Silk Stockings

Don't plan on retiring the Kiss Me, Kate album just yet, for once again. Cole Porter has come up with nothing in the way of a worthy replacement. The success of the pleasant, second-rate Can-Can seems to have taught Mr. Porter that a catch title and a song about Paris can fill in for his undisputed wit.

While Porter is laboring under this misconception, his audiences are not finding the going too smooth either. For Silk Stockings lacks even the tuneful amiability of his last show. Silk Stockings, you will soon find, lacks just about everything except some of that splendor which Mielziner imparts to any setting. Porter's ballads are so similar that the overture is only one, uninterrupted composition. There are none of the patter songs, those mixtures of Bulfinch, Shakespeare, and Louella O. Parsons which have paced the memorable Porter productions. He does, it is true, get off "A girl could flatten Lord Mount batten in satin and silk, silk and satin." But he has done better than that.

All of the numbers have lyrics that are either predictable from the first line or so contrived that his past offenses look pallid. In "Paris Loves Lovers," for example, he perpetrates something about Paris bringing out "the urge to merge with a splurge." This sentiment is repeated three times, so I am doing Porter no injustice through misquotation.

Porter is not the only disappointment of the evening. George S. Kaufman and wife have failed to do for Ninotchka what Sam Spewack and wife did for Taming of the Shrew. In the Kaufmans' version, propaganda and comedy are blended in the worst proportions. Near final curtain, when they decide that perhaps the audience is convinced that Paris is preferable to Siberia, the authors throw in a few old anti-anti-Communist jokes and call it a night.

Right down the line in the production good things are cancelled out by bad. Hildegarde Neff, a Marlene Dietrich with a bigger frame and a smaller voice, was the only cast member who managed to make the script worth her while. But though there should be few complaints with Miss Neff, Don Ameche plays opposite her, as an American who turns her head and ideology. There are somewhere, I am sure, people who enjoy Mr. Ameche and his teeth. They will be gratified to see that he approaches a song with the same enthusiasm with which be extolled coffee for so many years. And he does enunciate clearly.

Yvonne Adair, the brunette in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, plays an American actress filming a musical version of War and Peace in Paris. In her best song, "Josephine," she is given a little material assistance by Porter; he had descried her in the first act with "There's A Hollywood That's Good," resulting in a number several cuts under the lowliest College musical filler. Had the authors done their share, Miss Adair could stop the show and Miss Neff could keep it going.

Anyone remembering Beat The Devil or Porter's own gangsters in Kate, knows the potential in the three bumbling agents who are sent out from Moscow to retrieve an errant comrade. The trio is wasted, however, in a show which can afford no waste; their "Siberia" number is as flat and as cold as that overworked land itself. In two other instances, "The Red Blues" and "Too Bad," they are joined by the entire chorus for masterpieces of staging and action. Since the audience is at no time caught by the musical, this brilliant motion is another waste--more pointless than exciting.

Of the show's love songs, "As On Through the Seasons We Sail" seemed to separate itself from the other indistinguishable tunes; but "All of You" has the kind of suggestive rhymes which will more likely attract general notice. Ameche leers at that lyric in what I found the lowest point in a down-grade evening.

George Tobias, as a Russian Commissar of Art, and the rest of the cast are blameless; they did the best they could. Silk Stockings is two and a half hours of testimony that Messers. Porter and Kaufman did not.