Merman: A Kid Who Wins All the Marbles

View page in TimesMachine

IN THE END the only rea son they'll have for closing “Hello, Dolly!” is to get ready to open the revival the following Monday. “Hello, Dolly!” does now loom as a permanent nation al institution, one that in vites anybody who is any body to drop in and play it sometime. It may become, for all star performers who can wear red on red, a kind of test match, a rite of ini tiation, an ordeal by fire and an election by accolade: Eith er you do it right or you don't get into heaven, or Sar di's, or sixth grade.

I mention sixth grade be cause Ethel Merman is in “Hello, Dolly!” now and also, I do believe, in fifth grade, plugging for sixth. Watch her walk. She doesn't walk like a crumpled adult, badgered by burdens, har ried by time, made cautious by too many collisions. She walks like a kid who has just won all the marbles (they're in her pocket, and nobody's going to get them back) and she's on her way home, king of the cracks in the sidewalk. Her arms swing back and forth jauntily, her head is up and her eyes straight forward, and you'd know she was singing even if you couldn't hear her. Put a paper hat on her head and a wooden sword in her hand and you'd have the ul timate image of Triumph at Age 10, male or female, veg etable or mineral, sink or.

If I mention knowing that she's singing even if you can't hear her, it's because half the time at the St. James I couldn't hear her. This has nothing to do with the quality of her voice, which is exactly as trumpet‐clean, exactly as pennywhistle‐piercing, exact ly as Wurlitzer‐wonderful as it always was. Right from the first notes, the first words (“I have always been a wo man,” I think they are), you know that it's all still there, dustproof, rustproof, off and aloft and ringing. The only thing is that she's just one woman, alone onstage, and one woman alone simply cannot make more noise than a thousand people in the au ditorium standing up and screaming at her. At the St. James they stand up and scream on the first number, they stand up and scream louder on the second, and by the time she gets to the “Hello, Dolly!” number they don't bother to sit down be tween notes. I'd like to make a deal with them. Equal time.

My God, what a woman she is. Her comic sense is every bit as authoritative, as high‐handed really, as her singing voice. At the very opening, as she's offering one of her calling cards to a horse, she makes the gesture with such confidence that you expect the horse to take the card. Later on, when she's stuffing up Horace Vander gelder (“Have some more beets, Horace”) preparatory to turning down the offer of marriage he hasn't made, she doesn't bother looking at Horace and she doesn't both er playing to the house. She concentrates on the beets, as though they were the gang of rowdies that had to be controlled, and she tackles them and dishes them out and returns to stare them down with such ab stract concentration, such tenacity of purpose, such to‐ you'd think she was Florence Nightingale reorganizing the Crimea. (Why has Florence Nightingale always been played by languid heroines when she must have been a whole lot more like Merman?

Merman is odd. She has won love by never asking for it. She does what she does, on her time and in her tem po, and it's up to you to de cide when you want to come around. Everybody's come around by this time, and there she still is, cocky, chin tilted, half‐dollar eyes sprout ing sunburst black lashes, power flowing from her that will still light the town when Con Edison fails. (Con Edi son is already issuing warn ings about the summer; Mer man never welshes like that).

The show, I must report, has come apart in various places, above all in the dances (above all in that once‐glorious number “Danc ing”); lift and precision seem to have gone out with Pearl Bailey's company to the road. Some of the cast replace ments are replaceable. (It's nice to see Russell Nype again, though, and both milli ners, June Helmers and Geor gia Engel, are fine). But the Oliver Smith settings still glow, the costumes are fresh ly laundered, probably by Miss Merman at home, and missing Merman in the role would be like waiting until Burbage had left “Hamlet” Bernhardt quits with “Camille.” You've got to come when the siren calls.

Shirley Booth is also back in town, with inexhaustible charm but less luck. “Look to the Lilies,” a musical ver sion of the film “Lilies of the Field,” has all sorts of assets that ought to be going for it: not only the warm and wry Miss Booth but the intelligent Al Freeman Jr. to spar with her as a black handyman dragooned into building a desert chapel sin gle‐handed, a score by Jule Styne, staging by Joshua Logan, the works, in fact. And it's tepid from tune‐up to curtain‐calls.

Mr. Freeman Is up against odds: He has to compete with the memory of Sidney Poiti er's performance in the filar, possibly the best performance Mr. Poitier has yet given us. But the evening's fundamen tal problem lies elsewhere, maybe in Mr. Logan's ordi narily inventive hands. The show has no practical or imaginative energy: There's no pressure behind anything, no stir in the choruses, no drive in the movement from scene to scene, no liveliness when the principals square off in competitive song. And dances all.

As a practical matter, this is an extraordinarily danger ous oversight when you con sider that the star, Miss Booth, is playing a nun who, by virtue of her calling, must maintain a certain rea sonable placidity at all times (I mean, she can't caper on the table‐tops), not to mention the fact that in the second half she is partially crippled and is forced to take her time getting about. So far as Miss Booth is concerned, that's fine. She can keep her voice low and still slip a knife in, for plot purposes or for a laugh. Each time she cuts off a flowing sentence, in Ger man dialect, with a curt “Eat, Schmidt” or “Sleep late, sleep till five,” she is as delight ful as she is brusque.

*

But to permit her to work in this necessarily low key, she must be set off like a small jewel, surrounded by a charivari she can be quiet against. The contrast isn't there. Everybody else func tions at approximately the same pressure level (even the whores in the local dance hall are surprisingly dis creet), which means that the entertainment spreads out over the stage floor like pan cake batter. Too bad, be cause it's time for Miss Booth to be about her business again.

Two of Mr. Styne's songs (“First Class Number One Bum” and “Look to the Lil ies”) have the composer's characteristic skip and lilt about them, and Jo Mielzin er's initial setting, which looks like a drawing in which all lines have been removed and only the shadings left, is singularly graceful. But the show plays like a readin with the staging still to come.