The Virtue of Nightclubs

Eddie Albert is a singing comedian whose checkered career has hopped from Broadway (Brother Rat) to Hollywood (Roman Holiday) to TV studios and back again. Maria Margarita Guadalupe Boladoy Castillo is a dancing actress, known simply as Margo, who made her mark in such films as Winter set and Lost Horizon.

Having pooled their lives (they were married in 1945), Eddie and Margo recently decided to pool their talents, last week were wowing audiences at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with a. fast-moving variety act.

Their show sails through a dozen musical numbers, with Margo chanting in her smoky contralto, Eddie singing, when he sings, in about the same vocal range, both of them whirling and capering between times. The act begins at breakneck tempo, works itself into an autobiographical lather (Never Marry a Dancer), takes a breather when Albert throws all his theatrical technique into September Song a la Walter Huston. Then it sidles off into a calypso tempo (Man, Man Is for the Woman Made), goes serious again when Margo dramatizes a mother's prayer (from Irwin Shaw's Sons and Soldiers), winds up in a welter of straw-hatted vaudeville routines and a big burst of applause.

The Albert-Margo act is something new for Waldorf-goers, who are accustomed to such chic acts as French Singer Patachou, Pop Songstress Martha Wright, Spanish Dancer Jose Greco. Eddie and Margo generate an old-fashioned vaudeville atmosphere, mixed with overtones of marital give & take. The audiences like it, and when Eddie hollers, "There's no business like show business," he seems to be having the best time he's had in years.

At 46 (last week), Eddie Albert says: "The theater is a lottery. Making bad movies for no fun. Television is the same--everything's got to be perfect. Nightclubs are the only place to try out new ideas any more. They are the only place to be lousy in."

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