New Musical in Manhattan

Rumple (book by Irving Phillips; music and lyrics by Ernest G. Schweikert and Frank Reardon) has just one real asset: Eddie Foy. He has the twin gifts of perfect stage presence and quiet audience courtship, the jaunty, pinpointed song-and-dance-man skill of the vaudeville era. He knows every last little hop, skip and jump, and nudge, bop and scram; he is master of the soft shoe, the dead pan, the faraway smile. As Rumple, a newspaper-cartoon character in danger of extinction because his creator has lost the power to portray him, he fights for survival with tactics that happily are more Foy than fey.

But even Foy, thrust as an invisible character into an all-too-visible musicomedy mess, can never move with the show; he can only draw attention away from it, like someone marching exuberantly out of step. The story, with its romantic snarls and journalistic crises, clumps its stubbornly senseless, monstrously long-winded way. It is a story that Foy can briefly brighten or interrupt, but never shorten or save.

In addition to a draggy book, there are tunes that can only turn rather untuneful to avoid seeming reminiscent, and lyrics that are ruggedly mediocre. Stephen Douglass and Lois O'Brien look nice as the lovers; Barbara Perry tries to help as Rumple's girl--or girl Friday; and Gretchen Wyler, with sass and sex enough for most roles, seems wasted as a girl with psychiatric problems that conceivably grew out of the show.

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