New Plays in Manhattan

Flying Colors (words & music by Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz; Max Gordon, producer). The gaunt little face of Dancer Tamara Geva (Chauve Souris, Three's a Crowd) hints at amorous vigils and voluptuous fatigues. His London tailor gratuitously makes the underpinning of Clifton Webb (Sunny, Three's a Crowd) seem even more graceful, more polite than nature made it. When Charles Butterworth's (Sweet Adeline) mouth is closed he looks like a small George Arliss; when the long lower lip falls open he looks like the Mad Hatter. Patsy Kelly (Sketch Book, Wonder Bar) is a ruffian. If you laid end-to-end the amount of excitement and diversion that this talented quartet has caused theatregoers it would circle Manhattan's theatre district a num-ber of times.

In addition to the above personnel, Producer Max Gordon, who considerably enlarged the scope of U. S. musicomedy when he produced The Band Wagon last year, has provided his latest attraction with other good things: Philip Loeb's delightfully self-conscious clowning; a dancer named Imogene Coca (who once worked with Mr. Loeb in Garrick Gaieties), an attractive young woman whose eyes close from the bottom; her teammate Larry Adler, the man who can use his hand like a tassel. Norman Bel Geddes designed the scenery.

Among high comic points in the show is the scene in which small Mr. Butterworth from time to time glumly interrupts a love lyric being howled at him by Miss Kelly with remarks about a trip to Europe he once made on the "doubles Ile de France." ("I was only sick once--five days--five nights.") Also funny is a skit by Librettist Dietz and George S. Kaufman called "On the American Plan." The scene is laid in the lobby of a hotel which is doing a rushing business providing rooms for suicides. One guest is described as having made "a very pretty landing" from the 23rd floor. Another demands orange juice with his cyanide. An indigent foreigner (Mr. Loeb) who can only afford a room on the second floor, jumps, returns to jump again muttering, "America! Hoch-tooey!"

Best set: the ingenious "Louisiana hayride." Best dance: "Alone together'' (Webb & Geva). Best tune and lyric: "A Rainy Day." Shocker: a song & dance sequence concerning muggles (dope cig-arets).

Clear All Wires (by Bella & Samuel Spewack; Herman Shumlin, producer") is an explosive tour de farce about foreign correspondents. It deals with the bombastic activities of notorious Buckley Joyce Thomas (Thomas Mitchell, last seen in Riddle Me This) who "never leaves a country as he found it" and who is a cross between Richard Harding Davis and patch-eyed Floyd Gibbons.

Correspondent Thomas, banished from the chieftainship of his newspaper's European bureau for chaperoning too vigilantly the young woman whom his publisher has sent abroad to study singing, finds himself exiled to Moscow. Within an hour after his plane has alighted on Russian soil he tricks the New York Times man (a quiet Britisher not unlike the Times's famed Walter Duranty) out of the best suite at the Savoy, steals his Russian assistant, wangles three telephones out of the Commissar of Communications and begins cabling his paper a running chronicle of himself called "My Life with the Red Army." Unhappily, Correspondent Thomas' employer, finding that his singer has followed the lively newsman to Moscow, also finds Correspondent Thomas' stuff dull and oldfashioned, fires him. "He's betrayed me!" wails Thomas, settling down to rack his brains for some reportorial coup which will reinstate him. It looks as though someone will have to be shot. Not Stalin. ("He's got too many soldiers around him.") Lenin? No, he's dead. Trotsky? He's in Turkey. Victim finally chosen is a languid, muddleheaded aristocrat whom Correspondent Thomas insists is "the last of the Romanovs."

But fate saves the last of the Romanovs, spots in his stead the Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Occasionally the material of Clear All Wires wears thin, but not in this sequence. Actor Mitchell, whose sturdy, plump bulk suggests the physique of a onetime college fullback who has sat around club bars a good deal since graduation, waves his thick arms, charges up & down, sweats mightily. The reward for his knavery is not a firing squad, which is ominously imminent, but a commission to go to China for William Randolph Hearst.

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