New Revue In Manhattan

Bless You All (music & lyrics by Harold Rome; sketches by Arnold Auerbach; produced by Herman Levin and Oliver Smith) is sometimes pleasant but never for long. Virtually everyone connected with it has more to boast of than the show itself. It's brightly colored but badly tended; the whole thing needs weeding, even the better things need watering. It looks about as a Broadway revue should look--perhaps in New Haven--three weeks before it opens on Broadway.

With Oliver Smith sets, Miles White costumes and some superior showgirls, Bless You All is sleek and satiny to the eye. But if that adds to the charm, it accentuates the mediocrity: it denies Bless You All the licensed bonhomie and sloppiness of an intimate revue. Even Negro Singer Pearl Bailey's enormous natural charm is put in double jeopardy by her wearing a flossy evening dress while struggling with flat material.

Helen Tamiris' dances--and Valerie Bettis' dancing--are highly professional but not unusual. Harold Rome's music is uniformly unhaunting, but once or twice his lyrics are really bright--as in Little Things Meant So Much to Me, where a wife, in the process of bricking up her husband's body, itemizes the irritations that drove her to murder.

But the backbone of any really sophisticated revue is the skits and those in Bless You All again & again fall flat. For one thing, their targets are usually as obvious as their aim is erratic. Perhaps the liveliest number is the most elaborate: a take-off of a 1960 presidential campaign conducted entirely by television. The show overworks Comic Jules Munshin, who is pleasant to have around now & then, and overtaxes Comedienne Mary McCarty, who can perform--but not miracles.

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