TV Reviews : ‘Stop the World’ Raises Questions

A ‘60s-era musical like Anthony Newley’s and Leslie Bricusse’s “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” makes that decade feel very far away, and the new production for the A&E; channel’s “Clairol on Broadway” series pushes us away even further.

Indeed, the show and the whole A&E; project serve up one fat question mark. Or several of them.

Why this incredibly dated work, replete with a truckload of sexist sympathies and Cold War references to “the Soviet Union” and “East Berlin”? Why the casting of the vocally strained Peter Scolari as the tale’s egocentric-yet-lovable anti-hero, Littlechap? And why the series’ “Broadway” suggestion when we’re not on Broadway at all, but instead at the Cherry County Playhouse in Muskegon, Mich.?

Scolari does some tightrope walking and juggling early on, but otherwise he is an unengaging Littlechap, climbing the ladder of corporate and political success and tallying sexual conquests along the way while his loyal wife, Evie (Stephanie Zimbalist), waits at home with the kids.

Make no mistake though: This is no kitchen-sink drama of Corporate Man in conflict with himself. Newley and Bricusse conceived of a highly symbolist mime-based show with minimal props and set and an all-female chorus decked out in sexier-than-thou leotards. Most of their songs have long lost their luster, though the acerbic “Mumbo Jumbo” is still a funny send-up of politicians’ double-talk, and there’s a timeless sadness to the closer, “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

The stage director and choreographer, Bill Castellino, has made some invisible trims of the original but has replaced the mime concept with a fuzzy aerobic sense of movement. (This cast doesn’t dance; they’re sweating to Newley’s and Bricusse’s oldies.) Whatever overall stage concept Castellino had in mind is badly smudged by the TV camera director, David Stern.

But if viewers know Zimbalist only from “Remington Steele,” they’re in for a surprise: She is smashing as the put-upon wife and Littlechap’s various international lovers, whom he snatches up and disposes at will. Vocally, she blows Scolari off the screen, and her keen comic timing has the kind of disciplined crispness that the rest of this misbegotten project can’t come close to.

* “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off” airs at 7 and 11 tonight on A&E.;