The Theatre: Porter on Panama

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(See Cover) The Rodgers & Hart-John O'Hara musicomedy Pal Joey had most of its lyrics and all its tunes written last week; Cabin In the Sky was ready to open this week; Hi' Ya Gentlemen was about to go into rehearsal. At this point, Cole Porter's Panama Hattie was rocking Boston audiences with its lewd gale before sweeping on to Manhattan. Composer Porter's shows—Jubilee, Red, Hot and Blue, Du Barry Was a Lady—are notable for being often the funniest, often the most risque in the business. Very fast, very funny and energized by the leading popular songstress of the period, Panama Hattie is easily the ripest of the crop, may well become the musical hit of Broadway's winter if lighthearted depravity pays Mr. Porter anywhere near as well as it has in the past. The scene of the latest of his many successes is a canvas Canal Zone where morals are so loose as to be virtually detached.

Chief looseners are a trio of sailors impersonated by Rags Ragland, Pat Harrington & Frankie Hyers—the last two on leave from Manhattan's locally famed "18 Club," where for some years they have assisted Comedian Jack White in making that institution a sort of petit palais of honky-tonk humor and personal insult. Mr. Porter has worked with funny men before (Victor Moore, Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr). But never with any so fundamentally low-down funny as these. In Panama Hattie one of them observes to his pal Ragland: "You make more cheap dolls than they do in Japan." They also gang up on a torso-rolling lady of the cast with the suggestion: "When you get that wound up, set it for seven."

Even a suave butler, in the person of famed Arthur Treacher of Hollywood, succumbs somewhat to the prevailing laxities. Although managing to maintain a certain propriety through an attempted seduction by Jitterbug Dancer Betty Hutton, when she cautions him "You can't take it with you," Butler Treacher unbends sufficiently to reply: "It wouldn't be very safe to leave it around here, either."

Possibly as a hedge against the Minsky tone of most of the proceedings, Librettists Herbert Fields & B. G. ("Buddy") De Sylva have introduced a bit of innocent juvenile appeal represented by Joan Carroll, aged 8, whose part was originally intended for Shirley Temple and who should please even those who insist on worshiping at that small shrine.

The Panama locale, lusciously tinted by Designer Raoul Pène du Bois, who has also clothed a luscious chorus line in just the right places, gives Cole Porter a chance to indulge his talent for Latin-American rhythms (previous examples: Begin the Beguine, I Get A Kick Out of You}. The Porterian lyric wit is displayed in a trio and quintet titled, respectively, God Bless the Women and You Said It. The tune that seems likely to prove most durable is Panama Hattie's response, in rumba rhythm, to temporary disappointment in love: "Make it another oldfashioned, please . . . leave out the cherry, leave out the orange, leave out the bitters, just make it a straight rye!"