New Revue in Manhattan

Lend an Ear (sketches, lyrics & music by Charles Gaynor; produced by William R. Katzell, Franklin Gilbert & William Eythe) blossoms out, after a long, wintry start, into a really gay intimate revue. Hailing from the West Coast, it often has a rough-diamond, loud-check sense of fun about it; and can be strenuously youthful as well as unpolished. But it has the greatest of assets for an intimate revue--a satiric eye and sassy tongue; and when it manages to be deft and daft at once, is thoroughly hilarious.

Its best jokes are family jokes, jabbing aspects of the entertainment world that age has withered or custom staled. There is a lush spoof of a road-company opera that the unpaid musicians have walked out on; and opera done without music can be flayed without mercy. There is a tearful but cheerful lament by three washed-up queens of the silent films; above all, there is "The Gladiola Girl," a wonderfully funny, insanely accurate burlesque of a routine musical of the '20s (see cut).

Lend an Ear attempts other targets with varying aim: those squalid Latin American tourist villages where hot sex and heavy gunfire are hourly occurrences in the public square; a bandleader and his wife sweating to live up to the lurid--and contradictory--bulletins the columnists issue about them; an old-fashioned Friday afternoon dancing class, in which the Penrod motif loses out to the pretty-pretty. There are the usual--all-too-usual--dance numbers in Lend an Ear, and some pleasantly forgettable tunes.

As is pretty much the rule with intimate revues, Lend an Ear is almost completely new faces and unknown names. But a number of these--as is pretty much the rule, too, when the revues are any good--may before long be pleasantly familiar. Among the others: Yvonne Adair, George Hall and Carol Channing, a large doll-eyed blonde who can be almost spectacularly funny.

. . .

It took seven years for Lend an Ear to get to Broadway. It took Author Charles Gaynor 19. Ever since Dartmouth he had wanted to write big-time musicals. While he was sparring for an opening, he did such odd jobs as playing the piano at weddings and writing college songs for a Fred Waring radio program. Having now performed the rare feat of writing the music, lyrics and sketches for a hit revue (almost always a collaborators' patchwork), he is planning a musical comedy.

Lend an Ear was written for the Pittsburgh Playhouse just before the war. One version lasted two weeks in a summer theater in 1941; another opened this June in Los Angeles, where it is now entering its 26th week. The 18 numbers in the Broadway version include only four from the 1941 original. It had incubated so long that a straight-faced Latin number had to be rewritten as a parody of itself.

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