at the Colonial through March 7

WRITING about one of the more blatantly commercial comedies of the current Broadway season. Walter Kerr applauded the playwright for concocting a work whose only purpose in the world seemed to be to keep the theatregoer from killing himself in the lobby during intermission. Kerr has a good point, because even if curbing suicidal ten-dencies in the audience shouldn't be the only purpose of commercial theatre, it must be its basic purpose. For if commercial theatre doesn't do at least that-doesn't at least make us temporarily forget our neuroses-it has no reason to exist.

As of the first week of its Boston tryout. Who to Love. the new musical based on William Alfred's Hogan's Goal, doesn't succeed on that basic level. It is not a terrible musical, it is a painful one. But, as I see it, better bad than painful; I'd take the recent Georgy, an infinitely worse product, over this depressing melodrama any day of the week.

Not that intrinsically depressing material can't work in the musical theatre; the best of recent musicals- Gypsy, Fiddler, Cabaret -all were tragic at the core. But, if seriousness is handled with anything short of perfection in a musical, the result is the worst kind of mess: the skeleton of a heavy play slowed down by the injection of music and dance.

In the case of Who to Love, the most unfortunate muffing has been done by the director, Albert Marre. Marre has, for some reason unknown to me, taken Alfred's lyrically sad saga of polities, love, scandal and death in nineteenth-century Irish Brooklyn and turned it into a dirge. It is without a doubt one of the most misguided jobs of musical staging I've ever seen. Marre should know that tragedy can only work in musicals if treated slyly: the sadder events of Hogan's Goat must sneak in the back door of Who to Love -for if the audience is allowed to dwell on unhappy plot developments in a musical, the audience eventually realizes how silly the whole musical convention is.

Regrettably, Marre lingers over all big moments; he points at them. Almost every scene between two or three characters also includes the chorus-standing frozen, gazing at the active actors. Staging like that is out of the century in which the work is set, but it cannot be confused with period charm or camp. It is, quite simply, a failure of imagination and tate. (Nor is Marre helped by Howard Bay's sets, which are dark, slow-moving, colorless, and, in a clambake scene, downright ugly.)

THERE is no getting around the fact that Marre's contribution to Who to Love sabotages everyone else's work on the project from the word go-and it is important to note that, with another director, there might be a show here. Importantly, Mitch Leigh, the composer, and Alfred and Phyllis Robinson, the co-lyricists, have come up with an above average score. Leigh's music is usually melodic, and the lyrics often have an intricacy and sophistication uncommon for musical comedies.

The book; now credited to both Alfred and Marre, is another story. During the first act, the show just drifts along while we wait in suspense to find out events that occurred before the play's action begins. Nothing new is happening, and in a musical this is unbearable. Not only that, but when we finally do learn the three-year-old scandal of Man Stamon and Mayor Quinn, it is confusingly presented; catalyst characters like Josie Finn are sufficiently undefined to screw us up.

In the second act the show actually begins to move-yet, even here, there is some dawdling. One climactic scene is followed by a song in which the show's urchin-narrators merely recap the action, making no additional comment on the scene we have just seen. The number takes place in front of the scrim. and possibly the only reason for its existence is to allow the sets to be changed. In addition, there is the clambake scene, whose importance to the second act escapes me, but which features a pointless dance number so old-fashioned that even Agnes de Mille wouldn't touch it. (And. after two minutes, I must admit that I turned my eyes to my date so I wouldn't have to look at it.)

What else is there to say? The east sings nicely, but we have been such performers as Robert Weede, Joan Diener, and Helen Gallagher (How I love her) in much happier circumstances. This time around, the director has given them so many May time poses to affect that acting is out of the question.

For that matter, also out of the question is the possibility of salvaging this show. Who to Love already-weeks before its New York opening-has that "used woman" look which characterizes musicals that have been rewritten by committee out-of-town. The fact that Alfred now has collaborators for both the book and the lyries suggests that the show may even be pretty much out of his hands-which is too bad for the show. If I were Mr. Alfred. I'd leave the whole frustrating mess to the hacks and get out completely-for musicals like. Who to Love not only encourage suicides during intermission but promise sure death at the box office as well.