The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan, Jan. 6, 1941

Pal Joey (book by John O'Hara, music by Rodgers & Hart, produced by George Abbott). Since he came of age, John O'Hara has spent more time in nightclubs than many men have in bed. He has stayed till closing, seen all the sights, heard all the jargon. His short novel Pal Joey consists of the magnificently illiterate letters of a nightclub crooner and hoofer, an attractive, low and decidedly rubbery heel, describing his greedy world of mice and moola (women and money). Perhaps the most laudable thing about this character is that he might not betray the mice for the moola—but one can't be sure. Joey has now become the combination hero-and-heel of a bang-up George Abbott musi-comedy, a profane hymn to the gaudy goddess of metropolitan night life.

The play in O'Hara's slangy dialogue is gamy, funny, simple in outline: Joey is taken up by a Chicago society woman even harder than he is. She keeps him until she is tired of him, then gets the heel out of there. Meanwhile he has lost the affections of a nice young ingenue. Somehow the show performs the feat of making Joey an almost sympathetic character. As Joey, lean, dark Gene Kelly has a treacherous Irish charm, a sweet Irish tenor, a catlike dancing grace that makes vice almost as appealing as virtue. This impression is confirmed by Vivienne Segal as the loose Chicagoenne. More opulent than she used to be in the Ziegfeld Follies, in Helene Pons's svelte costumes she is a luscious miracle of corsetry.

The amours of these two are accompanied by all the dancing anyone could want and at least three more great Richard Rodgers tunes: I Could Write a Book (sweet), Love Is My Friend (torchy), Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (catchy). Cigar-chewing Lyricist Lorenz Hart, the pint-sized genius with a two-quart capacity, abets the spirit of the occasion with leerics about zippers, canopied beds, secret telephones, mirrored ceilings, iniquity, chambermaids who are deaf, dumb & blind. Brazen little June Havoc, sister of Burlesqueen Gypsy Rose Lee, does a sidesplitting parody of all kinds of cafe singing and yields nothing to her sister in ability to make a rhinestone gown twitch with significance. In singing Zip, the show's funniest novelty song, a girl named Jean Casto, wearing horn-rimmed goggles and a tweedy sports ensemble, stops the show with the neatest trick of the musical-comedy year—a satire on a strip-tease in which she removes nothing more than her overcoat.

For those who can park their morals in the lobby, Pal Joey is a wow.

My Sister Eileen (by Joseph Fields & Jerome Chodorov, produced by Max Gordon). Several years ago The New Yorker ran some wry, funny sketches by Ruth McKenney describing the screwy plight of herself and her sister Eileen on first moving into Greenwich Village. Last week Eileen McKenney and her husband, Novelist Nathaniel West (Miss Lonely hearts, The Day of the Locust}, were killed in an auto accident while returning to California from a Mexican hunting trip. And last week sister Ruth's sketches were the basis of a new Broadway comedy hit, directed by George S. Kaufman.

The fictional sisters from Columbus, Ohio move into a characteristic Greenwich Village mare's nest—a furnished, one-room, basement apartment (with partitioned bathroom) suggesting a cross between a Gothic crypt and a rummage sale.