New Musical in Manhattan

Barefoot Boy with Cheek (book by Max Shulman; music by Sidney Lippman; lyrics by Sylvia Dee; produced by George Abbott) is another of those youthful musical frolics (Too Many Girls, Best Foot Forward) for which Producer Abbott has become famous--and a little fatiguing. This one's locale is the University of Minnesota, and its line-up includes a fraternity run like a clip joint, a lummox of a football star, a pinhead of a society student, a sourball of a professor, a strident campus Communist, and a freshman hero (Billy Redfield) who is mauled by coeds and made president of the Student Council.

Most of this is kidded with all the subtlety of a fire alarm, though Philip Coolidge, as the dyspeptic professor, offers some deft deadpan satire. But Barefoot Boy, like its predecessors, trades mostly on zip, pace, and the sheer commodity value of youth itself. It gets a fair measure of these; but the Abbott trademark is beginning to seem perilously like a rubber stamp. And Barefoot Boy is very much poorer than its predecessors in the matter of music, and not quite so peppy in its dancing.

The show's biggest asset is pint-sized Nancy Walker (Best Foot Forward, On the Town), who, as class-conscious Yetta Samovar, shows all her likable toughness, sharp timing and comic verve. But Nancy Walker's biggest asset is her way with a good brassy ballad, which she chants in a good brassy way, and Barefoot Boy allots her exactly one.

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