New Revue in Manhattan

La Plume de Ma Tante (written by Robert Dhery; music by Gerard Calvi) speaks a kind of compound-fractured English. But in all other respects it is as engagingly French as it is abundantly funny.

The question of speech scarcely matters anyhow, for La Plume generally favors the international language of leers and leaps, pratfalls and double takes, cupboards and manholes. In a season deafened with the rat-tat-tat of drearily mechanical gag shows, this alone would call for modest thanks. But, in La Plume's case, the quality of merci is not strained; the show shines by more than contrast. If a fair number of its exhibits fall rather flat, even they have high spots to fall from, and acrobatic performers.

The success of the show is three-pronged: a matter of madness, precision and charm. The madness is a sort of scuffled Hellzapoppin, of light jolts and quick surprises. The audience seldom has a sense of what is coming and may quite literally be hit with it. The evening offers a series of memorably wacky pictures: a man contentedly nibbling a dog biscuit; a superb high-kicking chorus line with one girl always kicking the wrong leg; a male ballet dancer suddenly blushing at his own immodest tights.

Partly because much of it moves to rhythmically gay and tinny music, La Plume has a sort of dreamlike clockwork precision, a sense of Jacques being nimble, Jacques being quick. But it is something very like charm that most enhances what is good in the show and cushions what is not. It is what lends lure to Robert Dhery's unbrilliant compere patter, appealingness to Pierre Olaf's pranks. It adds something human and wistful to the calisthenic comedy of the high point of the evening. This first-act finale, in which four monks make jubilant Maypole madness of four bell ropes, becomes--even as it is being laughed over--one of the tell-the-grandchildren stage memories of a lifetime.

What often seems like simple, elementary la-plume-de-ma-tante performing is in truth almost untranslatably idiomatic. From two of Broadway's outstanding virtues. La Plume removes the accompanying kinks: there is no aggression in its showmanship, no tension in its speed.

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