New Musical in Manhattan

Bloomer Girl (book by Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy from a play by Lilith & Dan James; music & lyrics by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg; produced by John C. Wilson in association with Nat Goldstone) was a roaring hit before it ever opened. Even after the superlatives have settled and the hats have dropped from the air, it remains a superior musical. A shiny period piece, it has approached its job with talent and invested a fortune with taste. Verbal comedy aside, it is an unusually well-rounded show--good music, likable lyrics, attractive dancing, engaging performers, stylish sets, gorgeous costumes, not too awful a book. The one defect of such virtue is that by keeping to its sunny plateaus, Bloomer Girl never scales any peaks.

Laid in an Eastern town in 1861, Bloomer Girl features revolt as well as romance. Evelina Applegate (played by thin-voiced but charming Celeste Holm) is the daughter of a stuffy manufacturer of hoopskirts, the niece of a suffragist proponent of bloomers. The young lady throws in her lot with her aunt, who also hides fugitive slaves. As a result, Evelina quarrels with her Kentucky beau (David Brooks), owner of one of the fugitives; and when Auntie gets pinched for crusading, Evelina accompanies her to jail. In musicomedy, however, stone walls do not an ending make.

All this is pleasantly interrupted by Composer Arlen's (Stormy Weather, Blues in the Night, That Old Black Magic) music--the choral lilt of When the Boys Come Home, the solemn gaiety of Sunday in Cicero Falls (a big spectacle number), the romantic fooling of Evelina, the dusky The Eagle and Me, the warm balladry of I Got a Song (put over with a bang by huge black Richard Huey).

The yarn is brightly punctuated, too, by Agnes de Mille's varied choreography--a sharp, expressive Civil War ballet, a waltz-drenched first-act finale, and some lively specialties in which Oklahoma!-born Joan McCracken is indeed pretty special. To her clean dancing style, she adds pert looks, funny gestures, a comic gift for bellowing a song:

T'morra, t'morra,* Livin' for t'morra, Why is t'morra better than t'day? T'morra, t'morra, Lookin' for t'morra, My aunt became a spinster That way.

* Copyright 1944 by Crawford Music Corp., N.Y.C.

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