New Musical in Manhattan

Top Banana (words & music by Johnny Mercer; book by Hy Kraft; produced by Paula Stone & Mike Sloane) is the most enjoyable show, considering how many things are wrong with it, that Broadway has seen in years. Few recent musicals have been so generally fast on their feet; fewer still have been so truly funny. And none has been more of a one-man show.

The man is engaging, bespectacled Phil (High Button Shoes) Silvers, who works like a truck horse at the speed of a race horse and with the timing of a steeplechaser. As TV's headlining, scene-hogging, credit-grabbing Jerry Biffle, the sort of megalomaniac who would throw himself in the path of a car if the headlights seemed bright enough, he bears a distinct but not very damaging resemblance to Milton Berle.

Actually, the funniest things in Top Banana come, not out of Berle, but out of burleycue. The show polishes up one old burlesque routine after another, before scrambling half a dozen together in a wonderful dream-sequence ballet. It also has bits of sheer nonsense, such as three men getting into a hilarious Laocooen-group tangle. As satire, Top Banana may not be very incisive, but as high jinks it is delightfully insane.

Fortunately, Top Banana does not depend on the usual musicomedy assets. Its music is discreetly commonplace; its love story classically dull. And no doubt, limelight-hogging Jerry Biffle saw to it that the sets, the costumes, the chorines should have no distracting charms. Top Banana is a musicomedy that owes its liveliness to TV, its laughs to burlesque, its success to indefatigable Phil Silvers.

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