The Meter Man

Nov. ig, 1863, Abraham Lincoln made a phone call from Gettysburg to his press-agent in Manhattan. Abe was rebellious. He was going to shave his beard and wear a cardigan. The flack demanded that he keep the beard, shawl, stovepipe and string tie, or he would wreck his "image." Abe then announced that he had his speech neatly typed, and this distressed the flack even more. "Abe," pleaded the pressagent, "how many times have we told you: on--the--backs--of--envelopes!"

This bit of fantasy is the work of George Robert Newhart, 30, the most successful new comedian since Shelley Berman. His record. The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, is climbing steadily up Variety's LP bestseller charts, standing fifth last week, topped only by such formidably publicized competition as Elvis Is Back and The Sound of Music. In the eight weeks it has been on the market, the record has sold 132,000 copies.* Last week Newhart signed for a Midas-clutch of fall TV shows (including four Ed Sullivan appearances), and his nightclub fees have gone from $200 a week to $5,000 and more--a remarkably bullish development for an unknown comic who did his first nightclub act only three months ago and has so far made only one network TV appearance (with Jack Paar).

A sort of balanced cousin of the sicknik comedians, Newhart vaguely follows their technique and style, but delivers his material in quiet, well-scrubbed Midwestern inflections that keep things from toppling over the brink of sanity. As a driving instructor, he maintains classroom calm while he sits in the front seat of a car with a lady who goes 75 in her driveway. As an eager 1904 entrepreneur, he tries to start transcontinental passenger service at once by putting a toilet on the Wright brothers' plane. As a stiff-lipped submarine commander, he tells the crew: "I think our firing on Miami Beach can best be termed ill-timed."

A onetime law student who flunked his exams and then scattered himself into a series of miscellaneous jobs (shoe clerk, cigar-counter man, etc.), Chicagoan Newhart learned the beginnings of his trade on the telephone, is still fond of it as a basic tool. He would call a friend and "try to break him up," making tapes of the conversations. The tapes were so funny that local radio stations bought them as "ratings boosters" to help raise the level of disk-jockey programs. On last year's Emmy Award program his Lincoln phone call stopped the show.

In private talks with strangers, words like "dig," "bugged" and "gassed" tend to float unnaturally on the top of his conversation, but once his credentials are established, they disappear. Balding and gently unforceful in speech and manner, Bob Newhart seems less like a comedian than like a fellow who is about to ask if he may go downstairs and read the meter --which is the essence of his appeal. may like but do not require 76 trombones backing up a song. As of last week, seven of the 22 off-Broadway productions were musicals, getting along nicely without monumental sets, orchestra pits, or even orchestras.

Accompanied by a piano and a Hammond organ, a 23-member company calling itself American Savoyards does a different Gilbert & Sullivan operetta each week, has won so large a following that it has already staged second repeat performances of H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. An idea of rare originality is realized in The Fantasticks, a musical in masque form based on Rostand's Les Romanesques. Since last spring, Jerome Kern's Leave It to Jane (1917) has been exploiting a rich vein of nostalgia: snowy-browed patrons go back and back again, are beginning to do the same at a new production of George Gershwin's Oh, Kay! (1926).

Above the others, two brightly tuneful first-run musicals stood out:

Ernest in Love. The newest of off-Broadway musicals is Anne Croswell's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, mounted with sets and costumes so painstakingly assembled that they seem to have been done for a Fifth Avenue window. Adapter Croswell was careful not to shatter the original's cut-glass dialogue. Shuffling identities and romantically mocking romance, Wilde's kaleidoscopic plot is intact as well, from the duplicity of the fellow who has a mythical sick friend called Bunbury and uses him as a shield against dull social obligations to the plight of the poor chap whose origins are unknown because he was found in a Gladstone bag in Victoria Station. Now and then guilty of unfortunate lapses of taste, the lyrics for the most part graft smoothly onto the play, as in a superbly haughty number called A Handbag Is Not a Proper Mother:

I'd welcome to my bosom any bachelor Whose family was highly regarded, But I cannot let my daughter wed a

satchel or A parcel that someone discarded.

In other lyrics, tradesmen are well instructed to respect the debts of the aristocracy because the debts go back for generations. And Actress Leila Martin, as Gwendolen Fairfax, sings coquettishly about the troubles one has selecting a hat while she lounges about her boudoir in ruffled pantaloons. All that could easily be little more than an unwelcome obstruction between the audience and Oscar Wilde; but Ernest in Love scores on its own through Lee Pockriss' music--engaging, deft, pleasantly hummable tunes that bob against one another like English strawberries floating in dry white wine.

Little Mary Sunshine. Despite a title that would embarrass Oscar Hammerstein. the show is redeemingly satirical, has turned into one of the most surprising phenomena in off-Broadway history. Running since last autumn to capacity audiences, Little Mary is sold out till the end of the month, plays to theater parties and matinees in an enlarged seating capacity (from 199 to 299 seats), has its own "original cast" album (Capitol).

Set in the Colorado highlands in the early 19005, the musical is a reminiscent farce, a kind of Die Rockymaus telling Tales of the Boulder Woods. It actually owes most to Friml's Rose Marie, whose Royal Canadian Mounties are now red-jacketed U.S. Forest Rangers. Little Mary enters carrying flowers in one hand, a watering can in the other, and stainless steel morals in her breast. She loves the No. i Forest Ranger, a strapping fellow, tall as a sequoia and equally intelligent. Wild improbabilities follow one another in woolly sequences; the skillfully imitative melodies by Rick Besoyan (who also wrote book and lyrics) seem to have been written with a pastry tube.

The satire, and with it the heel-kicking, finger-feathering gestures of Little Mary (Eileen Brennan), tires out before Yellow Feather, the Indian heavy, finally has the heroine strapped to a conifer and the No. i Ranger comes singing to the rescue. Nonetheless, there are plenty of fine moments along the way: an ex-diva of Germanic origin sings of her native burg (In Izzenschnooken on the Lovely Essen-zook Zee). A soubrette who wishes she were an unvirtued spy sings her unashamed worship of Mata Hari:

Once inside the castle gate Mata'd never vacillate.

Facile, she would rassle late 'Til she got her due.

Audiences shout with laughter at every sinister turn in the plot, causing at least one minority group to scowl in dissent: children at the matinees take the story dead seriously.

* The only comparable successes: Inside Shelley Bcrman and Outside Shelley Berman, which made their way to the top layers of the LP charts where usually only music can hold its own. Still on the charts, Inside was No. 6 last week, Outside No. 23.

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