Sport: On Ice

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Frick & Frack do not depend on costumes, grimaces or falls to get their laughs. With the pantomime of Charlie Chaplin and the rubber legs of Leon Errol, they take the elements of figure skating, distort them into crazy positions to create some of the most astonishing feats ever performed on skates. Frick's specialty: a cantilever Spread Eagle in which his body, bent backward from the knees, is almost horizontal with the ice. Frack's specialty: a rocking-chair Spread Eagle (gliding in circles in a sitting position).

Says Frick, the stolid one: "People think our skating is eccentric. It is not so. Any figure skater should be able to do a serious Spread Eagle asleep. It becomes comedy when you do odd things with your body while the Spread Eagle is going on. We use our brains, nerve-control and concentration." Says Frack, the fractious one: "What we like most outside of skating is to go to a vaudeville show so we can laugh once in a while."

While the Ice Follies were attracting 94,000 Manhattan spectators last week, two other first-class ice shows jampacked U. S. and Canadian arenas:

> In Houston, Sonja Henie's Hollywood Ice Revue opened its 1940 tour—with a cast of 160 troupers, $65,000 worth of costumes and special icing machines capable of making 125 tons of ice for each performance. The tour is Sonja's farewell personal appearance.

> In Montreal, a new revue called the Ice Vanities, produced by Bill O'Brien (promoter of the Vines-Perry professional tennis tours) and featuring Prague's Vera Hruba and Ottawa's Guy Owen, played to sellout crowds in the eighth stop of its U. S. and Canadian tour.

> Still in rehearsal last week was still another grand-scale ice show, the European All-Star Ice Revue. Its cast includes two dozen British skaters who found themselves jobless this winter, Switzerland's famed Armand Perren (King Leopold's skating instructor), South Africa's Edwina Blades and New York's peppy Audrey Peppe (twice runner-up for the U. S. amateur figure-skating championship), who turned professional last week.