Posted 8:04 AM by Gene

We also see that Oklahoma! has opened. We wouldn't mention this but that every decade or so a new work opens that issues a shatteringly truth-telling portrayal of youth. Ten years ago it was La Boheme II, and we wonder how far it would have lingered but for the ghastly death of its creator before the opening, which turned the show into its own shrine (it being mostly about AIDS anyway). Before that was Runaways, an ingeniously tuneful and memorable newspaper in music (so the typists said) before it gradually came out that its "composer" (somebody named Swados) could neither read nor write music -- she dictated it a la KERNGERSHWIN HAMMERSTEIN -- and she tried one or two more works before floating into obscurity. Before that was West Side Story, and who knows how long its well-meaning hand-wringing would have lasted without Leonard Bernstein's first-rate score. This has five musicians, which is hardly Robert Russell Bennett, and the ACADEMY®'s honors and Jon "Non" Pareles give us reason enough to believe it's NG. (That and the fact that these scribblers' ancestors panned the score for The King and I.) We must ask who will come out to see this; the expense-account crowd may squirm, and the youth may feel patronized. (Here's a laugh: Social-Security eligibles praising a youth show.) This will probably be another smash -- we were wrong about Stephen Schwartz' contraption because we didn't know how much the expense-accounters love heavy machinery -- but brilliant music aside we wonder if this isn't just another pill.