It’s a Hard ‘Life’ in Times Square

“Yeah, they cleaned up the neighborhood,” announces Jojo, an ex-pimp now making his living in the “motion picture business.” (“You should see the motion in my pictures.”) “About time, too. Have to have it squeaky clean for Mickey Mouse.”

In “The Life,” the musical that opened Saturday night at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Jojo (Sam Harris) is our suitably amoral guide to Times Square in the days before Disney moved in and the cleanup began. Harris displays a clean-cut, dimpled charm permanently smeared with a sneer. The twinkle in his eye implies that Jojo has seen and done some pretty nasty deeds. And we’re gonna hear all about them.

Down drop the neon triple-X signs and out struts a fierce assortment of pimps and prostitutes in synthetic wigs and makeup calling “Check it out!” to the audience. They are realistically garish and loud--Times Square circa 1980. Moving to a Fosse-esque slink choreographed by Joey McKneely, they make those bygone days of living porn come alive, the days when the city’s most overtly sleazy citizens lived and worked in the heart of the theater district. Their come-on to the audience provides the season’s most arresting opening number.

Unfortunately, the creators make little use of this seething mass of humanity they’ve gathered so vividly onstage. Whatever else you might say about it, no one could call “The Life” a smart show. It tries to have it all ways and then pretends not to notice. For instance, a number called “My Body” is an anthem for the hookers, as rousing as it is dramatically dishonest. Defiant, the hookers prowl the stage, scouring the audience for signs of disapproval. To a catchy beat, they scold us: “Maybe you don’t like it / But baby it’s written in stone / It’s my body / And my body’s / Nobody’s business but my own.”

That’s a fine sentiment, and the audience cheers. But we’ve already seen how these hookers are controlled by the evil pimp Memphis (Chuck Cooper), who beats and humiliates them when they’re late or tired. And we will see them stand in the cold, selling, lit only by the passing cars in front of an ugly wire fence and amid piles of litter (set by Robin Wagner). Like the showgirls in Coleman’s “Sweet Charity,” they sing about their dreams of getting out of the life. But these women have it so tough they make Charity look like Grace Kelly in “High Society.”

Cy Coleman’s lively score offers the most robust new songs on Broadway, though the competition this year has not been tough. Those songs (with Ira Gasman lyrics that favor the pedestrian) adorn a show that has no point of view on its own subject, presenting characters only as they seem to see themselves, with attitudes adapting from day to day. The book is by David Newman, Gasman and Coleman.

The show’s main focus is on Queen (Pamela Isaacs) and Fleetwood (Kevin Ramsey), just two decent kids in love who live together on the money she makes as a prostitute. (He claims to have “dreams as big as New York.”) Trouble enters in the form of the striking Mary (the eminently watchable Bellamy Young), a cornfed beauty just off the bus from the Midwest. With Jojo prodding him on, Fleetwood believes he can add Mary to his stable and become a fancy pimp, like Memphis. Queen is furious and forms an unholy alliance with Memphis, whose booth she very publicly graces at the annual extravaganza called the Hooker’s Ball.

Just what Queen expects to gain I can’t say. If she can’t see that an alliance with Memphis means lifetime servitude, then the audience knows more about the life than she does.

All of this would be tedious if it weren’t for the talent director Michael Blakemore has assembled onstage. Playing a prostitute named Sonja, the big-voiced Lilias White brings down the house in her Act 1 number, “The Oldest Profession.” She is always engaging, no matter how old the hooker jokes she must deliver. (“I been in seven beds tonight and I ain’t slept in one of them.”)

As Memphis, Cooper sends a delicious bass baritone floating out in “Don’t Take Much,” a song that explicates his pimping philosophy. (“Ain’t no trick to turn a hick into a hooker.”) Isaacs rises above her underwritten part, and her Act 2 duet to friendship with White is the one number that cuts through the cliches. Sam Harris has an upbeat, Runyan-esque energy that’s good for the show. In the catchy song “Easy Money,” Bellamy Young is pure, glowing selfishness as the new girl who can out-use the biggest users in town.

The vanishing era of in-your-face Times Square porn is a memorable one, when the city’s sleaziest denizens brushed shoulders daily with the moneyed privilege of Broadway. Now Cy Coleman and friends have invited that world into a Broadway theater, and the two worlds collude for our entertainment dollars. It would have been interesting to have gone through the fun-house mirror and learned something about the life that wasn’t already plain to see on the street itself.

* “The Life,” Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St., New York, (800) 432-7250.