New Plays in Manhattan

Earl Carroll's Vanities (Music & lyrics by Harold Arlen & Ted Koehler; dialog by Jack McGowan). "Perhaps I'm a doddering old softie," 0. 0. Mclntyre admits in a preface to the Vanities program, "but in these blizzardy days of a world in chaos it seems heartening that to Earl Carroll nothing is ever lost, that there is no such thing as defeat and that life itself can be a perpetual triumph."

Producer Carroll's tenth durbar is not a perpetual triumph, but it reaches zeniths of one sort and another. A young man named Keith Clark snatches six cigarets, a cigar and finally a pipe from the air, astounds spectators as thoroughly as does Cardini, "The Suave Deceiver" in RKO vaudeville with the same trick. At one point the chorus parades around a dark stage with long glass tubes of rare gases (neon, argon) exposing them to an electro-magnetic field from time to time so that they light up in weird pale colors (''first time on any stage" I. The behavior of The Most Beautiful Girls In The World is a little subdued this year. Presumably as a result of Mayor "Holy Joe" McKee's theatrical clean-up campaign, even in the big Spirit of the Blue Danube number not a single Carrollite breast is bared. But in all other respects, especially in dirty remarks, the new Carroll revue lives up to the tradition of its predecessors.

Chief comedienne is dry-voiced Helen Broderick. who variously impersonates a streetwalker, an inmate of a maternity ward, a deceiving wife. Harriet Hoctor. wanly unreal as a porcelain figure, does her old raven dance and a couple of others. Offsetting this wholesome influence is an abandoned fellow named Milton Berle (to rhyme with "peril") whom Producer Carroll has chosen for his chief male funster.

Mr. Carroll's shows have long held the record for borderline humor. In Comedian Berle is to be found the acme of hysterical vulgarity. His funniest printable jape is introducing the audience to Jim Londos. and then finding that he has mistaken an unknown lady in the third row. for the onetime champion wrestler (see p. 22). While one part of the audience blushes and the other part guffaws. Comedian Berle proceeds to imitate a person of uncertain gender, quip about the show girls' fundaments, shout depraved announcements into a loudspeaker. Less mad than Jimmy Durante, less subtle than Willie Howard, Comedian Berle's horrid humor is noisily unique. He seems to get a great deal of fun out of it.

Most of the music, by Howard Arlen (You Said It), is pleasant. Best tune: "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues."

Success Story (By John Howard Lawson; Group Theatre, producer). Sol Ginsberg had an insatiable thirst for success. When he first went to work for the advertising firm, he knew what he wanted. After he had ousted his gentile boss, spurned the boss's secretary who loved him and married the boss's mistress, he was sated, did not know what to do with himself next. The secretary settles that for him by shooting him dead.

The Group Theatre, which proved itself worthy of serious consideration by last season's House of Connelly and Night Over Taos, has given Playwright Lawson's piece a workmanlike production. Franchot Tone, as the employer, seems miscast because of his youth. But Stella (the secretary) and Luther Adler (Ginsberg), of the famed yiddish acting family, display a genuine shrewdness and intelligence in their impersonations. If Success Story lacks the authoritative click for which the Group Theatre is still searching it is the fault of Playwright Lawson. whose one authentic success to date was Processional, produced eight years ago by the Theatre Guild. His present piece uses three words where one would suffice, lacks clean edges, bogs down under occasional loads of heavy-handed satire. Explicit acting and direction make the play recommendable.

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