Nights in Shinbone Alley

"This short hepcat opera buffa is a boffola," caroled Variety in its review of archy and mehitabel. Set to jazzy, tricky but agreeable music by George (Tubby the Tuba) Kleinsinger, the hard knocks and good times of Shinbone Alley came to life last week at Manhattan's Town Hall, providing the music season's pleasantest half hour.

Librettist Joe Darion fairly faithfully followed the saga of archy, described by his creator, the late Columnist Don Marquis, as a sensitive cockroach who had to express himself or die. For archy, writing was even more painful than for most poets: he had to type each letter by diving headfirst from the frame of the machine to the keys (his works were all in lower case because he was unable to land simultaneously on the shift key). His bruised outpourings are mostly about mehitabel, the life-battered but life-loving cat ("toujours gai, toujours gai") who is pretty sure she is a reincarnation of Cleopatra, the hottest cat on the Nile. The libretto is somewhat bowdlerized (gone is mehitabel's running refrain of "wottheheli wotthehell"), but the original's splendid gutter lyricism is still there: wind come out of the north and pierce to the guts within but some day mehitabel s guts will string a violin

In the Manhattan production (imaginatively presented without sets or costumes by the Little Orchestra Society), Mignon Dunn, a mezzo-soprano of Dag-mar-like proportions, made a fine, feline mehitabel; diminutive Baritone Jonathan Anderson made the best-voiced cock roach in history, and a vocal quartet called the Four Heatherstones supplied bacchanalian backgrounds. This spring Columbia Records will release an archy and mehitabel album, starring Carol Channing. But Kleinsinger and Darion expect the bulk of their royalties to result from the opera fever that has broken out across the U.S. among amateur and semi-pro groups. University workshops in particular have eagerly seized on such short works as Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Tele phone and Kurt Weill's Down in the Valley. In that company archy and mehitabel should easily hold its own: it is consistently imaginative and toujours gai.

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