That's My Baby

By T.E.K.

WHOOPEE!

Book by William Anthony McGuire Music by Walter Donaldson Lyrics by Gus Kahn

If they survive for half a century, songs are not only classics, they are also beloved. One could sense that on the opening night of the revival of the 1928 musical Whoopee! Just the first few bars of Makin' Whoopee, I'm Bringing a Red, Red Rose, Love Me or Leave Me and Yes, Sir, That's My Baby brought forth the sound of 2,000 hands clapping.

The book has apparently undergone some renovation, but purists of the Broadway class of '28 are the only ones who are likely to be troubled by that. If the word escapist were forgotten, Whoopee! would redefine it. The show is transparently mindless and totally exhilarating fun. Director Frank Corsaro has wisely pitched the tone of the entire evening between silent-movie comedy and balmy operantics. It is never camped. Like gentle satire, it is half in love with what it kids, but time -not the cast -does the kidding.

The plot is wafer thin. Henry Williams (Charles Repole) is slight in stature but huge in hypochondria, and so full of pills that when he sneezes "people around me get cured." By happenstance, Henry extricates Sally Morgan, a coy maiden winsomely played by Beth Austin, from the maritally-minded clutches of Sheriff Bob (J. Kevin Scannell), a sage brush Keystone Kop. Sally's true love is Hiawatha, or rather, Wanenis (Franc Luz), a noble North American savage from red-blooded Dartmouth. She gets him, and after a number of featherbrained misadventures, Henry finds perfect health and pneumatic bliss in the arms of a lusty-voiced, opulently endowed nurse (Carol Swarbrick).

As Henry, Charles Repole moves with the erratic precision of a broken watch spring, but his tap and soft-shoe dances possess the style that Walter Mitty's dreams are made of. He looks astonishingly like Eddie Cantor, the show's original star, but his manner is endearingly cuddlesome, rather like Joel Grey's. Choreographer Dan Siretta's dance numbers blaze across the stage like prairie fires, and the smashing chorus girls are a bouquet of red, red roses.

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