New Musicals in Manhattan

Hellzapoppln (produced by Olsen & Johnson) is a cross between a fire in a lunatic asylum and the third clay at Gettysburg. Billed as a "screamlined revue," it roars into action with bullets, bombs and sounds of heavy artillery backstage. Radios blare, sound films boom, gorillas growl, vendors hawk tickets for rival shows, people race across the stage, plunge down the aisles, dive among the audience, ride horseback in boxes.

But if the voice is the voice of Stentor, the hands are the hands of B. F. Keith. Helhapoppin turns out to be toothless old vaudeville trying to act like a lusty, bellowing babe. From the time the curtain goes up on a cockeyed newsreel in which Hitler talks with a Yiddish accent and Mussolini with a Negro one, Helha-poppin--gagging, hamming, roughhousing all the way--does not miss a trick.

The captious might complain that there are no trained seals in the show, but there is everything else. Two or three of the acts are very good: Walter Nilsson cavorting madly on a monocycle, Hal Sherman pantomimes dancing adroitly while looking as awkward as Charlie Chaplin. But most of the acts are very bad: all the skits, a Turkish harem number, a roguish sister act performed by two girls each of whom looks like the other's mother.

Sing Out the News (by Charles Friedman and Harold J. Rome; produced by Max Gordon in association with George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart). Biggest musical find last season was Composer Harold J. Rome, who wrote the songs for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union homespun Left revue. Pins and Needles, Rome's Sing Out the News is a custom-tailored, more conservatively cut satire on world events, most of whose pins are safety pins. Recurrent target for its gags, skits, songs, is neither Hitler nor Chamberlain, strikes nor wars, but Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now & then the firecrackers land in F. D. R.'s hair, far oftener in the faces of Republicans and anti-New Dealers. The tycoons take their best beating in Sing Ho for Private Enterprise, where one of them groans he is reduced to eating domestic caviar. Between times the show, whose sprightly cast includes Hiram Sherman, Philip Loeb, Rex Ingram, Joey Faye, sings out the news about LaGuardia, European diplomats, liberals, Hollywood, cafe society.

Pert, jaunty, ingenious, fast as a pickpocket's fingers, slick as a chorus boy's hair, Sing Out the News has the look of a knockout revue. Yet that is chiefly a tribute to its direction. The satire is goofy but glib, the jokes are neat rather than new, the lyrics trip smartly but lack kick, the tunes are good to hear but hard to hum. Composer Rome offers nothing so bomb-bursting as his last season's Sing Me a Song with Social Significance, nothing so hilarious as his Chain Store Daisy. Only once could a first-night audience, half drawn from Who's Who and half from the Social Register, roar with joy: when a packed stageful of Negroes shagged, capered, clapped, galumphed, jumped up & down in a great spontaneous whirl of excitement.

You Never Know (produced by the Shuberts in association with John Shubert). After playing the road most of last season (TIME. April 11), changing its appearance almost as often as it changed its address. You Never Know reached Broadway last week in its final form. Good as ever were Clifton Webb's suave acting, Libby Holman's husky hooting. Lupe Velez's carnival spirits. Cole Porter's words & music, such as Alpha to Omega:

From Lou Gehrig's home run

To Lou Chiozza's bunt;

From Tripoli to Kankakee,

Not to mention from Lynn to Lnnt.

But You Never Know still lacks bounce, still gets tied up in knots (which take forever to unravel) on account of its hackneyed, highly complicated plot of the valet and the lady's maid who masquerade as master and mistress. Result: first-rate entertainers doing their best with an unentertaining book.

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