The program notes for “Legs Diamond,” at the Mark Hellinger Theater, were full of touching little asides, expressions of gratitude or hope addressed by members of the company either to individuals or to the community at large: “ ‘The dream is alive’ thanks to love & support from family and friends” (Carol Ann Baxter) or “ADRIAN BAILEY thanks the Legs Co. for the opportunity to pay rent on time!” or “After 16 years of tours, stock, regional & dinner theater—B’way at last!” (James Brandt). Other messages—equally passionate but more ominous—read like the cries of drowning souls (or just people who expected never to be heard from again): “Luv to MDGGLN. Out of room. Bye!” (Deanna Dys) and “I’m just thankful!!! Mom, I love you!!!” (Keith Tyrone). As my companion settled into her seat and surveyed the bios, she remarked, “One always wants things to go well for these kids,” and it’s true—one always does want things to go well for them. So for the longest time I tried to look at “Legs Diamond” optimistically. But it was no use. I kept thinking of the “Forbidden Broadway” number where a couple of actors, made up to look like Jackie Mason and Robert Goulet, come out singing about how it’s “Almost like Vegas in New York” to the tune of “Almost Like Being In Love.”
By now, everyone has heard of the efforts it took to bring the “Legs” project to fruition: the five-million-dollar budget, the years of planning and writing, the elaborate (and dangerous) computerized sets, the last-minute cuts, changes, and rewrites; how Harvey Fierstein had to be called in to assist Charles Suppon with the script, first as an adviser, then as a full-fledged collaborator; how, with customers paying full price for preview tickets, songs were still being written and cut, characters dropped, and a subplot excised to provide the show’s target audience with a story line suited to its putative mental capacity. The result is a vehicle without a star—a musical about a person of no interest (a guy who manages to prove himself a more effective crook than another guy) and with no plot, no book, and no good songs or dance numbers.
One of the most depressing aspects of the show is the way it reminds you of other, better musicals. A snatch of “West Side Story” goes wafting by. A siren wails and you think of “Fiorello!”; there’s a peroxide chorine (Randall Edwards) like Miss Adelaide in “Guys and Dolls,” an aging soubrette (Julie Wilson) like Vera in “Pal Joey,” and a speakeasy whose name—the Hotsy-Totsy Club—seems to conflate The Hot Box from “Guys and Dolls” and the Kit Kat Club from “Cabaret.” For the rest there is a script consisting mostly of bra jokes, panty jokes, bottom jokes, intercourse jokes, testicle jokes, and orifice jokes, and a good deal of choreography (by Alan Johnson) of the kind that one rarely sees except on the night of the Academy Awards. (It includes not one but two “happy native” numbers.)
At the center of it all is the man who put this show together like a leveraged buyout—the Australian Peter Allen, a performer of singular vulgarity, who cannot dance or act, who can barely carry a tune, and who evidently thinks that style is something you do with your tongue. Whatever star quality Mr. Allen may possess seems to reside in a willingness to move his pelvis about. He goes through the show trying to establish a rapport with his two leading ladies by touching parts of his body to parts of theirs and with us by thrusting his privates in our direction. Watching him sweat profusely standing still—badly balanced over hyperextended knees, hands dangling awkwardly—you realize with a kind of horrified fascination that you are attending a musical built around the only man in America less charismatic than George Bush. You keep waiting for Julie Wilson’s big ballad. When it comes, it’s a torch song of such surpassing banality that her pained expression might indicate embarrassment. In the meantime, with nothing else to think about, you work on translating the show’s title into French and studying the peculiar things Peter Allen does with his face in an attempt to affect what he thinks is an American accent.
Such an obscene lot of time, money, and manpower were spent in producing this show that it seems a shame to expend any further effort in describing it. Of Miss Wilson, that accomplished singer and diseuse, I can only suggest (with respect) that she seems utterly out of place. For the rest, it remains merely to thank David Mitchell (sets) and Jules Fisher (lighting), for providing something to look at other than the performers; Willa Kim, whose gowns for Miss Wilson are the one tasteful element in the production, and Michael Starobin, without whose orchestrations Mr. Allen’s songs would no doubt have been much harder to listen to. And to all those kids with the show-biz names (Ann Baxter, Dianna, Tyrone): as they sometimes say at funerals, “Under pleasanter circumstances.”
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, January 9, 1989