New Plays in Manhattan

Walk a Little Faster (words & music by E. Y. Harburg & Vernon Duke; Courtney Burr, producer). Following the prophetically mediocre opening number of this show, Bobby Clark (traditionally equipped with a dilapidated covert cloth coat, painted spectacles and short cane) and Paul McCullough (attired in a grey bearskin and tennis shoes) pop onto the stage. "All right, McCullough," says impish Mr. Clark, "this is a new revue and we won't use any of the old stuff." Whereupon, happily as of yore, his celebrated cigar shoots torped like out of his mouth and he prevents his partner's snatching it only by beating him off with his stick. As Mr. McCullough wrings his fingers, Mr. Clark remarks: "He's been trying to get that cigar for 27 years." If Clark & McCullough had been permitted to use more of the old stuff, and if that parody of a woman, Beatrice Lillie, had not been introduced to obscure the few moments of genuine low comedy which are vouchsafed them, many a the atregoer would have a much better time at Walk a Little Faster. As it is, the team which brought too much fun to The Ramblers and Strike Up The Band might as well not be in the show. Of course, there is still Miss Lillie. Sandwiched in between four teams of singers and dancers, about whom the most that can be said is that they should not have cost the management much. Comedienne Lillie is at top form. She first ap pears as a college girl, "Scamp of the Campus," series of 1906, wearing a shirt waist of billowing sleeves, smoking a pro scribed cigaret under a sailor hat which wobbles just a little, getting off such mots as "I should worry, I should fret" and "Go 'way back and sit down." She is also the belle of a Yukon saloon, a radio songstress with a roguish fundament, a French diseuse condescendingly interpret ing the story of her song, which concerns one female and two male kangaroos ("It is--what you call it?--a quadrangle"); a catty girl friend visiting 'a stage star on opening night. If these skits fail to amuse you--and they may--do not leave until Miss Lillie and Bobby Clark present their satire on the antics of Clifton Webb & Tamara Geva in Flying Colors. Biography (by S. N. Betaman; Theatre Guild, producer). Marion Froude is a second class painter who has led a first class life. She has seen most of the world through the thumbhole of her palette, perched the great and strange on her posing stand, has been surprised at how accessible most inaccessible people are. On the side she has taken more than one lover. Into her Manhattan studio one afternoon bursts a high-powered young man who believes his mission in life is to ridicule the mighty out of their high places but whose job is to get Painter Froude to write her biography for a magazine very much like the Cosmopolitan. Cajolery, flattery and abuse turn the trick. The painter consents. Thereupon complications arise. An old flame from Knoxville, Tenn. appears on the scene. He is about to be shoved in the Senate, fears that the electorate in the Volunteer State may flinch at the forthcoming revelations of his earlier life. So does his prospective father-in-law, a political power. Setting his lance at a windmill, the publishers' young man is determined that the biography shall appear. Between him and the Senatorial aspirant, both of whom soon discover they are in love with Marion Froude, the matter of the biography is built into a towering issue which is only settled by the lady and a Franklin stove. As the painter, Ina Claire, looking closer to 15 than her reported 35, with a frizzy coiffeur and maidenly costumes, ably achieves the desired characterization of a tolerant woman of the world. The rest of the mumming, plus a nonadult script, result in a play which is of no more im portance than the over-stuffed situation with which it is concerned.

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