High Kicks Above the Big Apple

European-style cabaret can-can succeed in Manhattan

Six long-stemmed can-can dancers kick, whirl and cartwheel, split, shimmy and pirouette to Offenbach's rollicking La Vie Parisienne. In a reverse striptease, a comely Victorian lass in black stockings and garter belt dresses up in corset and crinoline for a grand occasion orchestrated by Strauss. The star of the show, callipygian Linda Bardot, clad mostly in a pearly headdress, twirls around under a filigreed umbrella, mouthing in puffick Cockney Oi'm Aownly aye Bird in aye Gilded Cayge. Between and after the twice-nightly shows, the place becomes a disco where the windows vibrate past midnight.

The Lido in Paris? A cabaret on Tokyo's Ginza? Rio's Copacabana? Hardly. The revue, well named Kicks, is packing New Yorkers and visitors into the Rainbow Grill, which in the past has been celebrated more for its 65th-floor view of New York City than for closeups of prancing showgirls. The revue is risque, sassy, elegantly mounted, and amusing, and its success may say something about the city's mood in troubled times.

Though piano bars, jazz joints and discos abound in the Big Apple, the Rainbow Grill is the classiest cabaret today in a city that once boasted such lively nocturnal redoubts as the Blue Angel, Le Ruban Bleu, La Vie en Rose, the Latin Quarter, the Persian Room and Cafe Society Uptown and Downtown. The irony is that this topless tower should be in the heart of staid Rockefeller Center, built 45 years ago by a family not exactly famed for tripping the light fantastic. On the other hand, the Rockefellers have never been known to disapprove of profitability, and the intimate (4,000-sq.-ft.) Rainbow Grill and its bigger sister, the Rainbow Room (7,000 sq. ft.), are doing better than ever under their present tenants, Neapolitan Tony May and Dublin-born Brian Daly.

The lines outside the Rainbow Room, whose art deco trappings and bouncy bands have been part of Manhattan's nostalgia bank since the days when young ladies made their debuts there in elbow-length white gloves, may be the longest for any after-theater show in town; it is a place so perfectly preserved in decor and atmosphere that one half expects Fred and Ginger to come tripping down the curving, chrome-railed stairways. The Grill, which long played second sax to the Room, became a supper club in 1965. Its windows were doubled in size and the floor raised 18 in. to pull the skyline into the room. It was modestly successful for 14 years, bringing in such performers as Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan. But topflight nonrock talent became increasingly hard to find from season to season, and Partners May and Daly decided to turn the place into a European-style cabaret.

A $1 million renovation gave the Grill a new stage, elaborate lighting and sound systems, and a low-key decor using muted browns, beiges and honey-colored furniture for at most 250 guests. The first cabaret show, Viva! Viva!, ran for 13 months. Kicks, produced, directed, choreographed and emceed by an exuberant Frenchman named Peter Jackson, consists of ten numbers, which are periodically changed, performed to taped music that ranges from the Beatles to Wagner. The show runs for 56 minutes. Says Jackson: "An American audience starts to scratch after an hour."

Dinner, a distinct cut above most cabaret fare, comes from a kitchen that also provides more elaborate menus for the Rainbow Room and nine private dining rooms. (At lunchtime the whole Rainbow complex is a private club for businessmen.) But then, when les girls are on, few eyes are riveted on the leg of lamb.

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