Singapore Sling

By T.E.K.

PRIVATES ON PARADE by Peter Nichols

There is an old evangelical hymn whose refrain runs, "Brighten the corner where you are." Scarcely anyone on either side of the Atlantic does that with more dazzling spontaneity and skill than Britain's Actor-Dancer-Singer-Clown Jim Dale. He is a grand and compelling reason for being at New Haven's Long Wharf Theater at the present moment instead of wherever you happen to be.

Dale is playing a faggot's faggot, but never fear: his manly chest and hairy legs are in full and virile view whether he is impersonating Marlene Dietrich in her black-garter outfit from The Blue Angel or banana-topped Carmen Miranda or dear, dear Noel Coward. Dale is the captain of a kinky service entertainment unit attached to beleaguered British troops who are in the process of losing Singapore.

While drawing their vaudevillian routines from the bottom of a gunny sack indelibly marked CORN, these entertainers engage in enough adventures and misadventures to stock a TV mini-series-- though much of it would have to be blipped out, since the show is rife with four-letter words, most of which begin with a, c. f or s.

Quite apart from Dale, this is a top-hole cast. There are some problems inherent in the play. Peter Nichols (Joe Egg, The National Health) has really scrambled three plays here-- a sequel to Oh! What a Lovely War, a sequel to The Boys in the Band and an indigenous British product of the past quarter-century that might be called Britannia Rues the Waves. This is a form of retroactive remorse for colonialist sins that one no longer possesses the power to commit. If Maggie Thatcher succeeds in turning England around, she may sound taps for a generation of British playwrights.

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