New Show in Manhattan

Keep Off the Grass (music & lyrics by James McHugh & Al Dubin; produced by the Shuberts) is the first summer musical to hit Broadway. It might as well be any hot-weather revue of the past 20 years, with too few good tunes and too many bad sketches; but it has Jimmy Durante's desperate clowning. Ray Bolger's skipping feet, some pretty girls, some entertaining specialty numbers.

The revue is laid in Central Park, but very little of it leans to the Fifth Avenue side. The greater portion suggests the Park around 110th Street--particularly corny sketches and many gags that could scarcely combine more vulgarity with less humor.

Schnozzle Durante rushes about the stage much as usual, like a worried tornado; he works harder than any other comedian, except possibly Ed Wynn. He makes a most unorthodox-looking Romeo, whose wooing of Juliet (Ilka Chase) is more like a bombardment than a courtship. In the loudest clothes ever worn by a white man, he cuts loose with a song called A Fugitive from Esquire. As a harassed guide, he attempts to conduct some hooligans through the ''Modernist Room" of the Metropolitan Museum. As a harassed tree surgeon he takes the temperature and sap-pressure of an ailing beech.

Ray Bolger can, still dance with the best of them, and a girl named Virginia O'Brien is surprisingly funny singing torch songs in a monotone, with a completely dead pan. Larry Adler does much better with a harmonica than anyone could possibly expect. And there's a bum (Emmet Kelly) who sits wordlessly on a park bench, removes a ham sandwich from a paper bag, eats it, then lazily brushes his teeth. He provides the one inspired moment of an otherwise uninspired show.

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