New Revue in Manhattan

Three to Make Ready (music by Morgan Lewis; sketches and lyrics by Nancy Hamilton; produced by Stanley Gilkey and Barbara Payne) bobbed up, after a series of slithering musicomedies, as the season's first revue. But the change of pattern provided little change of luck. Despite having Dancer Ray Bolger (On Your Toes, By Jupiter), a star with about the nimblest feet in show business, Three to Make Ready slithers too. Its music is tepid and tacky. Most of its skits are not funny at all and the rest are not funny enough.

Bolger, to be sure, is a pretty great fellow, and seems an even greater one by contrast--fair as a star when only one is shining in a show. He repeats his floppy Wizard of Oz scarecrow dance; he wickedly burlesques ballroom dancers; and in the show's and the season's most fetching solo act, he does a perfect soft-shoe routine while poking delightful fun at it.

There are other pleasant people in Three to Make Ready, notably expertly exuberant Dancer Harold Lang (Fancy Free) and wryly imperious, tonily shrill Brenda Forbes, a kind of Class B Lillie. But otherwise, Three to Make Ready is a very wet box of matches--a bathroom sketch whose humor is even more out of date than the plumbing, an interminable Sad Sack todo, a facile take-off on Oklahoma!, comments by a grimly recurrent radio comic named Arthur Godfrey. Everything considered, Three to Make Ready would have done far better to confine itself to Bolger and a backdrop.

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