Musicalamities

Broadway got its first musical comedies of the fall last week, but they proved to be musicalamities.

Count Me In (music & lyrics by Ann Ronell; book by Waiter Kerr & Leo Brady) has Charles Butterworth and Luella Gear (both accomplished comics when they are given half a chance), the nimble dancing feet of Hal Leroy, a fast-paced, fine-feathered chorus and an estimated $100,000 worth of trimmings. What makes it commonplace is its tunes. What bends it over double and finally lays it out flat is its book (about a family who are all in the war except Papa): it stupefies with as dull a book as any in years.

Let Freedom Sing (music & lyrics mostly by Harold Rome; produced by the Youth Theater) brought to Broadway a bunch of youngsters who for several years have contrived some amiable side-street shindigs. Their grown-up party is a bust: their high spirits produce silliness; their satire goes sour; their amateurism sticks out like a sore thumb. A topical revue, Let Freedom Sing purveys standing jokes (the WAACs, Washington overcrowding, hoarding, snooty refugees) without giving them a single new twist. Composer Rome's tunes have none of the lilt he put into Pins and Needles and Sing Out the News, and his lyrics have none of the sparkle.

Back to Broadway, five years after it ended a run of 835 performances there, went Three Men on a Horse last week. John Cecil Holm's and George Abbott's machine-made farce about a mousy little greeting-card writer whose knack for doping out the races gets him shanghaied by professionals, still has some laughs. And Actor William Lynn still makes the little guy appealing.

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