New Revue on Broadway

Show Girl (music, lyrics and sketches by Charles Gaynor; additional sketches by Ernest Chambers) is mostly Carol Channing, a real win-place-and-show girl with any kind of luck and, even without it, still pleasant to watch. In a "small revue" that could scarcely be smaller--besides Carol, just Jules Munshin and a singing French foursome--versatile Actress Channing performs in three out of every four numbers, often shifting gear right on stage behind a screen. She is very much a show girl in how hard she works, very much more than one in how neatly she gets her hoofs, or her lungs, or above all her teeth, into a great many aspects of show business. Few mimics, moreover, who have such sharp teeth have also such appealing tremolo, are so touchingly themselves along with riding herd on others.

In Show Girl, Actress Channing is at her best doing what first won her praise on Broadway: she spoofs the sillier musicomedies of the '20s till every inanity glitters, and with a magic that in the very act of murdering old musicals can bring them back to life. Today's grim musical dramas are not as funny targets, nor has Carol as fine a touch for them, but her Switchblade Bess, at least, has inspired moments. If much of Show Girl rather smacks of family jokes, it is at any rate a well-known family--Marlene Dietrich, Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland--and full of family bluntness. And in Show Girl's freshest idea for a skit, Miss Channing and Munshin play the Lunts fussing like two Hausfrauen over the theater named after them.

Not only as Alfred Lunt, but as a thinly veiled Impresario S. Hurok, Munshin has chances to show his mettle, and Les Quat' Jeudis are agreeably different, or French enough to seem so. As the author of almost everything spoken or sung, Charles Gaynor is not uniformly sprightly. Indeed, Show Girl is full of ups and downs, but is never long enough down for dire trouble, and is often high enough up with its star to be one of the season's few real sources of laughter.

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