Hit Parade

By T.E. Kalem

PERFECTLY FRANK

Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser

As a composer and lyricist, Frank Loesser was a Broadway Thoroughbred; he was class of the field in Hollywood too. Yet in some peculiar way, full justice has never been done him. Melody lane's ivy wreaths of adulatory fame, bestowed over the years on Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert, on Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, on Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein, on Lerner and Loewe and, in these latter days, on the slyly astringent Stephen Sondheim, never quite landed in full and profuse bloom on the brow of Frank Loesser. Yet he was indisputably a peer among those peers, a genetic child of Apollo, the Greek god of music.

In addition to melodic grace, he had wit, humor, intelligence, a mist-blown romanticism and staggering versatility. Just to mention a few of the more than 60 songs that are included in this show is to indicate the disparate modes in which this man was a master. With songs as varied as Take Back Your Mink, Two Sleepy People, Once in Love with Amy, The Boys in the Backroom, Marry the Man Today, I Believe in You, Standing on a Corner, .If I Were a Bell, Luck Be a Lady, Brotherhood of Man, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition and Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year, Perfectly Frank is a one-man hit parade.

Unfortunately, the show itself falls short of Loesser's exacting professionalism. Occupying the stage of Broadway's Helen Hayes Theater, Perfectly Frank sometimes seems to be on a shakedown cruise. It lacks high style and cohesion and is overemphatic rather than self-assured. Loesser's widow, Jo Sullivan, a wondrously lyrical singer-actress, does her numbers with limpid beauty, particularly the ones from The Most Happy Fella, but she also indulges in tedious, extraneous reminiscences about the Loesser she lost.

The rest of the cast have vocal tang and flying feet. Mercury himself seems to have lent his wings to that gypsies' gypsy, Wayne Cilento, for one orgy of jitterbugging with a fetching imp of vivacity named Jill Cook. Virginia Sandifur is one of those leggy, wind-blown Venus-on-the-half-shell blonds that only Botticelli could do justice to, and Andra Akers is her body-and-soul sister. But the woman who truly lights up Perfectly Frank is Debbie Shapiro. As a World War II U.S.O. girl in a grease monkey suit, she sings I Don't Want to Walk Without You and wipes every eye in the house wet. When she torridly belts and writhes her way through a little-known incendiary number called Junk Man, you will not be quite sure whether you are on Broadway or at the equator at high noon.

-- By T.E. Kalem

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