New Musical in Manhattan

Ziegfeld Follies can be thanked for bringing Beatrice Lillie, after four years, back to Broadway. Unhappily, it has brought nothing of its fabled oldtime self back. Not only is Rome not rebuilt in a day; not only do styles in architecture change--even showgirl architecture--but there is the always irreducible need of using good bricks and mortar.

In this show, to be sure, there are the required number of stately showgirls with whole gardens in their hair, the remembered number of semi-nudes descending the staircase. And as of yore, the flesh is willing; but the spirit is weak. The spirit, in fact, has just about vanished. The songs have no lilt, the lyrics no verve, the sketches no crackle. The dancing has its bits of color and movement, but never the slightest distinction. In such feckless fandangos, the better performers--Billy De Wolfe, Harold Lang and Helen Wood--are largely wasted, while most other performers only make things worse.

There remains the Lillie. In the circumstances, it is clearly no accident that she is at her best when she speaks not a word; for lamentable are many of the words she has to speak, or--worse yet--to trill. Indeed, that chill stare of hers, suggesting an insulted mermaid, that disdainful glide, as of a sneering sleepwalker, might very well be addressed to her material. Even when shackled by it, she manages at moments to shake herself magically free; the grande dame lurches, the veiled maiden loops, culture splinters into anarchy. There are scattered glories with Actress Lillie as an airplane hostess croaking doom, or as a rajah's favorite, or as the girl in a sickle moon suspended high above the audience and tossing down garters and other pretty trinkets. But only at her first appearance, coming--with snow on her picture hat--into a restaurant filled with ghostly elegance, to dine alone, to struggle with asparagus and be rebuffed by corn, to clip a lobster's claws and dip gloved fingers in a finger bowl--only then does Lillie achieve a definitive grandeur de folie, or the Follies recapture the grandeur that was Rome.

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