Old Operetta in Manhattan

The Red Mill (music by Victor Herbert; book & lyrics by Henry Blossom; produced by Paula Stone & Hunt Stromberg Jr.) has never before been revived on Broadway since it first nourished there --starring Montgomery & Stone--in 1906. There was no overpowering reason for reviving it now. The Victor Herbert music is nice but hardly notable. The book, jokes and horseplay are not only antiquated for 1945 but were probably no better than average for 1906. Yet this production has the disarming trait of not trying to bridge the years. It makes no effort to scrape any of the red mildew off The Red Mill. Hence the show is an amiable relic. It is frankly a horsecar-- not a horsecar pretending tp be a bus.

Bustin' out all over with operetta romances and sub-romances, misunderstandings, impersonations and sundry other Dutch-village doings, The Red Mill utterly eludes summarizing. Dorothy Stone is still light on her feet. In the main comedy roles, Michael O'Shea and Eddie Foy Jr. save some of the long, dusty stretches between songs. The songs themselves--Whistle It, In Old New York, Because You're You, Isle of Our Dreams, Every Day Is Ladies' Day With Me--are pleasant both as melodies and memories. The Red Mill is far from a full evening's entertainment, but in that respect it is no worse than many a successful musical of the '40s.

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