New Musical in Manhattan

Mexican Hayride (book by Herbert & Dorothy Fields; music & lyrics by Cole Porter; produced by Michael Todd) is a $225,000 tropical splurge. Better musicomedies have been swung on far less money, but Mexican Hayride is a smooth formula job -- large-scale and lavish, with good dancing, fair tunes, pleasant people and plenty of Bobby Clark fun.

Zany Clark, of the sudden grrrr, the steady leer, the carousel-horse lope, is cast as a numbers racketeer hiding out from the FBI in Mexico. Pursuit of that fine fiction drives him into some startling new disguises. As a strolling musician he flutes and frolics; as a bucktoothed Indian squaw (see cut) he joins in a happy warble, Count Your Blessings:

You'll forget you had the dropsy

When they finish your autopsy sb sb sb

You'll be happier when you own a

Pretty pickled pine kimona,

So count your blessings and smile.*

Second-fiddling the fun is pert, legsome June Havoc (Pal Joey), cast as a lady bullfighter from the States, and given to such rhymed ruefulness as:

There's a boy moose for ev'ry girl moose,

There's a boy goose for ev'ry girl goose,

There's a papoose for ev'ry ma-moose,

So there must be someone for me.*

In general, Composer Porter has relied on comic ditties instead of trying to dazzle the customers with languorous Latin rhythms. But out of a pleasantly unexciting score emerges one fetching, early-Porterish tune, I Love You. The dancing, too, is Main Stem rather than Mexican--fast routines and catchy specialties. The sets are vivid, the costumes showy. Killjoy on the hayride is the book, which for a while is a worse threat than the FBI.

* By permission of the copyright owners, Chappell & Co.

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