The piranhas of the New York press proved to be a cold fish audience at a preview of Bette Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue.” It was a crowd that I would not care to face if I were hitting the stage of the Minskoff Theatre with a “comeback” at stake. There was no rushing the stage, no anticipatory laughter, none of that audience sweetening on which Midler’s particular act has always depended.

The Revue is essentially not much different than a musical comedy like “Sweet Charity,” except that it has a core of burlesque in which many recent musical forms and events are reviewed and renewed through adaptation of Midler’s peculiar gifts. Actually the Revue resembles those Summer Camp shows you once gave at Camp Tamarack or Camp Pokagon or wherever. I am not talking about “camp” Here, not in the sense that it is usually applied to Midler. I arri talking about the breezilyamateurish segues (credit director Joe Layton), the youthful restylings of stardards from various genres (from a samba-ed “Strangers in the Night” sung into a juke box to Guest Star Lionel Hampton’s marimba treatment of “A Day in the Life” to Midler’s driving version of Bowie’s “Young Americans”), and that peculiar feeling of summer camp children performing for their parents: I just wanna be loved. Aren’t I cute?

That Midler is cute most of the time (except during an overly-long comic monologue in the second act and occasionally abrasive reactions to the audience) is to her credit. We do want to love her like she is one of our own, take on her warm-heartedness and isolation as though we could assuage herf fears. You see Bette Midler makes the audience feel responsible for the success of “Clams on the Half Shell” in the same way that we have all — at one time or another — made our parents responsible for our worst failings and our most expressive virtues. What I found most appealing about the Revue has more to do with the fact thatj Bette Midler will hot, cannot, sustain herself than it does with the lady’s talent. We must enjoy her right now. For what it is worth, here is my prediction about Bette Midler: in five years her voice will be almost totally destroyed by her vocal technique, a technique dependent upon her nose. Even now, when she redoes “Hello in There,” she cannot sing softly, cannot produce the sound which once made her 30 distinct. She is a lovely natural actress and she should continue — as she does with “Clams on the Half Shell”—to heighten this sensitivity, because acting is what Bette Midler must ride on in the future, acting and a unique sense of knowing what it is to be both an underdog and an overdog. In the future she will not need the Harlettes, will not need the King Kong sets, will not apply the Andrews Sisters and the Dixie Cups and a hundred Other burlesques to her personality. Not because''she will not wnat to do this, but because she will be vocally incapable of it. It is a problematic position for a performer in her early thirties, and one which Midler must navigate cautiously. Summer Camp stays alive with all of us only as memories, and memories are a hard act to follow. Bette Midler the Actress does not need Summer Camp, and when she learns this, she might well turn out to be our Senior Counselor.