New Revue on Broadway

The Girls Against the Boys (music by Richard Lewine; sketches and lyrics by Arnold B. Horwitt) seems a promising enough theme for a revue. And certainly in any such comic warfare, Nancy Walker should make a sterling commander on one side and Bert Lahr a doughty generalissimo on the other. But the girls and boys in The Girls Against the Boys are forever fighting their material instead of one another, and conveying the mere din of battle rather than the exploits. The singing and the stomping in the show are often as piercingly loud as an unsupervised children's party, and the sketches and joking are correspondingly leaden.

As comics, Bert Lahr and Nancy Walker are both likable and skillful, and whenever they are permitted to do things instead of being forced to say them--notably in a pantomime of bare-fanged marriage--they are splendid. Lahr in a plane or at a stage door, Walker in a hash house or the Garden of Eden, also have their moments. But too often, though they make their lines brighter, they cannot make them bright. TV's Shelley Berman does nicely in a character-part telephone monologue, but falls flat as a straight man, and the rest of the show alternates dullness and noise when it does not combine them.

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