New Musicals in Manhattan

Pinion's Rainbow (book by E. Y. Harburg & Fred Saidy; music & lyrics by Burton Lane and Mr. Harburg; produced by Lee Sabinson & William R. Katzell) is an apt title for a show where frequently rain is falling and the sun is shining at the same time. It is decidedly brighter than most musicals, and it might have been one of the brightest of them all; but its virtues can never quite shake themselves free of its faults.

A formula plot is certainly not one of these faults; what goes on in Finian's Rainbow almost defies synopsis. A satirical and social-minded fantasy, Finian tells of an Irishman (Albert Sharpe) who borrows a pot of gold from a leprechaun, brings it to the U.S., and buries it somewhere in the southern state of "Missitucky." The gold's magic powers turn bellowing Senator Billboard Rawkins first into a black man and then into a kindly one; take the kinks out of the romance between the Irishman's daughter (Ella Logan) and her Missitucky beau. And, bereft of his pot of gold, the leprechaun gradually--and gratefully--turns into a man.

The wacky freshness in the idea of Finian is by no means lost in the working out. The book has humor, gaiety, moments of charm, a few neat satiric flings. But it also has a good deal of fairly maddening cuteness that creeps into some of the lyrics as well; it chronically follows up good lines with bad ones; it blunts its satire with buffoonery; and from elfin antics it suddenly plummets down to outhouse humor.

Fortunately, there are some nice dances, pleasant tunes, and funny ditties to get it on the wing again. The best of the tunes,

How Are Things in Glocca Morraf, hit Manhattan before the show did. The brightest of the ditties, When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich, fills out a hilarious dream fashion-show in which the sharecroppers doll up in fantastic mailorder finery. Actor Sharpe, specially imported from Eire, makes a lively Finian, and David Wayne an immensely engaging leprechaun. Finian's Rainbow is not lacking in good things. What it really needed was an implacable blue pencil.

Street Scene (book by Elmer Rice; music & lyrics by Kurt Weill & Langston Hughes; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman & the Playwrights' Co.) is much more folk opera than musical--a re-handling of Elmer Rice's famous outside slice of life almost entirely in musical terms. There are arias as well as tunes; septets, choral passages, large-scale orchestral effects, recitatives. As music, some of this is fancy, facile, too high-pitched. But, thanks to the rest of the score and to the residual vitality in Elmer Rice's play, Street Scene is steadily interesting musical theater.

Spilling out of a Manhattan tenement onto a June-baked side street are all Mr. Rice's once-familiar exhibits--gossips, sluts, roughnecks, a dispossessed family, a jittery expectant father, the Negro janitor, the Italian music teacher, the Jewish law student, young Rose Maurrant whom he loves, and Rose's ill-mated parents--the mother who has taken a lover, the father who has taken to drink. Long brooding over the Maurrants, melodrama bursts upon them at last--with two quick revolver shots behind an open window.

Perhaps the melodrama muscles into the new Street Scene a bit too conspicuously; there is, at any rate, a good deal less of the old garish street life, the huddled, gabby tenement humanity. But, endangered by a lot of song-&-dance distractions, the story builds much more strongly by leaning on plot rather than people. And it finds time for enough that is human and humorous. Composer Weill (Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark) scores with all his lighter songs and with some of his romantic ones. And there are good people to sing them--notably, opera singer Polyna Stoska, whose beautiful soprano voice is a treat for Broadway. What is more, most of the singers can act.

Now, as 17 years ago, one of the most fetching things about Street Scene is its street scenery: Jo Mielziner has once again designed an ingenious three-story tenement fagade.

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