New Musicals in Manhattan

Toplitzky of Notre Dame (book & lyrics by George Marion Jr., music by Sammy Fain, produced by William Cahn) proclaims openly what many football coaches may have secretly suspected: that Notre Dame football teams are divinely guided. The proof: God sends down an angel to play in an otherwise all-too-human Notre Dame backfield. Then matters get ungodly involved. Just before the big Army game, the angel (Warde Donovan) falls in love with an innkeeper's daughter (Betty Jane Watson), is sternly ordered home. But at the last minute Heaven relents. The angel is made man for keeps, gets his girl and, what's more, beats the Army -- by kicking a 105-yard field goal.

With plot and title, this strenuous musical makes a strong bid to get Notre Dame's subway alumni on its side. It will interest few others. The book utterly dulls a bright satiric idea, and the songs, with the quaint exception of a Hibernian lay describing a game of seraphic hurley,* are easy to forget. But in small ways, Toplitzky often goes over big. Comic Frank Marlowe does a couple of good wide turns as an overgrown hayseed; Hoofer Walter Long manages to make tap dancing look interesting; Gus Van is delightful as the Irish immigrant, who calls Notre Dame Coach Frank Leahy the day he lands, wishes him "a foi,ne year of Catholic action."

But the only really remarkable thing about Toplitzky is the almost ferocious vim with which everyone performs; the chorus behaves as if it might tackle anyone in the audience who didn't cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame.

Beggar's Holiday (book & lyrics by John Latouche; music by Duke Ellington; produced by Perry Watkins & John R. Sheppard Jr.) is "based on" John Gay's renowned and raffish 18th Century Beggar's Opera. The debt to Gay is not large. Beggar's Holiday has a present-day setting, a new book, new lyrics and new music. What it has kept is the general movement of the story, the principal low-life characters (one or two in name only) and the cheeky last-minute happy ending.

What it has parted with least wisely, for it has found nothing at all compensating, is most of the hardboiled, high-flying satire of The Beggar's Opera. Gay ripped open the underworld of his time to reveal its dissoluteness and dog-eat-dog love of lucre; but he had a corrupt great world equally in mind, even satirizing Prime Minister Robert Walpole. And Gay made his bawds and fences, his cutpurses and stool pigeons part of a pungent, roaring scene.

Beggar's Holiday has a full crew of mobsters, doublecrossers and madams; it skips from brothels to hobo jungles to clinks; but it lacks satiric or any other kind of momentum. It skitters between monkeyshines and melodrama, dilutes the satire, overdoes the sex. But it remains, by Broadway standards, refreshingly unconventional. While giving little to Beggar's Holiday, The Beggar's Opera perhaps took something vital away--the chance to start from scratch, to build homogeneously from the ground up.

Even in pure musicomedy terms, Beggar's Holiday has as many ups & downs as an elevator. But when it forgets that John Gay ever lived, and the mixed white and Negro cast sings and stomps to Duke Ellington's rhythmic tunes, Beggar's Holiday has real high spirits and character.

* An Irish game played with a small ball, big shillelaghs and an attending undertaker.

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