New Musical in Manhattan

Bells Are Ringing (book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music by Jule Styne), to put first things first, brought Judy Holliday back to Broadway after six years in Hollywood. Moreover, it brought her back--not least because of her own presence in it--in a very likeable show. The Judy Holliday who started her career in nightclubs shines readily in a musical. She can sing or do take-offs of singers and adorn a chorus or dance. In the role of a warmhearted answering-service operator, she can quaver like a beldam or give a rumbling impersonation of Santa Claus. But what is perhaps more important, she can look engagingly blank or beguilingly large-eyed, can be daft, sly, small-girl, strong-minded, touching. She is an adroit performer and an inimitable personality.

By way of her Manhattan switchboard, she brings hope, cheer, confusion and the vice squad into the lives of various unseen clients in whom she takes an unsolicited interest. With one of them (pleasantly played by Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie), she falls in love at first hearing. The love story of Bells Are Ringing is almost defiantly orthodox, but suffused as it is with Judy's warmth, never really becomes a burden. But it does bulk much too large for wit to keep pace with sentiment, for the Comden-Green book to display the usual fresh, crisp Comden-Greenness.

Judy's forest of switchboard wires would seem to promise wacky complications and entangling alliances in all five boroughs, with some of the offbeat sassiness of an On the Town. But despite bookies posing as musicians, and a dentist who yearns to write songs, despite visits to penthouses and nightclubs, and a rollicking subway ride, Bells Are Ringing--even in its liveliest dancing--sticks to Broadway, Broadway, all evening long.

But if it quite lacks distinction, Bells comes off very nicely at its own Broadway level. Once started, it keeps moving; the tone is gay and good-natured, Jerome Robbins' staging is brisk, the Comden-Green lyrics are sprightly, the Jule Styne tunes are often schmalzy, and now and then rousing. And to put first things last, there is a heaping portion of Judy Holliday.

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