New Musical in Manhattan

Where's Charley? (book by George Abbott; music & lyrics by Frank Loesser; produced by Cy Feuer & Ernest H. Martin in association with Gwen Rickard) sets to music that old piece of nonsense with nine lives, Charley's Aunt. The result is not happy, less because the 55-year-old farce is dead than because the new procedure is deadening.

Revived on Broadway eight years ago with Jose Ferrer, the horseplay about an Oxford student who impersonates his aunt from Brazil so that a lunch party will have a chaperon was mostly fun because it was magnificently frenzied: farce is among the few things with the right to advocate violence. The new version not only has music that is pretty poor, but, as a way of halting the high jinks, every tune might as well be Lead, Kindly Light.

Yet it has a simple-minded charm at moments, and it has Ray Bolger throughout. Bolger is not a great comic--just an awfully good one, which is quite a lot for someone who is also a great dancer. One of those rare males who prove amusing rather than embarrassing in women's clothes, Bolger clowns through the evening with his customary long-faced liveliness. And when he takes it into his feet to kick off both his petticoats and the plot, and spins in a medley of tap, softshoe, eccentric and ballroom dancing, Where's Charley? becomes the most delightful disappointment of the season.

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