If it Gets Off at Westport

There are no leg irons sunk in the walls, but otherwise it is the sort of place the Count of Monte Cristo might have tunneled from. And the whole scruffy establishment is doomed: next summer it will be razed to make room for a new, antiseptic office building. The liabilities of the Downstairs Room, a dark, crowded cellar on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, are impressive even at a time when small informal nightspots are cashing in (TIME. May 27). What brings full basements (legal limit: 80 customers) to the Downstairs these nights is a small, eccentric troupe of humorists who put on one of Manhattan's first successful nightclub song-and-satire revues in 15 years, recalling the Village Vanguard's famed Revuers, with Judy Holliday.

At one end of the narrow, smoky room, on a stage not quite wide enough for the show's five performers to buck without winging each other, the cast, backed by two pianos, lines out patter songs, monologues, ballads and production numbers (everyone onstage at once). The revue keeps up a two-beat pace with fast blackouts. Most lyrics are aimed at Manhattan's theater set and suburbia's bar-car sophisticates, but they are not necessarily too esoteric for the occasional Sixth Avenue Sindbad who "falls downstairs looking for the subway." Sample:

O he caught her in the kitchen playing Westport

A game indigenous to suburban life

Where you grab a wife of whom you're not the husband

And someone else's husband grabs your wife . . .

Westport--the game that some of our local leading lights

Play to while away the long Connecticut nights.

Pro Musica Antique. Star and principal lyricist for the current revue is a craggy-faced comic named Ronny Graham, a Broadway fugitive (New Faces of 1952) whose delivery is sometimes so shaggy that it is hard to tell which end of his joke is wagging. He mugs through an uproarious monologue on graduation day at a bop school, i.e., a baccalaureate sermon on how to puff marijuana cigarettes without wasting a whiff of those "leftwing Luckies." With poker-faced, evil-eyed Straight Man Gerry Matthews, 26, he delivers a to-the-point parody of TV Torquemada Mike Wallace. The cellar's other mummers are Ceil Cabot, a pout-mouthed Imogene Cocaesque comedienne with a wonderful talent for double and triple takes, and Singer Jenny Lou Law, who laments the love she lost in a grocery--"I was looking for Wheaties; you were looking for Kix".

High point of the show is a forlorn ballad sung by Lanky Blonde Ellen Hanley about a wan, straight-haired maiden who attends a meeting of an antique music society and trustingly goes home with a base-hearted fellow enthusiast:

Well, he took me up to his flat as he had said . . .

And he looked at me with his eyes that lie

And I knew when I saw that look in his eye

That he had no recordings of Des Pres or Dufay

From the Pro Musica Antiqua.

Sowbelly & Spelunking. Proprietor of the Downstairs (and of another water hole, accurately called Upstairs at the Downstairs, situated due north) is a mustached, elegant North Carolinian named Julius Monk, who dresses like an under secretary at the Foreign Office, struts a pea-soup-thick British accent, and floats out an occasional sowbelly vowel. Monk opened the Downstairs early in 1956, now emcees the show, also fills in when one of the two pianists doesn't show up. He is also busy planning the Downstairs evacuation to another, larger catacomb. Selecting the site will not be easy. Says Monk's man Matthews: "People like to think they're discovering us." The problem: finding a new cavern capacious enough for another 50 or so intrepid spelunkers. carefully crummy enough to make them think they have discovered something.

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