New Musical in Manhattan

I Married An Angel (words & music by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart; adapted from the play by John Vaszary; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) sent first-nighters home humming and happy, drew cheers next day from song-starved critics. The show is hardly as good as all that though for the marriage of the season's most ethereal stage bride, Producer Wiman has provided a shimmering trousseau reputed to have cost $125,000; several wardrobefuls of beautiful bright clothes, a pile of lacy, hand-embroidered stage sets by Jo Mielziner, plenty of Rodgers silver tunes.

The plot of I Married An Angel has to do with Count Willy Palaffi (Dennis King), a Budapest banker who, swearing he will marry nothing less than an angel, is forthwith confronted by one (Vera Zorina), wings and all. They wed, but the bride's celestial habit of blurting out the truth stirs up a lot of trouble with the groom's friends and depositors.

For an act and a half, I Married An Angel pins all its hopes on being fluffy, fleecy, feathery swansdown. And fluffy, fleecy, feathery indeed is Actress Zorina with her pale face, charming figure, dainty dancing and foolproof accent; never more so than in the scene where she is visited by her sister angels from Heaven and floats across the stage cooing their names: Clarrinda, Rosa-leena, Seronel-la, Arabella. In the same mood are at least two of Composer Rodgers' best tunes: I Married An Angel (a natural for the hurdy-gurdies) and Spring Is Here.*

In the middle of Act II, Producer Wiman suddenly tosses Budapest into the Danube, lights out for Manhattan, hotchas up Broadway and gives the signal for all kinds of people to rush in where angels fear to tread. The slightly incongruous result wakes up a drowsing show with the black coffee of a burlesque on a Radio City Music Hall routine, introduced by the song At the Roxy Music Hall:

Where they change the lights a million times a minute,

Where the stage goes up and down when they begin it,

It's a wonder Mrs. Roosevelt isn't in it At the Roxy Music Hall.

It's a wonderland where every one is Alice, Where the ladies' room is bigger than a palace, At the Roxy Music Hall.

Composer Richard Rodgers, 35, and Lyric-Writer Lorenz Hart, 43, are the best-known words-&-music team on Broadway, with 24 shows behind them, including such hits as the two editions of the Garrick Gaieties, A Connecticut Yankee, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, and the current I'd Rather Be Right. Their collaboration started when they wrote two Columbia Varsity shows (though Hart had already left Columbia), then drew their first salute from Broadway with the first Garrick Gaieties, in which Hart thumbed his nose at the June-moon school of lyrics, introduced such slick rhymes as the famed

We'll go to Greenwich

Where modern men itch

To be free.

Having once meshed, the two never pulled apart, stuck together even in Holly wood (Love Me Tonight, Mississippi). Except for Blue Moon, which was an independent song hit, their best songs (Mountain Greenery, My Heart Stood Still, I've Got Five Dollars, Ten Cents a Dance, The Lady Is a Tramp) have come right out of their shows.

A Broadway star overnight, Actress Vera Zorina (real name: Brigitta Hartwig) is 21, was born in Berlin, made her professional debut there at the age of eleven. After studying dancing under famed Nicolas Legat, coach of Pavlova and Nijinsky, she played in the Reinhardt productions, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Tales of Hoffmann. Quickly spotted, she was engaged for the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe, which forced her to take her present Russian stage name. Spotted again by Producer Wiman, she played the Tamara Geva role in the London production of On Your Toes. Spotted there by a Goldwyn scout, she went to Hollywood, had a leading role in this year's Goldwyn Follies, is due back in Hollywood early next winter for another picture.

* The title of a fine little Rodgers & Hart show of 1929.

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