Cranks (by John Cranko; music by John Addison) is a pint-sized English revue with a Jeroboam's worth of frills. Three men and a girl squeal or kneel or sit with their backs to the audience, climb things while they rhyme things, weave about or dance or contort while singing ballads or blues. In a welter of shifting lights, one revue number slithers into the next while the performers act as their own stagehands.
Now and then—with a telephone, a pair of gloved hands, a package addressed to one actor that drives an inquisitive fellow actor mad—the essential idea is fresh, amusing and...