New Plays in Manhattan

Boom-Boom. Someone said: "I won a beauty contest once." Someone else replied: "I'll bet it was in a raffle." The audience sat silent. There was altogether too much of that sort of thing in this revival of some of the best jokes of the revival.and subsequent decades. But there was Nell Kelly, slim and not angular, who distorts her features until she looks like a terrifying Donald McKee drawing of the younger generation. There was also Harry Welsh, whose eyebrows know innuendo and who is funnier than anyone else in this show, not excepting the starred Frank McIntyre.

Lady Fingers. This is the musical version of the 1925 comedy Easy Come, Easy Go which Owen Davis clashed off in an idle moment. Business of stolen papers, a trip to a health farm--including the use of the Pennsylvania Station, Manhattan, as a scene for dance routines--and the cosmic conquest of love, all figure in this fair-to-middling piece. But no show which boasts the presence of the McCarthy Sisters can be lightly dismissed as mediocre entertainment. Well do theatregoers remember these voluptuous ladies in George White's Scandals of 1926, when their amphoral figures were practically the only relief to the eye from a race of U. S. women gone fashionably lissom. Nor with the return of the becoming bulge have the McCarthy Sisters lost allure: their bland dancing, not too mechanically synchronized, and their effortless singing will doubtless keep them on Broadway until Margaret or Dorothy, or Margaret and Dorothy, develop real embonpoint.

John Price Jones and his inordinate good looks make a telling drive for further idolatry. Louise Brown, onetime bearer of happy tidings in Good News--as was handsome Jones--shares the spotlight.