New Shows in Manhattan

Ice Follies of 1941 (produced by Oscar F. Johnson, Edwin H. & Roy L. Shipstad ). Like its four annual predecessors, this big, glistening chunk of the new Ice Age will tour throughout the U. S. (23 cities this year). Today's fancy ice skaters have developed an astounding rapport with each other and with frozen water. They have already done about everything on skates it would be safe to show the children. To other, less accomplished skaters, the great ice stars already begin to seem like gods. To timid nonskaters they frequently seem on the point of killing themselves.

Ice Follies of 1941 has no such lovely ballet formations as Sonja Henie's show It Happens on Ice (TIME, Oct. 21), but the Follies' specialists are unsurpassable. Auburn-haired Evelyn Chandler does seemingly impossible cart wheels; Harris

Legg not only jackknifes over eleven barrels but also leaps through a revolving, flaming ring. There is fairy-tale comedy by a family of three Penguins, and the pratt-fall school of wit is upheld by numerous masters of the padded backside. Just when it seems impossible that skating can be any funnier, the Swiss team of Frick & Frack appears and remains in graceful motion while drooping backwards so far that their heads nearly sweep the rink.

Producer Roy Shipstad, who advertises himself as "the greatest male skater in the world today," probably is. He is to the ice what Fred Astaire is to the boards. And as the last couple in a group waltz (spectators will do well to spot them from the beginning of the number), young Ruby & Bobby Maxson from Duluth do perhaps the most beautifully abandoned pair-skating the ice has ever held.

Mum's the Word (conceived, produced & acted by Jimmy Savo). Little Jimmy Savo with his big black eyes, dwarf's body and appallingly baggy pants has often been called one of the world's great clowns, a pantomimist in Chaplin's class. Highbrows have rhapsodically declared that he brings the Commedia dell' Arte back to one-man life. Hundreds of vaudeville audiences have paid him the simpler tribute of howling when he whispered the song River, Stay 'Way From My Door and shooed the river away with childlike gestures. His last Broadway appearance was in the Rodgers & Hart musical. The Boys from Syracuse. Last week Savo put on a one-man show of his own.

Some of the twelve scenes started toward straight satire but most of them wound up utterly cuckoo. When Savo performed a drunken surgical operation, his patient's insides yielded a number of colored balloons, a string of sausages, and finally a Punch & Judy show. As a washerwoman by a stream, he was interrupted, for no ascertainable reason, by the passing -- of an invisible fox hunt, but returned to the amorous contemplation of a union suit. Time & again he was a citizen of a never-never land as fantastical as that inhabited by Krazy Kat.

In vaudeville the absurdity of Savo's silent comedy was heightened by the persistent squeaking of his shoes. Last week his shoes didn't squeak but what his admirers regretted most was that Mum's the Word closed after four showings. Savo's clowning evokes a world much more fey. much less relevant to the real world than Chaplin's, and Savo's few attempts at solemnity never approach Chaplin's. But to anyone who enjoys Savo's world, a whole evening of it isn't too long.

Delicate Story (by Ferenc Molnar. produced by Gilbert Miller & Vinton Freedley). The famous Hungarian playwright-refugee Ferenc Molnar (Liliom, The Swan, The Guardsman) apparently has not been too depressed by a world at war. Nowadays he spends much of his time in Manhattan's Plaza Hotel bar, and he has not lost his Continental knack of getting amusement out of the idea of cuckoldry. He is amused by it in Delicate Story. which is so delicate that it almost -- but not quite -- wastes away. The wife of a Swiss delicatessen-keeper takes a shine to a young man about to be called back to the army of his native land. Her husband eventually suspects the worst, but it really hasn't happened. The young man -- to the distress of the wife -- has been in love with someone else all the time.

Amorous waywardness is always trite enough in outline, but life usually fills in the outlines with subtle erotic shadings. So does Molnar. Edna Best is so plumply and seductively feminine as the wife that her unwanted virtue seems a shame. Jay Fassett, the heavy and harassed husband, is a fine figure of a man. But the show is nearly stolen by Harry Gribbon, a former Keystone cop, carrying on as a police officer. In the end Molnar the craftsman almost triumphs over Molnar the trifler's failings.

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