On Ice

Sophisticated New Yorkers, accustomed to the finesse of their annual Skating Club Carnivals, have been slow to warm up to professional, itinerant ice shows. Last week, however, when the Ice Follies of 1940 hit town, New Yorkers crammed Madison Square Garden to the rafters for six nights, whistled and stomped like yokels. For suddenly, it seemed, the variety-show-on-ice had crystallized into first-rate entertainment.

It was the fourth year the Ice Follies had come to Broadway. The show was started on a shoestring by Eddie Shipstad & Oscar Johnson (a pair of St. Paul skaters who first got into the business 13 years ago when they were hired to do a comic Bowery skit at a Manhattan hockey game) and Eddie's younger brother, Roy. In 1937, the Follies were as crude as a road company of East Lynne. Next year the little St. Paul troupe was more professional. Last year they were still better. This year their show was as polished as any Follies the late Florenz Ziegfeld ever produced.

Beautifully costumed, cleverly staged, its acts varied from acrobatics to ballet, from comic capers to spinning solos. It had no glittering star like Hollywood's Sonja Henie. But skating fans last week were ready to adopt new ice gods: Wisconsin's piquant Bess Ehrhardt and dashing Roy Shipstad (the "human top"); Adagio Specialists Idi Papez and Karl Zwack of Vienna (onetime European pair champions) ; Brooklyn-born Evelyn Chandler, who turns nine Arabian cartwheels without touching hands to ice; little Harris Legg, who takes a breath-taking leap over a lineup of eleven barrels and as a giant snowman performs the rare stunt of skating on 18-inch stilts; onetime Minnesota Footballer Heinie Brock and his buffoonery; Eddie Shipstad & Oscar Johnson, still cutting up in their own show.

But the skaters that brought down the house each night were Frick & Frack, a pair of Swiss comics. Frick & Frack have been a scream ever since they first skated together in their native Basle three years ago. Frick, whose real name is Werner Groebli, was a student at the University of Zurich. Frack, born Hansruedi Mauch, was studying at a business school. One holiday afternoon they set to burlesquing some of their pompous neighbors who acted as though they owned the rink. Onlookers tittered merrily.

Before they realized what was happening, Frick and Frack were performing in Zurich, Berne, St. Moritz. At St. Moritz an English producer spied them, hired them to do a turn in a London ice show. In London last winter a U. S. promoter saw them, hired them to do their stuff at Hollywood's Tropical Ice Garden. When the Tropical Ice Garden melted after four weeks, Frick & Frack got one job and another, finally found themselves in St. Paul's Skating Carnival. There Producers Shipstad & Johnson, who know a good comic when they see one, grabbed the boys from Basle--at $500 a week for 48 weeks of the year.

Frick & Frack do not depend on costumes, grimaces or falls to get their laughs. With the pantomime of Charlie Chaplin and the rubber legs of Leon Errol, they take the elements of figure skating, distort them into crazy positions to create some of the most astonishing feats ever performed on skates. Frick's specialty: a cantilever Spread Eagle in which his body, bent backward from the knees, is almost horizontal with the ice. Frack's specialty: a rocking-chair Spread Eagle (gliding in circles in a sitting position).

Says Frick, the stolid one: "People think our skating is eccentric. It is not so. Any figure skater should be able to do a serious Spread Eagle asleep. It becomes comedy when you do odd things with your body while the Spread Eagle is going on. We use our brains, nerve-control and concentration." Says Frack, the fractious one: "What we like most outside of skating is to go to a vaudeville show so we can laugh once in a while."

While the Ice Follies were attracting 94,000 Manhattan spectators last week, two other first-class ice shows jampacked U. S. and Canadian arenas:

> In Houston, Sonja Henie's Hollywood Ice Revue opened its 1940 tour--with a cast of 160 troupers, $65,000 worth of costumes and special icing machines capable of making 125 tons of ice for each performance. The tour is Sonja's farewell personal appearance.

> In Montreal, a new revue called the Ice Vanities, produced by Bill O'Brien (promoter of the Vines-Perry professional tennis tours) and featuring Prague's Vera Hruba and Ottawa's Guy Owen, played to sellout crowds in the eighth stop of its U. S. and Canadian tour.

> Still in rehearsal last week was still another grand-scale ice show, the European All-Star Ice Revue. Its cast includes two dozen British skaters who found themselves jobless this winter, Switzerland's famed Armand Perren (King Leopold's skating instructor), South Africa's Edwina Blades and New York's peppy Audrey Peppe (twice runner-up for the U. S. amateur figure-skating championship), who turned professional last week.

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