New Revue in Manhattan

Make Mine Manhattan (music by Richard Lewine; lyrics and sketches by Arnold Horwitt; produced by Joseph Hyman) offers gay, lively, irreverent homage to the world's most densely populated island. East Side, West Side, all around the town it darts, its thumb to its nose, but with a slightly dreamy look in its eyes. Manhattanites, swelling, with small-town pride at its air of big-town savvy, will be the show's best audience. But out-of-towners, whether from Butte or Brooklyn, should find it fun.

A lot of the show is funny, most of it is fresh, and all of it is fast-moving. It has nice tunes and even nicer dancing. But what really gives it the New York Look are Arnold Horwitt's extremely lively lyrics and brightly satirical skits. One funny ditty has all those who ruin the city's sleep--street diggers, taxi drivers, milkmen, newsboys--bawling:

Did you ever stop to wonder

Why the dawn comes up like thunder

With a clatter and a racket and a fuss?

There's a very simple explanation:--Us!*

Another kids a Park Avenue theater:

There's a movie house in Manhattan

That's for only the upper crust;

And every family of worth

Enrolls its children there at birth . . .

You can fish for your favorite trout there

Debutantes have their coming-out there. . . .*

Make Mine Manhattan is probably the first revue in years to contain more good sketches than bad ones. One of them takes drama critics over the jumps, another rides Hollywood producers in Manhattan, a third royally kids Rodgers & Hammerstein's Allegro.

There are just enough weak spots in the program, and inexperienced people in the cast, to prevent Make Mine Manhattan from being a wow. The cast as a whole is not terribly adroit, but it has the conceivably greater virtue of being enormously likable.

* Copyright 1947 by Arnold B. Horwitt and Richard Lewine. By permission of the publishers, T. B. Harms Co., New York City.

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