Theatre: New Shows in Manhattan

• Share

The Streets of Paris (produced by the Shuberts and Olsen & Johnson). Once Broadway had a summer season when producers trotted out fleecy and filmy girl shows. But with the decline of musicomedy and the growth of the straw-hat theatre, producers took to estivating. Show business decided months ago, however, that, with World's Fair crowds in the offing, this was to be no ordinary summer. The World's Fair began by knocking show business groggy; but by last week, when the first of the summer musicals opened, show business was up on one knee, with a chance of keeping its feet during the rest of the bout.

The Streets of Paris is a thoroughly agreeable, if never remarkable, revue, made to order for hot weather visitors. Although it is about as Parisian as a hot-dog stand, it makes the grade by continuous liveliness, Broadway showmanship and savvy.

For one thing, the show has a lot of dependable talent: the amusing, if less than Bea-Lillie, drollness of Luella Gear; the Gallic, if less than Maurice-Chevalier, charm of Jean Sablon; the dazed, middle-aged prankishness of Bobby Clark ("I'm Robert the Roue of Reading, Pa."); the borderline sanity of Abbott & Costello; the magic bartending of "Think a Drink" Hoffman, who turns water into not only wine, but dry Martinis, Pink Ladys and piping hot coffee.

For another thing, The Streets of Paris gets good and wacky, as anything must in which those Hellzapoppinjays, Olsen & Johnson, have a hand. Screwiest bit: Bobby Clark waltzing with a stately blonde in an Apache dive, supremely oblivious of the guns that pop, the knives that whiz, the bodies that hurtle all around them.

And the show has oomph: a limbsome, lightly-robed chorus, and Carmen Miranda, a Brazilian singer whom Lee Shubert spotted in a Rio night club and brought to Broadway. Enveloped in beads, swaying and wriggling, chattering macawlike Portuguese songs, skewering the audience with a merry, mischievous eye, the Miranda performs only once, but she stops the show.

From Vienna (produced by the Refugee Artists Group). One by one, after Anschluss, the members of a young Viennese theatre group called the Wiener kleinkunstbühne found their way to the U. S. as refugees. By last winter they were a unit again, eager to act. Few knew any English, but they plugged away at the language. They had no resources, but they found such sponsors as Mr. and Mrs. George S. Kaufman, Irving Berlin, Edna Ferber, Max Gordon, Sam H. Harris. Last week they presented their first U. S. revue.

Although they are ingratiating and talented enough players, with (by now) merely piquant accents, the first half of their revue was lumbering and slow. Following Viennese custom, they included one long, serious number — an allegory that chugs back through history making as many stops as a milk train. Their advisers should have warned them that the Vienna dear to U. S. hearts is one of fluffy Schlagobers, not heavy Sauerbraten.