New Musical in Manhattan

Very Warm for May (music by Jerome Kern, book & lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, 2nd). First Kern musicomedy to reach Broadway since 1933, Very Warm for May brought out a glittering first-night audience. The audience proved much more glittering than the show. Kern's tunes were bright and strummy enough, but a raucous, epileptic plot made the show a bird that could sing but not fly.

Not that Very Warm for May lacks "ideas." Rather, it is swamped by them. Providing an elaborate burlesque of summer barn theatres, with their mauve-tinted playwrights, dimwit patronesses and clod-like performers, it lunges wildly in every direction. It jazzes up Freud, mimics Dali, writhes and wriggles, gambols and glides, rains schottisches, streams gavottes, blows ballets. The atmosphere, at its thickest, is very warm for mayhem. The whole thing suggests perfectly the hysterical side of summer theatres, but doesn't turn the funny side into laughs.

Even such shrewd comics as Hiram Sherman and Eve Arden fail to be very funny, while Kern's prettiest tunes are drowned out by the heavy artillery of the plot. The show gets good only when the barn theatre is forgotten and some attractive youngsters such as Ingenue Grace McDonald sing and dance. But by then, unfortunately, there's no use locking the barn door.

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