Dispatches doesn't have any dramatic continuity; it is another Swados nightclub cantata, a setting of disconnected passages from Michael Herr's book of war reportage. Herr's main interest is what Vietnam did to one's consciousness, his own as much as the soldiers'. At one point he equates the moral upheavals caused by the war with the social upheavals going on back home, and refers to a "rock-and-roll war." This dubious phrase is the one that has misled Ms. Swados. Her war is staged as a rock concert…. It is not the silliest damn thing I've ever seen in my life (close, though), but it is certainly the most frustrating waste of a major opportunity….

[The net effect of Swados's] tinpan tunes and cute diddy-bop routines is to soften and mute the gritty realities on which Herr's speculations are based; the words go racing by semi-audibly, usually cheapened by the visual component. An interesting anecdote about a female Viet Cong sniper is turned into a Lady-in-Red honky-tonk number; a disturbing list of the superstitions G.I.s clung to is lightened with a cheery ragtime tune.

Imitations of famous rock acts, and tableaux copied from news photographs, add to the distraction. What does the story of a legless soldier and the priest who lied to him have to do with Jimi Hendrix's guitar-smashing act?…

A performance that dealt with the facts, causes, and effects of the Vietnam war in an authentic way would probably make half the audience walk out in anger, and the other half sick in the aisles. Even so, I would rather be offended that way than be cajoled into swallowing the tiny bitter pill Swados has so carefully sugared; she doesn't seem to realize that the sugar is the rancid part: When she picks up on Herr's dubious philosophizing, and tries to make the audience believe that we're all swell folks who don't like liking war, and that those who stayed home suffered just as much, that "we've all been" to Vietnam, she is doing something actively pernicious, insulting to those who were there and confirming those who were not in an equality they have no real right to feel.

None of this is to say Swados isn't creative, dedicated, and sincere; she is. But she is rapidly becoming New York's most unthinking young artist, snatching up anything that can be ground through her musical mill. She has no right to do it with a subject as demanding of moral responsibility as Vietnam; she ought to know better. Even in this dismal welter, several of her melodies—the nonrock ones—are listenable…. On the other hand, her directing sabotages the spoken texts with the same kind of stuntiness that disfigures the show as a whole. There is no excuse for her adulterating this spare, exacting prose with fake-naturalistic ums and ers, fake-stoned pauses, and fake-black street jive; she is as unfair to Herr as she is to Vietnam.