Friday, Jan. 05, 1962

Hush Hour

Subways Are for Sleeping jumped the gun on Transport Chief Michael Quill's threatened New Year's Day subway strike in New York. Five days earlier this musical staged a song slowdown, a dance walkout and a star lockout, and then sat down on its flat, flat book.

Capable Scripters Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote the book and lyrics, but apparently their thinkwell ran dry. The initial notion sounds funny: to explore the antics of a special tribe of New Yorkers who shun the workaday rat race by turning into moles. They doze at Grand Central, sleep on subways, and even rest in the Egyptian sarcophagi at the Metropolitan Museum. They are not exactly bums, but grey flannel grifters who sponge off friends, walk dogs, and ring Christmas bells as charity Santas.

The head grifter is Sydney Chaplin, who acts as if he were carved in lard. Love sets in when a raven-haired newsgal (Carol Lawrence) starts sharing Chaplin's bench in search of a story. They are a rueful twosome, about as happy as a pair of viruses. Actress Lawrence's musicomedy gifts are under smothering wraps, and the only unwrapped presents of the evening are Orson Bean and Phyllis Newman. Fighting hotel-room eviction by wearing nothing but a towel (they can't throw her out nude), Comedienne Newman has one of the two numbers that threaten to wake up the show, I Was a Shoo-in, a hilariously mimed saga of how she missed being Miss America. Comic Bean, a twitchy bundle of broken watchsprings, has the other: he begs her to seduce him by putting on some clothes.

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