New Musical in Manhattan

Jamaica (music and lyrics by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg; book by Harburg and Fred Saidy) boasts Lena Horne and much that is stylish and charming. Its achievement, to be sure, is more one of atmosphere than of action, of grace than of speed. The humor in Jamaica is covert and glancing; the very hurricanes blow up too fast to be spectacular; even the calypso recalls an island charmer of long ago.

The danger in all this is growing languor and ultimate drowsiness. That is what befell Composer Aden's tropical House of Flowers, with its far more promising book. But though the book of Jamaica, in short, has an idiot simplicity and an almost insolent lack of purpose, it sort of timidly shuffles about between tunes, seldom even daring to let go with gags. Moreover, the book has Lena Horne on every page, and Harold Arlen to turn the page while she is singing one or another of his songs. She is beautiful, and with what elegant sexuality she twists about in tight-curving, fishtail skirts. She is accomplished in a way all her own, seldom raising her voice, never neon-lighting her effects. With equal seductiveness, she spoofs mechanization in Push the Button, or great-men-turned-to-dust in Napoleon, or sings woman-to-woman in Ain't It the Truth or woman-to-man in Take It Slow, Joe. As a much earthier seductress, Josephine Premice jiggles and jabbers with fine mocking verve.

Happily, Composer Aden's score, here modestly intricate, there suddenly lyrical, has more individual appeal and island charm than routine tropical heat. The entertaining lyrics in Jamaica are never once belted out, nor are the tunes whistled afterwards in the lobby. A show so lightly strummed, so insouciantly strutted, so frilled and beflowered needs to be stylish. Jack Cole's pictorial dances, Oliver Smith's airy sets. Miles White's gorgeous costumes give it style. If it has almost no Broadway snap, it has even less Broadway brassiness. If this is a Jamaica with little ginger and no rum, those, after all, are largely its exports. From at least a musicomedy standpoint, Lena Horne, gay colors, winning tunes--and even shiftless lie-in-the-sun librettos--are its tourist attractions.

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