Labor Hit

International Ladies' Garment Workers Union is proud of having the biggest local (New York 89: 42,138 members) of any U. S. labor union. By last week I. L. G. W. U. had something else to be proud of. While the Broadway season continued to number more flops than successes, I. L. G. W. U.'s homemade show, Pins and Needles, had become a definite hit. Produced last month by Labor Stage, Inc. as a weekend venture, the show had been so jammed since then that Labor Stage announced last week that it would present the show every night, beginning the week before Christmas.

It took union members a year of rehearsals, threaded between sewing hours, to get Pins and Needles in shape. Staged in a remodeled Manhattan cinema house, with an amateur cast and two grand pianos for orchestra, its rollicking satire made critics agree that I. L. G. W. U. members were class-conscious but not grim about it, that their show was funnier and faster than many a Broadway revue.

Opening chorus of Pins end Needles declares its theme. A number of enthusiastic seamstresses change from work clothes to evening clothes, beamishly chant:

Sing us a song with social significance; There's nothing else that will do. It must be packed with social fact Or we won't love you.

Lynne Jaffee (Dressmakers' Union) minces like a millionaire, twitters to a line of strikers: "It's not cricket to picket." The show's dance specialty is Doin' the Reactionary. Slim Ruth Rubinstein (Corset & Brassiere Union), as Italy's Public Enemy No. 1 (because she produces only one little Fascist at a time), laments:

I'm sure that Mussolini

Thinks I'm an awful meany:

No matter how I try

I cannot satisfy.

Most popular number is one in which Mussolini, Hitler, Eden and a Japanese general, bedight with halos and wings, slyly kill each other with pistols, daggers, machine guns tucked away in their angelic robes. All the while they sweetly sing:

Four little angels of peace are we;

There is one thing on which we agree: With foe or with friend We will fight to the end

Just for Peace! Peace! Peace!

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