New Play in Manhattan

May Wine (words & music by Frank Mandel, Oscar Hammerstein II & Sigmund Romberg; Laurence Schwab, producer). As Playwrights Bella & Samuel Spewack explain in their current uproarious comedy about Hollywood, most popular drama is derived from the tried & true formula: Boy Meets Girl--Boy Loses Girl--Boy Gets Girl. No one knows better than Messrs. Mandel, Hammerstein and Romberg how exasperating it is to try to find a fresh method of stating this old theme. Last time out together (East Wind, 1931), they solved the problem by having their boy meet their girl in French Indo-China. This year their situation, for musicomedy, was novel enough: a Viennese psychiatrist marries a woman who is in love with another man, cherishes his sorrow so blindly that he fails to see she has learned to love him, works himself up into such a state that he takes a pistol to her. All this comes out of an unpublished novel by Wallace Smith and Erich von Stroheim who used to go around frightening virgins out of their wits on the silent screen. On the operetta stage it somehow fails to click. A possible explanation lies in the choice of Walter Slezak, whose big act is chubby artlessness, to play the part of the psychiatrist. Mr. Slezak was the amiable bumpkin in Music in the Air. And most spectators will find it hard to understand why such a handsome brunette as Nancy McCord ultimately dismisses Baritone Walter Woolf King (formerly Walter Wolf) in favor of Tenor Slezak.

Like the late great Victor Herbert. Composer Romberg, usually teamed with Oscar Hammerstein II, has rarely received worthy support from his lyricist. Setting no record for originality, Lyricist Hammerstein begins the chief serenade of May Wine: Out of a smile that I found in your eye, I built a dream one day.

A master of thumping anthems rather than gracious melody. Composer Romberg has nevertheless managed to do well without a singing chorus in this show, has written for May Wine a charming little waltz called Something in the Air of May and an appealing fox trot, Once Around the Clock, which audiences leave the theatre trying to recall.

May Wine is Opus 67 for Sigmund ("Rommy'') Romberg. Born 48 years ago at Nagy-Kanizsa, Hungary, he started out to be a bridge engineer. The success of a composition called Soldiers of Mercy, dedicated to the Hungarian Red Cross, turned him toward music. The first tune he published in the U. S. was Some Smoke, a turkey trot, in 1913. Following year he wrote his first operetta, The Blue Paradise, and the first of his 19 Winter Garden shows. Of all the scores he has written in the past generation, he likes The Student Prince, The New Moon, Maytime and My Maryland best.

A short, plump man, Romberg is at his best composing martial music to be sung by a stageful of actors, played by a pit full of musicians. He gets thundering effects while writing his music in his penthouse on Manhattan's Park Avenue by an arrangement which permits him to play a piano and an organ at the same time. More like ponderous Rudolf Friml than graceful Jerome Kern, ''Rommy" Romberg is probably the best-known second-flight popular composer in the world.

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