The Theatre: New Musical in Manhattan: Dec. 11, 1939

Swingin' the Dream (by Gilbert Seldes & Erik Charell; produced by Erik Charell in association with Jean Rodney). With Shakespeare a hit last season in musicomedy (The Boys from Syracuse) and The Mikado a hit in swing, it was dollars to doughnuts that Broadway would not rest until it had swung the Bard himself. Last week at Radio City's huge Center Theatre it swung him high & wide, turning A Midsummer-Night's Dream into a lavish jitterbug extravaganza. Shifting the scene from Athens to New Orleans around 1890 ("At the Birth of Swing"), it displayed clarinet-tooting Benny Goodman, trumpet-blowing Louis Armstrong, soft-voiced Maxine Sullivan, Walt Disneyish scenery, scraps of Mendelssohn's famed Midsummer-Night's Dream music, hit tunes in swingtime, half-a-dozen singing and dancing troupes.

As a color-drenched spectacle, Swingin' the Dream is as good as a parade with floats, and some of its specialty acts are excellent. As a show, it falls flat as a pancake. It is overcrowded, overelaborate, too much of a good thing, like being in nine theatres at once. The authors seem to feel that if they have less than 50 people on the stage the audience will imagine it is intermission.

Further, the four distinct plots of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, which clog it plenty as a play, virtually wreck it as a musical. Helena, Hermia & Co. prove just as ghastly bores running loose in the wooded outskirts of New Orleans as in the Athenian groves. Nor are some of the headliners all they might be. Louis Armstrong should stick to his blast, not try to play Bottom. The Maxine Sullivan who sings Moonland is not the irresistible Maxine Sullivan of Loch Lomond.

The enormous Center Theatre is a problem in itself — ideal for Ben Hur, but practically ruinous for anything else.