Hot Line of Goods

By T.E. Kalem

IRENE

A MUSICAL REVIVAL

Directed by GOWER CHAMPION

The nostalgia craze is on the wane in the theater, and Irene demonstrates what happens toward the end of such entertainment boomlets. The content becomes a commodity. Even though it is supposedly set in 1919, the year in which the original musical was produced, the show is not nostalgic about anything. It fails to evoke a mood, a tone, a memory of any clearly definable period or place. It is strictly a product of the Broadway showshops peddling nostalgia per se, just as they peddled nudity per se two or three seasons ago as another hot line of goods.

Peddling is work, sometimes hard work, and anyone attending Irene ought to be forewarned that much of it is about as playful as a Detroit assembly line. The assembly-line touch might even be called the essence of Gower Champion. As a director, he is the relentless master of mindless mechanics. He has never paid more than trifling attention to the meaning of a show. A virtually meaningless show like Irene is an irresistible challenge to him since he can drive the cast and dancers into assembling the pieces, faster and faster and faster. As a result, his direction, like his choreography, slants all of his work toward farce, since that is a genre that depends on enforced pace rather than organic motion or felt emotion.

This approach suits the temperament of his star, Debbie Reynolds, who is a model of cool, scrubbed-up efficiency rather reminiscent of the Old Dutch cleanser ads. And does she work! It is as if she were performing some selfless public service that precluded the display of any private pleasure. She sings well, but without entrancement. She dances nimbly, but without any vivifying personal style. She acts acceptably without creating a character.

In all fairness, the distilled silliness of the plot does not aid her. Debbie is Irene O'Dare, an Irish-American piano tuner who lives in a Manhattan Ninth Avenue flat with her widowed mother (Patsy Kelly). On a tuning job at a Long Island mansion, she meets Donald Marshall (Monte Markham), heir to a family fortune. He is so impressed with her commercial savvy that he makes her a partner in a couturier venture sponsoring a man named Madame Lucy (George S. Irving). Love calls; the pair answers. Good night, Donald. Good night, Irene.

With a narrative line like that, scene stealing is almost a salvage operation. Irving steals several scenes with high-camp good humor, and Kelly plies her larcenous wiles outrageously, though if Broadway ever de-accessions ham her situation could become perilous.

Those who hope to travel down memory lane with the score will find much of it a dusty detour. Only Alice Blue Gown, You Made Me Love You and the title song have survived 1919 with melodic vitality. Thanks be to Peter Gennaro's dance numbers for some lively eye openers at points in the story where one might be strongly tempted to doze off. They are executed with zest and finesse, and one number, The Riviera Rage, also possesses a saucy elegance.

What with ball scenes and soirees, there are several abortive hints that Irene intended to mimic My Fair Lady, but for that one needs Shaw as well as scenery. One also needs the sly romantic sorcery of champagne and Irene is drunk on Ovaltine.

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