New Musical in Manhattan

Seventh Heaven (music and lyrics by Victor Young and Stella Unger; book by Victor Wolfson and Miss Unger; based on the play by Austin Strong) never, with the help of music, achieves the schmalz that the play and movie versions achieved without it. The idyl of a young girl of the Paris slums and a sort of young king of the sewers--who comes home blind, at the end, after World War I--leaves the audience not only dry-eyed but pretty heavy-lidded. It even lacks the appeal of something sweetly out of date. The reason, perhaps, -- is that the lovers are no longer the real story, but merely the required treacle in a seamy-side-of-Paris musical. The rest of Seventh Heaven is almost all tabasco -- streets of Paris and streetwalkers and street dances, apaches and sailors, madams and midinettes, and a pimp who stops a bullet.

Unfortunately, no one stops the show. With one or two Gwen Verdons, Seventh Heaven might bounce to victory the way the equally uninspired Can-Can did. Seventh Heaven does have some reasonably lively dancing and some agreeable sentimental tunes. But it lacks production excitement: Hollywood's Gloria DeHaven and Ricardo Montalban make love seem pleasantly unmemorable, and no one makes sin very thrilling. Sin, in fact, is a good deal more lavendered than scarlet --the hotcha is mostly oo-la-la, the Paris mostly an old-fashioned Gay Paree. The last show of the season, Seventh Heaven might have wound up any season for the past 20 years.

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