New Musicals in Manhattan

Oklahoma! (music by Richard Rodgers; book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, 2d; produced by The Theater Guild) pretty much deserves its exclamation point. A folk musical laid in the Indian territory just after the turn of the century, it is thoroughly refreshing without being oppressively rustic. It boasts no musicomedy names and nothing much in the way of a book. But Composer Rodgers (working for the first time in his Broadway career without Lyricist Lorenz Hart) has turned out one of his most attractive scores, and Choreographer Agnes de Mille (the ballet Rodeo) has created some delightful dances. Even run-of-de-Mille dances have more style and imaginativeness than most Broadway routines, while the best are almost in a different world.

"Based on" Lynn Riggs's folk play, Green Grow the Lilacs, Oklahoma! chiefly concerns the struggle between a good cowboy (Alfred Drake) and an evil hired hand (Howard da Silva) over a fetching farm girl (Joan Roberts). The cowboy's triumph is delayed by a perversity of female behavior pretty glaring even for musicomedy, not to speak of a brand of villainy pretty passe even in Wild West films.

But the general atmosphere is a good deal better. And there is warm romantic melody in such songs as Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' and People Will Say, gay lilt in The Surrey with the Fringe on Top, humor in Pore Jud and I Cain't Say No, a roof-buster of an anthem in Oklahoma! If, compared to Lorenz Hart's at their best, Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics lack polish, so after all did frontier Oklahoma.

Ziegfeld Follies (music by Ray Henderson; lyrics by Jack Yellen; produced by the Shuberts in association with Alfred Bloomingdale and Lou Walters) is Shubert flapdoodle. In 1934 and 1936 the Shuberts borrowed this lustrous title to some effect, but this time they have thrown it away on a completely lackluster show. Alternating undistinguished sketches with indistinguishable tunes, gaudy spectacles with soggy satire, young legs with old gags, handsome clothes with jitterbug clatter, it is just the Shuberts' old Winter Garden formula to cop the summer trade.

Most in evidence and least in the way is Comic Milton Berle (Earl Carroll's Vanities, See My Lawyer), whose patter is sometimes funny, though his aversion to new jokes is hardly an asset. The screen's best deadpan butler, Arthur Treacher, buttles his way through a succession of poor skits. With finely formed, Hungarian-born Ilona Massey, the Follies does a little girl-glorifying, but in general the show lacks oomph as well as pep.

Many an oldster, dozing over last week's show, must have dreamed back to the great days of the New Amsterdam Theater, where the late, great Florenz Ziegfeld made summer official with a new Follies. Perhaps memory winged back to the Follies of 1917, with W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Fanny Brice, Bert Williams, Walter Catlett, Peggy Hopkins (later Joyce) in the cast. Or to the Follies of 1919, with a cast hardly less impressive, and such tunes as Tulip Time, Mandy, and the nonpareil Bert Williams' You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake On Tea.

The Shows of Yesteryear. Between 1907 and 1927 the Follies had just about everybody: Mae Murray, Ina Claire, Nora Bayes, Ed Wynn, Ann Pennington, Marion Davies, Marilyn Miller, George White, Leon Errol, Raymond Hitchcock, the Dolly Sisters, Van & Schenck, Moran & Mack. Among the Follies song writers were Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml, Irving Berlin. In one edition or another, Fanny Brice choked throats with My Man, Gilda Gray upped blood pressures with her shimmy, Bill Fields played his ludicrous game of pool, Gallagher & Shean hurled countrywide their most famous song.

On the New Amsterdam roof, after the show, Ziegfeld offered his Midnight Frolic, the most glamorous memory in Manhattan nightclub history. There John J. Pershing did some of his victory dancing and the jazz age got under its fanciest headway to the strains of the late Art Hickman's great band from California playing Avalon, Japanese Sandman and the Tishomingo Blues. There, after midnight, lemonades brought appalling Prohibition prices, the Follies chorus and principals entertained, and the most notable playboys of the postwar period started on their hair-losing ways.

But, above everything else, the Follies were--and were meant to be--girl shows. Though he had the greatest clowns of the era, Ziegfeld distrusted most of their turns, thought they detracted from the lure. His most famous show girl, beautiful, English-born Dolores, got a record $650 a week. Ziegfeld seldom issued a chorus call; he kept a "Book of Girls" and out of it came the most delectable, and probably the most wined-&-dined, chorines in the history of show business. A vast number married millionaires; asked, once, just how many, onetime Follies man Georgie White replied: "All the smart ones."

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