SUPERMAN!

Faster than a tall building. Able to leep speeding locomotives at a single bound. That's Superman, at least as rendered in the musical of the same name.

Camp it certainly isn't. Bookwriters David Newman and Robert Benton have resisted the temptation to play Superman entirely for heckles; but if they have some larger purpose up their collective sleeve, they never reveal it.

When Superman is enjoyable, as it sometimes is, the overall lack of cohesion matters little. When the multi-colored super-hero gets introduced to someone and he says "Glad to meet you, I'm Superman," what difference does it make if the character he meets appears in one scene, fails in love with Lois Lane, and is never heard from again? But after a while, so many plot points and characters are introduced only to be dropped or ignored, that the musical loses all of its continuity and most of its interest.

Nor is the score much of a help, Lyricist Lee Adams and composer Charles Strouse did Bye Bye Birdie and Golden Boy, both of which realized more talent than Superman hints at. Even the notions behind the numbers are uniformly uninspired. "Doing Good," "We Need Him," and "The Strongest Man in the World" are poor ideas gone nowhere.

Some of the performances, however, nearly transcend their material. Jack Cassidy as the gossip columnist Max Mencken is unbelievably slick and professional. Michael O'Sullivan hams to a proper excess as a ten-time Nobel Prize loser who takes revenge on the world by trying to destroy its culture-hero, Superman. Bob Holiday's deadpan makes him perfect for the title role.

The scenery by Robert Randolph seems to have come straight out of the comic books. Metropolis's skyline is faultless. The Daily Planet, Clark Kent's apartment, City Hall, and scores of other familiar landmarks move effortlessly on and off the stage. Unfortunately, Superman himself is another matter. The wire he dangles from looks like a cable thick enough to hold the Queen Mary. And the illusion of flying is hardly enforced if you sit at the side and see Holiday waiting high up in the wings for each of his entrances.

Director Hal Prince knows where he's at, and Superman is smoothly and competently staged. But while production seems to be all it takes to make a musical a hit, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman! will have to take its place in musical history on gross receipts value alone.