New Musical on Broadway

The Happiest Girl in the World has

several Broadway marriage brokers--Librettists Fred Saidy and Henry Myers, Lyricist E. Y. Harburg--trying to unite Aristophanes and Offenbach. Unaware or uninterested that the two are mismated, the matchmakers give their efforts much more sense of ravishment than of matrimony. For plot they have gone to Lysistrata, with its inspired, antiwar idea of having wives lock their bedroom doors to make their husbands lay down their arms. But in production terms that idea has recurrently inspired more bad taste and ponderous bawdry than it was ever worth, and if The Happiest Girl is no more than middling lewd, it is so clangingly loud and heavy as to suggest marriage with the Anvil Chorus. Moreover, the lavish librettists have added Greek deities to Greek dames, offering scenes on an Olympus that, culturally, seems way below sea level. Furthermore, all the characters favor a modern idiom, so that when not dittying "Whoever is chaste has got to be chased," they talk of sponsors, top brass, secret weapons, summit meetings and population explosions. Against all this, the evening offers Jan ice Rule as a Diana down in Athens from Olympus, Cyril Ritchard as a Pluto up from Hades, attractive William and Jean Eckart sets. The musical also has at least one good Dania Krupska ballet, and some of Offenbach's best and best-known tunes.

Miss Rule is attractive as both dame and deity; Ritchard is resourceful at several kinds of deviltry; and when the two dance together, there are moments of charm. But even the better shenanigans get skittish or noisy, and the Offenbach delights are dulled by weak voices or smart-alecky words. Musically, The Happiest Girl in the World is much like re-encountering a bewitching Paris charmer on the sands, and in the spirit, of Coney Island. Squeezed between all that is heavy-handed in the show and all that is tawdry, what has merit is left gasping for air.

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