Kismet (book by Charles Lederer & Luther Davis; music by Alexander Borodin; musical adaptation and lyrics by Robert Wright & George Forrest) seems to have mistaken itself at times for a supercolossal film. The production cost $400,000, and thanks to Lemuel Ayres's eye for color and sense of medieval Bagdad, a great deal of Kismet could not be more satisfactorily sumptuous. But Kismet is too weighted down with finery to be at all fast on its feet, and even with Alfred Drake to pace it, most of it is just resplendently tedious.
With a plot that requires virtually the entire population of...