On Your Toes

On Your Toes (words & music by George Abbott, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers ; Dwight Deere Wiman, producer) is an historic show. Like The Little Show (1929), Music in the Air (1932), As Thou sands Cheer (1933), it stands as a definite milestone in the U. S. musical theatre. Fu ture productions which fail to measure up to its stiff standards of achievement may be considered to have retrograded. Such was the appraisal of the most gilded first-night audience of the 1935-36 theatrical season -- a collection ranging from handsome Federal Housing Administrator Stewart McDonald to Hoofer Eleanor Powell--which roared in astonishment and approval all the way through the performance.

On Your Toes devotes its first act to kidding a Russian ballet. Ballet dancers' Broadway reputation for arrogance, jealousy and venery offers, like a clown's buttocks, a large and ludicrous target for whacking. Three modern masters of whacking, George Abbott (who staged this season's side-splitting Boy Meets Girl) and Rodgers & Hart (who supplied Jumbo's score) have done so with authority. The finale of On Your Toes' Act I, in which disaster strolls implacably through a conventional ballet, will make it impossible for many people ever again to take the serious Dance seriously. Thereupon, Messrs. Abbott, Rodgers & Hart, uncannily abetted by famed Choreographer George Balanchine, perform an even more impressive theatrical miracle by staging a 15-min. ballet of their own, "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." which would probably evoke an ovation from modernists anywhere outside On Your Toes. Miracle No. 3, which tops the evening, occurs when Abbott et al. bring the whole performance back into the musical comedy theatre with an exciting, side-splitting and thoroughly surprising finale.

Written and staged by men accustomed to smash hits, discerning Producer Wiman's show lifts some old stars to new heights. Disillusioned Luella Gear (Gay Divorce), the only hard-boiled stage lady who seems to know where comedy ceases and churlishness begins, has never been more amusing than when she sings:

Mother told me

Never to drink with a guy.

But I was made

On lemonade.

The heart is quicker than the eye.*

As a bulbous and bearded impresario, Yale's famed Drama Professor Monty Woolley simultaneously makes his debut and a great success.

Languorous Tamara Geva ribs her fellow Russians as the temperamental ballerina who introduces her equals as her "supporting cast" and, when told to get some clothes on because a man is coming to see her, packs deep disappointment into the line: "Oh, that kind of a man."

Into his own at last comes gangling, homely Ray Bolger, whose feet are loaded with as much "swing" as Benny Goodman's jazzband. In On Your Toes, Bolger has his first chance to establish himself as a definite stage personality rather than a funny Broadway tap dancer. Called upon to impersonate a WPA music teacher who winds up as a master of ballet, his genuine charm and humor are instantly apparent. In fact, he and his teammate, pretty golden Doris Carson, seem to fit into that important theatrical niche vacated by the late Marilyn Miller & Jack Donahue.

Tunes in the best Richard Rodgers manner: Too Good for the Average Man, There's a Small Hotel.

* Reproduced by permission of the copyright owners, Chapell & Co., Inc.

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