Ten at a Time

Broadway usually runs out of gas around May i, but with the New York World's Fair coming, the present theatre season is fueled for a non-stop flight straight through the summer. Best evidence that Broadway has its eye on Flushing, Long Island, is the sudden boom in musical shows. Last season there were eight musicals and revues in all. When Stars in Your Eyes (book by J. P. McEvoy, music by Arthur Schwartz) and Blackbirds of 1939 (by Lew Leslie, music by Rube Bloom) opened last week, for the first time since 1930, Broadway had ten musicals running at once.

Since 1930, however, the musicomedy set-up has changed: cinema and radio not only helped ruin musicomedy, but permanently lured away from Broadway many a top-notch musicomedian. Cinema and radio between them tied up such talent as Jack Benny, Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, Fannie Brice, Eddie Cantor, Charles Ruggles, W. C. Fields. And during musicomedy's lean years, no new faces have turned up to replace the renegade headliners. Out of vaudeville's grave Olsen & Johnson, it is true, have leaped to glory in Hellzapoppin; Teddy Hart plays an amusing second fiddle to Jimmy Savo in The Boys from Syracuse; Hiram Sherman made a nice side-street reputation in Sing Out the News. But there are no new giants like those before the Flood.

In Stars in Your Eyes, however, are two of the old giants, Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante; and people who swoon over both of them will probably hail the show as Four Stars in Your Eyes. Ethel Merman, certainly, is fun even for a man with a head cold: in a pinch she could put over the Boy Scout Oath, Joyce Kilmer's Trees, or Article IV, Section I of the Constitution of the U. S. She has had better songs than those in Stars in Your Eyes, but she has never sung songs better, or more triumphantly given out her whole personality along with her voice.

Jimmy Durante is dippy and dynamic as ever. But those who are lukewarm toward the 99%-perspiration-and-i %inspiration school of comedy to which Durante belongs will not suddenly, this time, take to rolling in the aisles-- particularly as Author McEvoy has played Schnozzle a dirty trick in the way of gags.

With its two headliners taking everything fortissimo, and with Hollywood at its loopiest for background, Stars in Your

Eyes follows suit as a boisterous, slam-bang show. Except for Tamara Toumanova's airy ballet numbers, the dancing comes down hard on both feet. The music is brisk. The humor is hearty. The pace is slow. The plot is terrible. Aside from Ethel Merman, Stars in Your Eyes is just a good routine show, nothing to write home about--even from the World's Fair.

The latest edition of Blackbirds--Broadway's first all-Negro revue of the season--is an upsy-downsy show, its singing and dancing forced to work like hell to make the audience forget its sketches and jokes. With several newcomers to Broadway in the cast, with cheap costuming and cheesy sets, the whole thing has a homemade, start-on-a-shoestring air about it. Attractive Lena Home puts something into a couple of songs, but the best singing is choral, in particular a rich-voiced arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

The cast taps, trucks, struts, shags in a way to make the white race gasp and give up. The swing finale to Act I--with the whole company whooping things up--provides the most animated ten minutes Broadway has seen since F.D.R. Jones in Sing Out the News. But after that, it is downhill all the way.

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