Old Musical in Manhattan

Pal Joey (book by John O'Hara; music and lyrics by Rodgers & Hart) had turned--in the eleven years since it first opened on Broadway--into a kind of musicomedy legend. It had only to be revived there last week to emerge as a kind of musicomedy classic. John O'Hara's book remains brilliantly alive; Richard Rodgers' score is still delightfully fresh.

The very thing that gives Pal Joey its distinction--its unabashed look at sordid doings--may always disconcert the people for whom musicomedy means moonlight & roses, or at any rate does not mean blackmail and kept men. O'Hara's account of a small-time heel with his naive boasts and shameless buttering-up, and of the rich, man-eating tigress who loves him enough to keep him in style and stake him to a nightclub, but who coolly leaves him before he can leave her, is vividly hardboiled. For once, musicomedy plays with people rather than paper dolls, and shows them left in the lurch rather than led to the altar. (Equally raffish on the surface, Guys and Dolls is far more romantic underneath.)

This book that could very likely get by without music is blended with very fetching music indeed. In this next-to-last of Rodgers & Hart's triumphs together, Rodgers' tunes were never suaver, wittier, more engaging--whether in such favorites as Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and I Could Write a Book or in such a mocking female duet as Take Him. Seldom were Hart's lyrics brisker, brighter, more uninhibited, enabling Elaine Stritch --for one example--to stop the show with Zip, a spoof of a striptease.

Pal Joey is perfect heel-&-toe stuff which, while carving up Joey, both creates and burlesques a raft of dance routines. What with the nightclub background, the second act possibly suffers from a take-off or so too many; but now as aforetimes Robert Alton's choreography has amazing liveliness, and the hoofing chorines are the jolliest bunch of girls in several seasons.

As Joey, Dancer Harold Lang--in a role that waved Gene Kelly to fame and filmdom--seems more squirt than heel. But he sings well, dances brilliantly, has a personality of his own. As Joey's benefactress, Vivienne Segal once again plays and sings with extraordinary ease, finish and charm. Mingling ugly facts with lovely tunes and abundant travesty, Pal Joey is a 20th century Beggar's Opera, which may conceivably be revived when South Pacific and the lost Atlantis are one.

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