[The Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach musical "Promises, Promises" proved to be] the kind of show where you feel more in the mood to send it a congratulatory telegram than write a review….

The hero is not a nice man. In fact he is a kind of mousefink, who decides to sleep his way to the top of business without really lying. The sleeping is done—in a manner of speaking—not by him but by the senior executives in the life insurance firm in which he works. He gives them the key to his apartment and they give him the key to the executive washroom. They find a haven for their girls, and he finds a haven for his aspirations….

Then he falls in love. He falls in love with a girl who is on visiting terms with his apartment but not with him. Guess what happens? You are right the first time.

Mr. Simon's play (and revealingly I find myself thinking of it as much as a play with music as a musical) crackles with wit. The jokes cling supplely to human speech so that they never seem contrived. The whole piece has a sad and wry humanity to it, to which the waspishly accurate wise cracks are only a background.

It is also interesting to see how Mr. Simon wins our sympathy, even our empathy, for his morally derelict hero. In a dramatic trick half as old as time, or at least half as old as Pirandello, he has this dubious young man address the audience direct. The same dubious young man—he must have been great at selling life insurance—takes us so far into his lack of confidence that we feel sorry for him. We even forgive his half-baked way of talking to invisible audiences. Mr. Simon, you see, is a very resourceful man, and persuasive. He wouldn't even have to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge; you would be prepared to rent it.