Broadway Blunders

Anna Russell and Her Little Show was built around an English mimic of various styles of singing and pianoplaying. Diligent, perceptive, unfunny, Actress Russell was like a perfume that had every merit except fragrance.

Carnival in Flanders (book by Preston Sturges; music & lyrics by James Van Heusen & Johnny Burke) spent some $300,000 and almost a year getting itself in shape as a musical. But it was still so shapeless that even the unflagging verve of its star, Dolores Gray, could not make it last more than a week.

A Red Rainbow (by Myron C. Fagan) was equally wooden and clumsy as the murdered-columnist whodunit it started off to be, and the anti-Communist-who-done-America-dirt it turned into. To keep the audience interested, it needed such allegations as that Harry Hopkins gave Russia the atom bomb.

A Pin to See the Peepshow (by F. Tennyson Jesse & H. M. Harwood) used an English love-triangle murder case, not in order to raise goose pimples, but to offer a slow-motion, 13-scene biography of the hanged but possibly innocent wife. The whole thing was so soporific that the opening-night audience could hear A Pin drop into limbo; there was no second performance.

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