New Musical on Broadway

Redhead (book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields, Sidney Sheldon and David Shaw; music by Albert Hague; lyrics by Miss Fields) puts musicomedy's million-dollar baby Gwen Verdon in a five-and-ten-cent storehouse of old theatrical gewgaws. The proof of her impishly awesome talent is not that she stops the show, which she does, but that she starts it--and sometimes startles it--into an amusing show of life.

Set in a turn-of-the-century London waxworks, Redhead casts Gwen as Essie Whimple, a mouse-humble cockney-accented taxidermist of crime sensations. When the wax cools on her tableau of a purple-scarf murder before the clues do, and the strangler begins stalking her, poor Essie hides out as a showgirl with a neighboring theatrical troupe. For Essie, a spinster of 29, whose lips have never touched liquor, cigarettes or men, the greatest thrill is to be close to the show's American strong man (Richard Kiley). The problem: who will get whose man first--Scotland Yard or Essie Whimple? In a Keystone chase finale, Essie gets both.

From the moment Trouper Verdon turns plain Essie into a glittering song-and-dance girl, Redhead stops being deadhead. Her articulate hands, toes and torso are parts of speech and her lines are more pleasing than the script's. Her body is an erotic spoof spelling sex in quotes, as she overtilts a wayward hip or dislocates an amorous shoulder; in marathon-long dances, the stage is her keyboard, and she never hits a wrong note. Under the bravura assurance lies an endearing Chaplinesque poignance. Smiles of delight cross the wistful, wide-eyed Verdon face, like sudden dawns. Eager to please, she seems perpetually astonished at her power to give pleasure, as if the double-take she often uses were her own second nature. More fun to be with than any musicomedienne since Gertrude Lawrence, Gwen Verdon gives a theatergoer the rare sensation that his ticket has been underpriced.

The non-Verdon moments worth counting are few, but one fine one is a witty chorus number called The Uncle Sam Rag, parodying a sedately British version of U.S. ragtime. As Essie's muscular true love, Richard Kiley is good in voice and virile in manner. The lackluster score sounds like eight notes in search of a composer, and the book should be returned to the moths from which it was borrowed. But Redhead's flaws are not in its star.

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