordinary people who plunge into insanity and sorrow.

In his lyric short stories and novels, Singer's prose is suffused with drama. In the theater, his work becomes prosaic. The notion of a girl deceived by a man who does not change his costume or his appearance demands a magic that neither the manic cast nor Director Stephen Kanee can sustain. For this tenuous fantasy, an entertainment tax is difficult enough. A credulity tax is insupportable. -- Stefan Kanfer

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