The Theatre: New Musical in Manhattan: Oct. 9, 1939

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The Straw Hat Revue (music & lyrics by Sylvia Fine & James Shelton; produced by The Straw Hat Company). Broadway is always hoping for an intimate, brightly satirical revue as good as — or as good as they seem in retrospect — the first Garrick Gaieties, the first Little Show. It somehow never gets one. The will may be there, and even the wit; but the paradox that a top-notch intimate revue must embody —to be slick while seeming spontaneous, fast while seeming leisurely — is a theatrical labor of Hercules.

Direct from a summer camp in the Pennsylvania hills the latest try arrived last week on Broadway. The Straw Hat Revue is much less ungainly than the usual country cousin. It is genial and imaginative. It has neat touches. It displays impudent, citrous-faced Imogene Coca. At its best, as in its gusty burlesque of a romantic operetta or Comedienne Coca's take-off of jabbering Carmen Miranda in The Streets of Paris, the revue is bright as a button. But most of the time the show does not come down on the beat. Sketches dawdle, jokes wait around for their echo, satire goes in for italics, Comedienne Coca makes the same pert faces too often. The whole thing needs tuning up —new city clothes, a manicure, a hairdo.

Show Business

¶Banned from a London revue last spring as an insult to the heads of foreign states was the song Even Hitler Had a Mother, Even Mussolini Had a Ma (TIME, April 10). Last week the song was being boomed out with gusto and impunity in another London revue. Benito (by the fortunes of war) took the rap along with Adolf.

¶Last week in Millburn, N. J. Crooner Rudy Vallee made his formal debut as a legitimate actor. Critic Sidney Whipple's verdict of Crooner Vallee's acting: "Save in the hands of some virgin direct from an academy of acting, I have never seen a less animate performance of a role." Of his lovemaking: "It was the most polite example . . . ever observed outside of Godey's Lady's Book."