New Musical in Manhattan

By Jupiter (music & lyrics by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart; book by Rodgers and Hart; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman and Rodgers in association with Richard Kollmar) started the 1942-43 season but possibly ended an era: it may well be Broadway's last fine-feathers, six-figures musical until after the war. Its large-scale lavishness--a beautiful chorus, gorgeous costumes, stage-deep dance routines--is one of its two real assets. The other is Ray Bolger (George White's Scandals, On Your Toes), its long-faced, nimble-footed star.

Adapted from Julian Thompson's The Warrior's Husband, in which Katharine Hepburn made her first Broadway success a decade ago, By Jupiter makes smirking and off-color copy--which soon palls and sometimes offends--of Playwright Thompson's inverted world of ancient Amazons where the women are bold and rakish warriors and their menfolk coy and high-voiced homebodies. It winds up with a real War-Between-the-Sexes in which the invading Greeks make proper women of the Amazons by stealing the magic girdle that is the source of their strength.

On the words-&-music side, Rodgers & Hart have done a fair enough job, but nothing to show that they are the top team in the business. The lyrics, sometimes gay, are oftener gamy. The score, except for one charming tune, Nobody's Heart Belongs to Me, is merely pleasant.

Merely pleasant too are most of the cast--pretty, thin-voiced Cinemactress Constance Moore, big-limbed Benay Venuta, gallery-god Ronald Graham. It's Ray Bolger's show. As husky Hippolyta's simpering, ladylike husband he is deft enough to draw many a laugh, skirt many a snicker. As a dancer he is superb--inexhaustibly inventive, unfailingly comic. But being the star of the show he has to carry too much on his shoulders to do all that he might with his feet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.