New Show in Hollywood

Hollywood made news last week by producing a good musicomedy. Last year Hollywood smacked its lips over a pleasant, tuneful, mildly pinko revue called Meet the People that eventually made its way to Broadway. Last week's show, entitled They Can't Get You Down, was confected by the same trio that put Meet the People together (Henry Myers, Edward Eliscu, Jay Gorney) and dished up by Jack Kirkland and Dwight Deere Wiman, who spent some $25,000 on its production.

They Can't Get You Down starts out where most musicomedies leave off--with boy and girl singing dreamily of future bliss. As the curtain falls, a stooge in a box noisily protests against the show's happy ending, insists on knowing what happened after boy and girl were married. Thereupon a proscenium mike, representing the voice of the theater, agrees, after a bit of bickering, to follow through. The hero becomes the $25-a-week slave of a pulp publisher, has his pay cut to $21 when the publisher's wife decides to support a Middle-European gigolo, is jailed for exposing his publisher's past. But, as it must to all musicomedies, a happy ending comes to this one.

Although the plot is a bit congested, and tries over-zealously to be socially significant, They Can't Get You Down is full of sprightly tunes, includes some dazzling dance routines. The title song, a combination Dale Carnegie-George M. Cohan inspirational piece addressed to "the little guy," has the swing of a fine marching song. But the hit of the show is a ballad called That Mittel-Europa of Mine, sung by highborn refugees. Sample lyrics:

I shot grouse with Oscar Straus

And lived upon women and wine.

Ausgezeichnet, Donner wetter--

Life was perfect--even better

Than a Shubert operetta.

In that Mittel-Europa of mine.

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