Perforated Valentine

By * T.E.K.

Backward, turn backward,

O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again

just for tonight!

--Elizabeth Akers Allen

That is not what No, No Nanette does, but nostalgia is the impetus of the evening. Nostalgia is rampant in the presence of Ruby Keeler, 60, who emerges as a warmly appealing personality and dances with a valiant nimbleness. Nostalgia propels the tap-Rockette sequences of the Busby Berkeley chorus, with its mass assembly-line dance routines supervised by the 75-year-old

B.B. himself. Even though No, No Nanette dates from 1925, the show more properly marks a reunion between Keeler and Berkeley, who in the early Depression era collaborated on such Warner Bros, extravaganzas as 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and a spate of other Late Late Show favorites. Ruby has spent 30 retirement years in the wings, most of the time happily married to an industrial builder. But the roar of the greasepaint has drawn her irresistibly back to Broadway, where she started her career at the age of 13 in the chorus of a musical called The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly.

If the yearnings of nostalgia sometimes contain a touch of morbidity, that is certainly present in the sets and costumes, which celebrate the supreme bad taste of the '20s, especially in women's dress. But nostalgia is not quite the appropriate word for the Vincent Youmans score, which has shown enduring vitality. Merely to mention the titles Tea for Two or / Want to Be Happy is to summon up the transporting glow that occasionally makes this show enchantment.

The book is one of those narrative toothpick trees that the '20s musicals utilized only to festoon with girls and dances. The central figure is a near-millionaire Bible publisher, whom Jack Gilford plays with gullible charm. Gilford is a kind of platonic sucker who has been gilding the palms of three avaricious flappers without any amorous return on his investment. He doesn't want his wife (Keeler) to find out about it, and he orders his lawyer (Bobby Van) to buy and bargain his way out of the mess. It all adds up to a kind of microminiature Feydeau farce set in Atlantic City.

Question of Camp. The top professional honors of the evening go to Bobby Van, who dances like an Anglo-Saxon Zorba, and Helen Gallagher, the girl who plays his wife. As she acts and sings ("Where-Has-My-Hubby-Gone" Blues), a smolderingly authentic Fitzgerald heroine comes alive on the stage. A special medal should be struck for Patsy Kelly as a comic howitzer of a maid with hilarious delayed-fuse timing.

The show is a copious delight, but it has a sizable temperamental flaw. No strict decision was made as to whether it should be played straight or campy, and the latter apparently won out as the lesser commercial risk. Camp is low-level satire, and it tends to destroy both the past and the present with a snicker. Far from being a "great creative sensibility," as acclaimed by Susan Sontag, camp is anti-sensibility. Its intrinsic nature is sterile, and it applies the tactic of reductio ad absurdum to imply that all cultural values are equally sterile. Thus at one moment No, No Nanette fashions an affectionate valentine to the past, and in the very next moment perforates it with a derisory dart from the present.

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