Forty Years On

By T.E.Kalem

PINS AND NEEDLES

Music and Lyrics by Harold Rome

Every show has two settings, the one onstage and one in the society that exists behind it. Pins and Needles, at Manhattan's Roundabout Theater, is almost 41 years old; the first line of its first number is "Sing me a song of social significance." But the difference between what was socially significant in 1937 and in 1978 is so ironically perceptible as to cripple some of the numbers while endowing others with brand-new satirical bite.

A song like Sunday in the Park is a musical idyl to the garment workers' one day off, where lovers hold hands, mothers stroll with their tots and old people bask on sunny benches. The park has to be Central Park, since Pins and Needles is very New Yorky in tone and allusion. Now people still do those things in Central Park, but its current "social significance" is that it is a place one enters at the risk of being mugged or mangled by young thugs armed with baseball bats.

At the other end of the scale, When I Grow Up ("I want to be a G-man--bang! --bang!--bang!") has an impact of disenchantment now that could not have been dreamed of in 1937. Then, a G-man was a hero, the sanctification of J. Edgar Hoover had just begun. Daniel Fortus delivers the song with wicked zest, and the audience responds in kind.

Harold Rome's music has an infectious amiability and moves the show along on dancing feet, though the level of choreography is primitive. Rome's lyrics achieve something that is perhaps rarer than wit, a good humor that arises from compassionate fellow feeling.

What the players communicate with no little success is the resilience of spirit of that period. The number F.D.R. Jones, inserted from another musical, is a clue to the social significance of Pins and Needles. Through magnetic eloquence and leadership, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to restore the Depression-bruised American people's confidence in themselves. Having come through that ordeal, they were ready for World War II.

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