Another New Musical

High Button Shoes (book by Stephen Longstreet; music & lyrics by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn; produced by Monte Proser and Joseph Kipness) isn't a specially good show, but it's pretty often a gay one. A period musical (1913), it spins an amiably undisciplined yarn about a con man and his stooge (Phil Silvers and Joey Faye) who sell waterlogged real estate in New Brunswick, N.J., flee to Atlantic City, sneak back for a Rutgers-Princeton game, at the end are earnestly seeking fresh frauds and pitches new.

A sizable bill of particulars could be drawn up against High Button Shoes: much of the score is commonplace, most of the lyrics are mediocre and great gobs of the humor fall flat. But the show has a redeeming bounce; it has a good comic (when he has good comedy) in Actor Silvers; it has a girl with looks and personality in Nanette Fabray. Most of all, it has a brilliant choreographer in Jerome Robbins (On the Town, Billion Dollar Baby). Robbins' best offering: a hilarious Mack Sennett ballet which grows into a masterpiece of controlled pandemonium.

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