New Musical in Manhattan

The Girl in Pink Tights (music & lyrics by Sigmund Romberg and Leo Robin; book by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields) deserves credit for a good deed: it brought Renee Jeanmaire, of France and Hollywood, to Broadway. Impishly black-eyed, boyishly black-haired, seductively black-silk-stockinged, she is an expert and charming dancer, an inexpert and amusing singer, an explosive personality, and a very bright asset of a decidedly dull show.

The show is a period piece with mild historical warrant: it tells of a French ballet troupe which came to New York around 1870, was burned out of the Academy of Music while still in rehearsal, and joined forces with a melodrama rehearsing at Niblo's Garden. Though presumably an account of how--via The Black Crook--American musicomedy was born, it seems an account of how it died. Few recent musicals have been more lavish, fewer still so long-winded.

The Girl loiters through a book burdened with one of those musicomedy love stories, and barnacled with scores of those jokes that are written in collaboration, as though no one writer cared to take the blame. It sprawls through a succession of Sigmund Romberg songs, all just sufficiently tuneful to sound like the same tune. In the face of this, the brighter bits--the acting of London's Charles Goldner, a ditty called Up in the Elevated Railway, some of Agnes de Mille's dance routines and most of Eldon Elder's sets--fail to count for a great deal. Even Jeanmaire herself doesn't count for quite enough.

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