New Musical in Manhattan

Silk Stockings (music & lyrics by Cole Porter; book by George S. Kaufman Leueen MacGrath and Abe Burrows) spent three spotlighted months on the road pitching things out and patching things up. It will probably spend many months longer on Broadway. The reason is not that it offers anything unusual in the way of merit or novelty; it seems almost frightened of anything distinguished. The reason lies rather in a formula professionalism, a kind of glazed mediocrity, a persisting common touch that, here and there, is a touch too common. Silk Stockings is all Main Stem and no flower.

There are, to be sure, some genuine good things. The book, freely adapted from Ninotchka (also used as a Garbo movie), has bright moments of storytelling and spoofing. In its tale of a fanatical Soviet woman commissar--who on a mission to Paris responds to French life and American love--there are brighter lines than in most musicals. There are two or three good Cole Porter tunes, and now and then a good Cole Porter lyric. As Ninotchka, Cinemactress Hildegarde Neff is exotic and pleasing enough to get by without a voice; as Ninotchka's Hollywood agent of a beau, oldtime Cinemactor Don Ameche has an excellent voice and everything else to match. And late in the evening, a Moscow jam session achieves a gay abandon that the show, by then, needs as badly as the U.S.S.R. does.

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