New Explosion in Manhattan

The New Hellzapoppin (produced by Olsen & Johnson). When Hellzapoppin opened last season the critics muttered a curt No, but the public howled an emphatic Yes, has been howling Yes, Yes, a Thousand Times Yes ever since. When the new Hellzapoppin opened last week, the critics acknowledged themselves licked. They knew they might just as well try to reason with an earthquake or talk back to a cannon.

Since the old Hellzapoppin was played fortissimo, no term exists to express the racket made by the new one. It is all the panics in Wall Street, all the riots in lunatic asylums, all the election nights in Times Square, all the Fourths of July in history, and all the alarm clocks in the world going off at once. But aside from its lustier detonations, it is pretty much the same show. Lena still wanders up & down the aisles calling for Oscar, the little flowerpot whose owner won't claim it still grows by stages into a gigantic tree, the guy in the strait jacket still rolls around for hours trying to get out. By now, however, these whimsies have acquired a kind of historical importance, have become authentic bits of Americana like the Katzenjammer Kids and Charlie McCarthy.

At last week's opening there was as much fun from out front as from the stage. When the cast went down into the aisles to dance a Boomps-a-Daisy with members of the audience, up rose Al Smith to tread a measure with alacrity and abandon, drew a storm of applause for being both a good boompser and a good sport. A little later Funnyman Robert Benchley was presented with a live chicken, Little-Man-What-Next Billy Rose with a child's potty-chair.

Stripped of its unsurpassable insanity, the new Hellzapoppin, like the old, is the worst kind of ham vaudeville. But, as a tourist once grumbled, "Take away the mountains and the lakes, and what is there to Switzerland?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.