A Sweet and Sentimental Smash

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

ME AND MY GIRL Music by Noel Gay

Book and Lyrics by L. Arthur Rose and Douglas Furber

A troublesome thing happened to the Broadway musical comedy on the way to its beleaguered state: the form became known as simply the "musical." Dropping "comedy" was more than a shorthand simplification. It reflected a rising notion that shows with music should aspire to as broad a range of subjects and as intense an emotional focus as any straight play, and should integrate song, dance and story in an earnest -- often grittily realistic -- performance. This redefinition has yielded some extraordinary work but seems to have almost banished the romantic froth and high-spirited vaudeville that first won the form a loving audience.

Broadway theatergoers proved last week that they still long for carefree exuberance. The street's newest hit, which ran its advance sales up to $2.5 million within days after opening, is a sweet, sentimental throwback called Me and My Girl. Produced in 1937 in London, it made a hit of The Lambeth Walk, ran four years and survived being bombed out of two venues during World War II. Painstakingly reconstructed from sketchy records by the composer's son and revived in the West End last year, Me and My Girl treats its material with respect: there is no modernization of the book or score, no overlay of contemporary cynicism, no relevance of any sort, just millionaires singing and dancing. The result is a jubilant romp that has spectators cheering and leaping like shortstops to catch balloons dropped from the ceiling at the finale.

Looked at analytically, Me and My Girl should not be so infectiously exhilarating. The lyrics are banal and devoid of wit; the songs, though hummable and winsome, tend to have the same simple beat; and the narrative -- a reworking of Pygmalion in which a cheerily crooked Cockney finds himself heir to an earldom and a fortune if he can learn to behave like a swell -- is comic but farfetched. Yet the gaudy $4 million production has an unabashed desire to please, touches of sprightly invention (a mounted suit of armor abruptly walks offstage; ancestor portraits come alive and tap-dance) and a hugely likable cast, led by Robert Lindsay as the newfound aristocrat and Maryann Plunkett as the plucky working-class girl who means more to him than ermine and marbled halls. The earl-to-be spurns his title for love, the girl rejects his proposals so as not to deprive him, and love finally conquers all -- with the slyly introduced help of Shaw's Henry Higgins, the alchemist of social class who makes a convincing duchess of a flower girl in Pygmalion.

The role of Bill Snibson, the Cockney peer, was originally a star turn for Lupino Lane, a comic mime of the '30s. Lindsay, seen in the U.S. as Edmund in Laurence Olivier's TV King Lear, proves an inspired successor. He has mastered the stereotypical Cockney's accusatory inflections, rough humor, feral grace and odd parlor tricks, from a no-hands bobbing of his hat on his head to incessant, playful swiping of a bystander's gold watch. He brings vitality to such shopworn comedy as passing out, being revived and protesting, "Here! I didn't faint for water." In a leaning-on-a-lamppost number, Lindsay achieves a slouchy elegance that visually echoes Gene Kelly's title solo in Singin' in the Rain. Plunkett is melodious as "my girl," but Lindsay's performance practically shouts, "Look at me!" and thoroughly rewards the attention.