There is something awfully depressing about seeing "Finian's Rainbow" this year this way….

It is not just that the musical is dated. Something lovely and nostalgic could have been made out of old Missitucky for the generation that grew up on "Finian's Rainbow" and "Brigadoon." It is that it has been done listlessly and even tastelessly, with quick updatings of Negro personalities to match what people who have lived in Beverly Hills too long must imagine modern black sensibilities are. The cast is full of children who act as artificially and insincerely as the whole enterprise, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, would suggest….

[The whole story] has just gone dim, as though nobody had troubled with it—hoping only to sell it to television as a family musical and get it over with.

Renata Adler, "'Finian's Rainbow'," in The New York Times (© 1968 by The New York Times Company...