New Musical in Manhattan

Miss Liberty (music & lyrics by Irving Berlin; book by Robert E. Sherwood; produced by the Messrs. Berlin & Sherwood and Moss Hart) was Broadway's most ballyhooed hot-weather opening since Composer Berlin's bang-up This Is the Army in 1942. This is not the army. This is not even a very exciting summer event. Miss Liberty has much that is sound Broadway about it, but little of Berlin at his best, and nothing of Sherwood at all.

The scene is the 1880s, when France had just shipped the Statue of Liberty (in 200-odd cases) to the U.S. The plot concerns a circulation war over the statue between Joseph Pulitzer's N.Y. World and James Gordon Bennett's N.Y. Herald. A Herald photographer brings over from Paris the girl who was Sculptor Bartholdi's model for the statue--only it turns out that she wasn't. The customary hocus-pocus leads to the customary happy ending.

Like most period musicals, Miss Liberty is charming to look at, with gay costumes and Oliver Smith's elegant and evocative sets. Like most period musicals also, Miss Liberty has a thin, insipid air of farce about it. But it is too much in one key; by not changing enough, it drifts steadily toward the worse. As a complete novice at musicomedy, Mr. Sherwood might have blundered into something truly fresh and individual, but he seems to have carefully studied how to be as much (and as mechanically) like everybody else as possible.

The ending--a solemn chorale to liberty after a full evening of monkeyshines--is wildly inappropriate.

Again, as an old hand at musicals, Composer Berlin might have fused lifetime knowledge with momentary inspiration. But he, too, has apparently taken pains to be as much (and as mechanically) like himself as possible. There are several nice tunes, however, and Only for Americans has some lively lyrics which kid the Paris tourist trade:

A Momarte lady drops her hanky

And slyly winks her eye:

That's only for a Yankee,

The Frenchman wouldn't buy.

As the old Parisian rip who bawls out this ditty, 70-year-old stage & screen Actress Ethel Grimes does a vigorous job that comes nearest to giving the show the comedy it badly needs. The young people in the cast--Mary McCarty, Allyn McLerie, Eddie Albert--are all pleasant enough, but their roles are definitely on the stale side. What does most to relieve the sameness and tameness of Miss Liberty are Jerome Robbins' gay, rowdy dances. They are much the best thing in the show.

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