I always thought that "Oklahoma!" had the simplest plot I knew: would a cowhand ever get to take his girl to a picnic?  But "Via Galactica", the space musical which has just opened and closed at the ample new Uris Theater, had a simpler one: would a space sanitation man ever take his hat off to a lady?

That was the great first act finale.  With chords throbbing up out of the orchestra pit, and all the stars of the Milky Way winking and blinking their unrestrained joy, the hero's hat came off. Of course, it wasn't exactly an ordinary hat.  It looked like one of those twirled ice-cream cones that come to a point on top, it spun on its own like a barber pole, and it somehow or other symbolized life on the planet Earth 1,000 years from now.

A hat-wearing man was a controlled happy man, blue to the gills to in order to eliminate racial distinctions (no black, no white, no yellow, not even pale blue), shorn of identity (there was no "I" on Earth, only "we"), master of the firmament and free to rove from asteroid to asteroid in a silver skin-tight suit, borne aloft by what seemed a floating clamshell (I have placed one on order to see if it will help me get through traffic on the Cross-Bronx at 5 in the afternoon).

For all that hats were different, problems remained much the same.  I have mentioned that our hero - his name was Gabriel Finn, and under the blue make-up you could almost find Raul Julia - was a space sanitation man.  It developed that galaxies were as loaded with trash as our unheavenly streets are, and that trash continued to be stored in trash cans, the very kind you and I put out back for the neighborhood dogs to turn over.  Two of these trash cans were carried about in Gabriel's garbage ship, called the Helen of Troy, and so were two perfectly familiar leather armchairs, thoughtfully provided for the men at the controls. I suppose some comfort had to be retained from 1972.

But 1972 was very much with us in "Via Galactica", at least in Christopher Gore's lyrics.  I should explain the entertainment contained no dialogue, only lyrics - or rather contained a great deal of dialogue disguised as lyrics, formally called recitative.  When Gabriel happened to land on a quite forgotten asteroid called Ithica to meet a girl called Omaha (there was a certain American bias to the whole planetary thing) and the girl named Omaha tried to get him to take off his hat, he promptly and stoutly sang "No way!"  I had hoped that a thousand years of progress would eliminate that expression.

Others continued to cling;  "Sez you!" sang a pregnant girl who had little to do with the plot except get unpregnant (twins in a 1972 wicker baby carriage) and "You blew it!" thundered a baritone who luckily had vocal chords considering that everything beneath them had disappeared.  (Only Keene Curtis's head emerged from an electronic cabinet, his liver and spleen as well as his sexual equipment having vanished long since; "I am the Head around here," he sang, making the evening's lone pun.)

If the snappy comebacks were rather familiar, so were the sunny slogans.  It developed that Ithica was a bit of a side-pocket, universally speaking, and had refused to move with the technological times.  "I believe in butterflies, rainbows and balloons" caroled Omaha in her slinky yellow satin, "I believe in things that grow."  Growing things included a baby she would like to have by Gabriel, the Head being unable to give her one, but they also looked farther afield, perhaps to another planet she and her Ithican companions (colors ranging from black to clown-white) might be able to reach by means of an Ark which looked rather like a Chicago Elevated station waiting to be torn down.  Omaha's missing father had always said "a land without a tree is a sin," and if they could only find him (he was dead) he might have been able to guide them to one spot in outer space where life  - life with butterflies and balloons, no hats - could begin again.  I trust you are not following the plot.  You will be exhausted for the Sunday crossword puzzle.

You may have gathered by this time that "Via Galactica" was a musical about the future that had none.  It was really cast as opera, though - unthinkably - as opera without a long or at any time complex musical line.  It was doggerel opera, nursery-rhyme opera, cracker-barrell opera, and by the time you had listened to several hundred short, flat constructions like "Bring him back/And then we pack" or "Why delay?/ Take your hat off, , try my way" or "Earth is on its way here/ We can't stay here," you were terribly relieved to get at least one that didn't rhyme ("I don't want to be no oyster/ I don't like those clammy bars")

I would call the text childish but children are clearer, Galt MacDermot's score seemed so determined to avoid its base in hard rock that it went all the way back to the fox-trot rhythms that Jolson and Ted Lewis once used to greater advantage, banjos and guitars stammered and came to abrupt halts as they searched for a melodic thread that would not turn into W. C. Handy's "Basement Blues" or (I swear it) "The Last Rose Of Summer."  Even so, neither Virginia Vestoff as Omaha nor Raul Julia as Gabriel was up to the high notes (harshness haunted you all the way home) and the large, though languid, chorus was unable to produce any gratifyingly massed sound.  The enterprise, except for Mr. Curtis's pun and an ashcan stowaway's announcement that "you've been spacejacked!" was utterly without humor.

I have not yet mentioned the oddest thing about "Via Galactica" and I am astonished that the distinguished british director Peter Hall did not notice it before he put foot to stage (or to trampoline as it happened).  Everything that was meant to make "Via Galactica" move immobilized it.  Irene Cara, a singing narrator, descended from the high vault of the new playhouse on a fixed trapeze, explaining the plot to us while suspended in mid-air.  But she was frozen there.  A giant crane moved the clamshell trashship slowly about the vast stage, portal to portal.  But the people inside it were as good as strapped to their seats, unable to do anything but relay us those foursquare lyrics.  Keene Curtis was of course totally confined to his box - the box itself could go back and forth, up and down, if that's action - and even the six trampolines that pitted the stage floor proved inhibiting.  people could bounce up and down in place, which became rather monotonous after a while, or they could leap from one springboard to another, which was only a little less monotonous.  But we were effectively denied choreography: dance depends upon having and seeing a floor from which bodies can depart under their own power.  The evening was, in consequence, entirely, staggeringly, static.  As for the scenery, it was almost entirely composed of little white dots like the ones they sprinkle on those candies they call nonpareils, with the result that we spent the evening staring at what seemed a steady rainfall of tapioca.

A few kind words can be said about The Uris Theater, though.  The proscenium decor may smack a bit of M-G-M 1935, but the brown-and-cream color scheme is modest, there are cross-aisles to get you from one side of the house to another, there is ample knee room row to row, and the interlocked lobbies are not only spacious enough to avoid jostling but are glossy-homey enough to actually invite intermission visits with long-lost friends.  I mean, you can find them, and the atmosphere makes chitchat flow.  Something must now be done to make a show flow as well.

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