As Broad As It's Long

To Hawaii last winter, in charge of entertaining the troops, went Broadway's most high-brow actor, Captain Maurice (Hamlet, Macbeth) Evans. In Hawaii this spring he is offering the Army's most low-brow show, a bawdy, corny musical called Hey, Mac, that the dogfaces are eating up.

To get what he wanted--and knew the soldiers wanted--was not easy. When Hey, Mac opened, there was a terrible to-do over its rough lyrics and rougher jokes. But Evans, arguing that Hey, Mac was for soldiers only, and that soldiers are not young ladies, carried the day. One skit that got the ax had been laid in the reception room of a brothel.

Hey, Mac is about a soldier outfit in Hawaii that suffers from too much red tape and not enough women. The cast contains 30 soldiers (six of them former actors) three paid actresses and seven local girls or wahine. The musical gets going with the outfit landing in Honolulu and gaily met at the dock by hula girls. From the wings comes a soldier bearing a sign: "Any similarity between this scene and our actual landing is purely accidental."

One sure-fire scene describes a latrine orderly's dream, in which a fairy, using a plumber's plunger as a wand, summons Uncle Tom, Simon Legree and others from the privy. Sample gag: says a sniffing sergeant to a private, "Have you taken a bath lately?" Says the private, "Why, is one missing?"

Maurice Evans' favorite scene has seductive Violet Salve, a Filipino blues singer, cast as a stripper. When she warbles The Government policy in this war Is to do the job you're suited for, the soldiers chorus back And your job is taking off your clothes, which they then proceed to help her do.

Hey, Mac has played Honolulu and traveled by "banana truck" to the remotest outposts on the island of Oahu. It will soon tour the outlying islands. Meanwhile Evans (who has done no acting) has in rehearsal such Broadway hits as Boy Meets Girl and My Sister Eileen; eventually he may dish up a little Shakespeare. He thinks blank-verse tragedy will be such a novelty for soldiers that they will like it. To back up his hunch, he points to three wow performances of Mac beth at Fort George G. Meade, last year.

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