New Musicals in Manhattan

Let's Face It! (book by Herbert & Dorothy Fields; music & lyrics by Cole Porter; produced by Vinton Freedley) is the first musical of the season to stir the critics to half-hysterical admiration. The show, a good routine musical, didn't fully rate it, but its headliner, mop-haired, magic-tongued Danny Kaye, did. Last season, in Lady in the Dark, he was almost brand-new to Broadway, but he would have stolen the show from any one less than Gertrude Lawrence. In Let's Face It! (for which he up & quit Lady) he rides off with the show in triumph.

The mad gestures and faces Kaye makes are enough to win him a niche in comic pantomime; they shrink to nothing compared with his whirlwind patter, his miraculous doubletalk. Even as he enacted Melody in Four F (written for him by his wife, Sylvia Fine, and Max Liebman), first-nighters suspected that they were seeing the birth of another such theater classic as Robert Benchley's Treasurer's Report, Joe Cook's Four Hawaiians.

Based on Cradle Snatchers, a Coolidge-era farce in which three long-suffering wives commandeer three college-boy gigolos, Let's Face It! chucks college boys for draftees without bringing shame upon the Army or disaster to the show. It is a lively job, leaping nimbly from gag to gag, light on its feet, pleasant to the eye. Cole Porter's score, though never haunting, is often hummable. In a generally competent cast, Comedienne Eve Arden stands out for her deft, acid touch, Mary Jane Walsh for her singing personality.

Son of a Brooklyn dress cutter named Kominsky, 28-year-old Danny Kaye didn't get into show business until he'd been bounced as a soda-jerker for giving his friends free drinks, bounced as an insur ance clerk for making a $40,000 mistake on the books. Then he got a start on the Borscht Circuit in the Catskills, hopped off for Siam and Singapore in a vaudeville act, stayed in the small time until he met his wife. She contrived for him dizzy skits that released all his mimicry, highlighted his genius for making gibberish exciting and hilarious. A wow with them at Manhattan's smart La Martinique, he was snatched up by Moss Hart for Lady in the Dark. In Lady he stopped the show cold with Ira Gershwin's lyric for Tchaikovsky--rattling off the names of 54 Russian composers in about 40 seconds.

Kay's appeal is terrific because it is double-edged: his daffy antics convulse people at the same moment that his incredible virtuosity astounds them.

High Kickers (book by George Jessel, Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby; music & lyrics by Kalmar & Ruby; produced by Alfred Bloomingdale) is a musicomedy attempt to bag the spirit of burlesque. The method is simple: the plot is all about a burlesque show. The joke-making is equally simple: always corny and always off-color. The casting problem could not have been hard: gams, old vaudevillians, Hot Mama Sophie Tucker and, to keep everything moving, Hellow-Mama George Jessel. The result is unfortunate: bearable in slivers, terrible in bulk.

Little George Jessel, with a couple of lively monologues, does what he can for the show. Big Sophie Tucker, with a lot of over-lively songs and an uncompleted striptease, does more than anyone wants. The girls and costumes are pretty, but the wit is much oftener rough than ready, and the songs and dancing are dull.

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