New Musicals in Manhattan

New Musical in Manhattan

Follow the Girls (book by Guy Bolton and Eddie Davis; lyrics & music by Dan Shapiro, Milton Pascal and Phil Charig; produced by Dave Wolper) has a number of virtues and two faults--its music and its book. Since the two mean hardly less to musicomedy than mountains and lakes mean to Switzerland, Follow the Girls falls short of perfection. But for the unchoosy pleasure-seekers and visiting firemen who swarm over Broadway, it should nicely fill the bill. It spills over with good humor. It boasts a lot of good people--likably tough Singer Gertrude Niesen, likably loony Comic Jackie Gleason, pert Dancer Dorothy Keller, graceful Ballerina Irina Baronova. Its dancing has zest and spin. Its girls are good-looking, its sets handsome, its costumes stylish.

Two or three of the tunes in Follow the Girls have a kind of rough zip; but not one sounds fresh, not one proves hummable.

New Play in Manhattan

Chicken Every Sunday (adapted from Rosemary Taylor's book, by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein; produced by Edward Gross) is a tall tale of boardinghouse life in Tucson, Ariz. a generation ago. A lot of it is less boardinghouse than monkey house, less chicken on Sunday than ham and corn during the week. Staking everything on laughs, Playwrights Epstein leap the boarderline of probability, cram the house with all kinds of weirdies and whacks, from a whiskey-soared giantess who yodels to a nymphomaniac who tears after Indians.

Best and least batty of the exhibits are Emily Blachman, who runs the boarding house, and her husband Jim. Emily (engagingly played by Mary Philips) is a bohemianized F.F.V., bighearted, bossy, shrewd, who keeps a roof over her family while the blustering, big-shot Jim (well played by Rhys Williams) tries for the sky. A familiar rudder-& -sails combination, the Blachmans ship a lot of water, ride put a lot of domestic storms.

Chicken Every Sunday is a spotty, oversexed, jerry-built farce, smacking less of Rosemary Taylor's Arizona memory book than of Adapters Epsteins' Hollywood tricks. But some of it is as funny as it is crude. And much of it is as lively as it is untrue to life.

There was turkey as well as chicken on the Broadway menu last week. Only the Heart (by Horton Foote), an earnest story about a Texas woman who tried to manage everybody, merely succeeded in depressing the audience. Public Relations (by Dale Eunson) must have depressed even its own cast, who did what they could in a stupefying comedy about a middleaged, divorced pair who were once Hollywood's first gentleman and lady.

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