New Show in Queens

Last season the Aquacade ran away with the New York World's Fair's amusement area. This season, though the Aquacade is good as ever, it will be hard pressed by a brand-new jamboree called Gay New Orleans. Gay New Orleans is a picturesque settlement full of old Creole atmosphere: French-Quarter houses with trelliswork balconies, a planter's mansion, the famous Absinthe House, a Sazerac bar.

Inside this framework Michael Todd (who last year produced The Hot Mikado and this year The Streets of Paris at the Fair) put on a show which, at 25-c-, is the best buy in the history of the amusement area. No high-brow affair, it is lavishly designed for the outdoors with floodlights, loudspeakers, has Irene Sharaff's gorgeous costuming and Hassard Short's lively direction, does a slick job.

It's really a succession of shows. Show No. 1 is a Negro gambol called Du Barry Brown, with at least one good tune, I've Got a Job, a good specialty act by three colored bucks with canes, a hot dance finale. Show No. 2, Sazerac, covers the white man's South, offers proof that the Albertina Rasch girls may surrender but never die, and that Scarlett O'Hara & Rhett Butler (who make love to music) are going to be equally hard to kill off. Best thing in Sazerac are those well-known comic acrobats, the Oldfields.

At midnight, when the family trade has presumably departed, Gay New Orleans offers a third show called Mardi Gras Frolic. This is a somewhat bolder type of entertainment. The clown, for example, who earlier in the evening cavorted on a lamppost, now cavorts on a huge statue of a nude. Muriel Page does a dance symbolizing the moth & the flame, in which her wings get burned and the rest of her clothes are hastily doffed to prevent the fire from spreading. But the spirit of burleycue reaches its climax with a "Wonder Woman" named Carrie Finnell, who has no wings to burn.

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