Evening star., 1943-11-26

forced landing OF an Army transport
plane on the campus of a girls
school. There were the girls, see
All of them at an impressionable
$50 to speak, age, hedged in by the
most strict of charm school rules,
ready to swoon at the mere sound of
man. Then, there was the plane
filled with glamorous air warriors
living the lonely lives of eagles.
What could be more amusing than
to bring them together by means Of
a forced landing and to keep them
together by means of measles
quarantine slapped on the school
right after the plane had made its
dents in the campus? The answer,
bluntly, is that lot of things could
be funnier, but the authors of
Whats Up clearly did not think Of
them.
The romantic, or biologic, implica-
tions of the situation are too en-
crossing to the authors to make
proper allowance for Mr.. Savo. The
best they could do for him was to
make him an East Indian potentate,
bound for Washington under the
aegis of the Air Transport Com
mand. Any one who knows Wash
ington and Mr. Savo realizes that it
would be whale of lot funnier for
him to have gotten there instead of
being forced down and lost among a
bunch of co-eds and young flyers at
charm school. He does the best
he can under the circumstances,
slithering into the movement of the
story from time to time for some
eloquently pantomimic seconds while
the scene is being changed. 1t is
unfair to both the audience and
Savo, the finest of the speechless
clowns, that he is stuck with that
environment.
AS the action of whats Up"
moves from the living room to the
bedrooms. to the rumpus room Of
the school, the younger people show
to much better advantage than Savo,
the, productions one genuine asset.
Most attractive of the younger set
turns out to be Miss Warren, a very
pretty girl, who has the right kind
of voice to deal with the ballads
composed by Lerner and Loewe
you've Got a Hold on Me-" a not
inspired piece of music by any
stretch of the imagination, is the
number which she lifts most notably
out of the rut in which it was left
by the authors.
Musically, Whats Up is better
in its quicker tempo items, although
these have tendency to become
too cute for the words at the dis
posal of the lyricist. joshua" an
item having to do with the efface-
ment of bedroom walls, is one that
you may be hearing on rather an
expansive scale Another is You
Wash and I'll Dry" which leaves
the impression that it was a better
idea than it is song, and a third,
The Iu-Tempered Clavicord," is
prettily variable sort of tune that
provides the basis for the rather
imaginative ballet which Mr.. Bal
anchine has concocted for the rum
pus room scene.
The best comedy note in the
shows music is that struck in the
opening number, Miss Langley's
School for Girls" It amounts to
a biographical sketch OF the typical
founder of such institutions and is
good enough to hint that the show
is going to be better than it turns
out.
X X
whats Up" also on the credit
side, is one of the most attractively
set and enticeingly dressed of the
new shows on Broadway. Boris
Aronson and Grace Houston, re-
spectively, are responsible for those
assets. With the others, however,
they leave the musical considerably
less than the sum of its parts.