New Musical in Manhattan

New Pins and Needles (music & lyrics by Harold J. Rome; produced by Labor Stage, Inc.). Two years ago this week Pins and Needles opened, almost clandestinely, on Broadway. The basters and but-tonholemakers of David Dubinsky's I.L.G.W.U. were merely out for a romp; they ended by setting a record.

By its second birthday Pins and Needles had played 865 Broadway performances; longest previous run for a musical show was Irene, with 670. Every girl in the cast now sports a fur coat with a union label.

To celebrate its second birthday, Pins and Needles rigged up virtually a new revue. Only three of the original numbers remain. The new show cannot, from the fame of the old one, provide the same kind of exciting surprise. But on its merits it is a much better show. It is better put together, better paced, better performed. It has four or five downright bad numbers, but no longer any heavy and humorless ones, and it has ceased to be amateurish while remaining fresh.

One of the best new numbers is Mene, Mene, Tekel, a rousing piece of Biblical hotcha. Another is Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl, a funnier burlesque than the usual beer-&-pretzels music-hall version, which achieves "social significance" through its injunction to the innocent Bertha that "it's better with a union man." Best number in the show is The Harmony Boys, in which Father Coughlin, Fritz Kuhn and Senator Reynolds go into an uproarious song-&-dance, muttering lines like these of Fritz's:

Last night I acted indiscreet;

I yelled Heil, Hitler! in Delancey Street*

*A section of Manhattan almost exclusively populated by Jews.

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