Posted 5:44 PM by Gene

It has been a while since I've heard Kismet, as I did tonight in the absence of a working TV. I once got the brilliant idea the show should be a feature-length -- cartoon. It really isn't so absurd on the face of it; instead of having Vincente Minnelli grumble his way to a mediocrity M-G-M could have assigned Tex Avery. That beloved screwloose could have flung his imagination on the scenes involving -- THE GIRLS; picture an ANIMATED "Zubbediya"! Of course it might also have required Friz Freleng to provide some Tweety-and-Sylvester laughs (not that Avery was a slouch there); but it could have been one of the glories of film, and saved animated features from their descent into sticky sentiment, a move that, for all the box-office success of computer animation, has never really stopped.

Listening to Kismet one may forget it was panned by most of the print critics -- but it opened during a NEWSPAPER STRIKE, and meantime Tony Bennett made a hit of "Stranger in Paradise," so its short-term success was assured. Longer term it could only be boffo, as its music was adapted from the inspired melodist Aleksandr Borodin, a full-time organic chemist and medical professor but only a part-time composer, so careless in his work habits fellow musicians like Rimsky-Korsakov had to edit much of his work. (Today, of course, Dubya and the EDUCRATS and the DILBERT CEOs would encourage Borodin to be a SCIENTIST.) Somehow mating Borodin and a creaky old play set in an indeterminate Baghdad worked, and the show has been recorded many times since -- but not revived since 1978 (in an all-black version [?!?!?]). Perhaps it can't be revived; perhaps it would be politically incorrect; perhaps it would be tone-deaf given our low-grade war; perhaps we're sated by Vegas spectacles and too much sex on the screen. But think if Ziegfeld did it -- it opened in his long-ago-demolished theater!

Maybe it's just as well; listening to the great Alfred Drake close the affair with "Sands of Time" I had to reflect practically everyone involved in this is gone now, irreplaceable -- Drake, the ethereal Doretta Morrow, Richard Kiley, Henry Calvin, the adapters Robert Wright and George Forrest, the album's producer Goddard Lieberson -- but the sands of time can never cover up this masterpiece of a score; some ages are better at leaving trinkets behind for posterity.