New Plays in Manhattan

It Happens on Ice--A Musical Icetravaganza (music by Vernon Duke & others, lyrics by Al Stillman; produced by Sonja Henie & Arthur Wirtz) is a vast and chilly vaudeville which slides across 50 tons of ice covering the enlarged stage of the Rockefellers' Center Theatre. Before and behind a curtain composed of 315,720,000 fibres of shimmering glass, a large company of skaters perform a series of fleet and charming ballets interrupted by specialty turns and, not often enough for many spectators, Joe Cook. Steel runners on ice add many mobile possibilities to the human body, and these have never been better exploited, thanks largely to the choreography of Catherine Littlefield & Robert Linden, which avoids boring platoon movements and sticks to free, whirling ballet designs.

The presence of Joe Cook means that the two foremost gadget comedians in the business are on Broadway. The other: Ed Wynn of Boys and Girls Together. If Wynn is a department store of inane machinery, Cook is a Montgomery Ward. He finally appears in a neon-lighted bandmaster's uniform to conduct the 1941 version of his famed Fuller Construction Symphony Orchestra, in which a double hanging leads by various roundabout mechanics to the tinkling of a drummer's triangle.

Since Cook's entrances are infrequent, since the musical score is chiefly valuable for spurring on the skaters, the performance rests largely on the skating. Enthusiasts for the art will find just about every variety they could want, from the classic duos of Hedi Stenuf and Skippy Baxter through some highly ludicrous comedy gliding to the syncopated mastery of an auburn-haired young woman named Le Verne. By way of encouragement to the patriotic spirit of the times, the production closes with a copper-tinted ballet entitled What's On The Penny, reminding the audience that "E Pluribus Unum . . . isn't on the peso, isn't on the lira, isn't on the franc."

Director Leon Leonidoff rehearsed the glacial $200,000 spectacle in an overcoat and rubbers, while the pianist swathed himself in camel's hair. The huge cast that swirls and veers through Norman Bel Geddes' wintry landscapes was drawn from as far away as Austria and South Africa. Although Producer Sonja Henie, most famed skatress of them all, does not appear in her own production, she has a worthy substitute in Premiere Ballerina Stenuf, an engagingly plump Viennese who was runner-up to Henie in the 1936 Olympics. Skippy Baxter, a Massine of the runners, began his career, aged 10, on rented skates in Ottawa. Le Verne (last name Busher) developed her off-beat virtuosity at De-Pauw University and in Chicago.

Boyd's Daughter (by St. John Ervine, produced by Copley Productions). Last week the angry Ulsterman who once spent a choleric period as drama critic of the late New York World gave Manhattan a little play which is practically a complete definition of the word wholesome.

Set in the Ulster village of Donaghreagh in some sweet pre-Hitlerian period, the plot poses the daughter of a greengrocer with the question of choosing between a young Presbyterian minister and a would-be competitor of her father.

The mild hilarity of the play was in such lines as "Funerals aren't what they were" and "I near broke a tooth on a rock that was in one of the buns." It closed after three performances on Broadway, but should enjoy a long life in the catalogue of Samuel French, purveyor of dramatic scripts to churches, high schools, summer stock, and other naive, high-minded players.

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