New Play in Manhattan

Babes In Arms (music & words by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart; Dwight Deere Wiman, producer) is a dewy and precocious musicomedy about a gang of youngsters who, abandoned by their vaudevillian parents for the summer, put on a revue to keep off the county farm. If for nothing else, the production is notable as a feat of theatrical cradle-robbing; there is hardly a vote in the cast.

The two most talented babes of Babes In Arms are apparently not even eligible to operate a motor vehicle at night in New York State, where full driving privileges begin at 18. One is Mitzi Green, a stripling advertised as 16 who used to be a child star in the films, progressed to a juvenile radio program which she surprisingly forsook this winter to entertain at a Manhattan night club called Versailles, a house where innocence is as rare as courtesy. There Miss Green did impersonations, the most painful of which--a re-enactment of Luise Rainer's big sob scene in The Great Ziegfeld--she repeats in Babes In Arms. Not only because of her physical appearance but because of her propensity for rolling her eyes and giving the customers a continuous big square-mouthed smile, Miss Green is constantly, if unintentionally, in the throes of an imitation of Fanny Brice. Nevertheless, she is the spark plug of Babes In Arms. She dances a little, sings a lot: most charmingly a song called My Funny Valentine, most stridently a song called The Lady Is A Tramp.

The other moving spirit of Babes In Arms had no previous theatrical experience whatever, which is evidently something of an asset since most of her colleagues are professional youngsters inclined to make up with mugging what they lack in poise. She is Wynn Murray and hails from the church choirs of Scranton, Pa. Miss Murray is the Kate Smith type, weighs some 150 lb. and, well into Act I, is the first one to get Babes In Arms off the ground when, with a pleasantly sophisticated manner, she croons of her home Way Out West On West End Avenue:

Git along, little taxi--you can keep the

change,

I'm ridin' home to my kitchen range

Way out west on West End Avenue!

Oh, I love to listen to the wagon wheels

That bring the milk that your neighbor

steals

Way out west on West End Avenue!

Having participated in the most refreshing musical show of the previous season, On Your Toes, Messrs. Rodgers & Hart were felicitated for having picked a novel notion this season for the first show they ever provided with a book as well as songs and lyrics. Lyricist Hart--never topped since he observed in 1925 that''beans could get no keener reception in a beanery: bless our mountain greenery home!"--still maintains the lightest touch in the business. As usual, the Rodgers melodies are fresh as a May wind, artful and surprising as the flight of a barn swallow. George Balanchine's ballets, particularly a long dream dance, continue to set marks for more serious masters to shoot for.

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