The Boy Friend

There's music on Mill Street these nights, gay music, Charleston music. The Boy Friend is on in the Winthrop Junior Common Room, and a well rehearsed band makes the lively score heard as far away as the Lowell court yard. Were the whole production equal to its music we would have perfection; as it is we have almost the next best thing.

A plot never appears, but no one complains. The atmosphere is everything and consists of equal parts dance, costume, and dialogue. The action starts at Mme. Dubonnet's Finishing School on the French Riviera, full of charmingly frivolous creatures of the Twenties ("They do chatter so!") gaily bent on little more than gossip, the Charleston and, of course, boys. The boys pop in and out innocuously enough as the shifts from the school to le plage and finally to the Cafe Patallon for the ball. It's all good fun.

Elizabeth Theiler's superb choreography highlights the show. Indeed, every scene is a dance scene, and the dances are all imaginatively conceived if not always admirably executed. The brightest spot in the performance comes late in the third act when a waiter (Philip Burnham) announces "Pepe and Lolita with the Tango," and tall Wes Thum and the petite Elizabeth Theiler run through an hilarious take-off on the "tragic" dance routine.

The other truly bright spot, also in the third act, has the graying but still frisky Lord Brockhurst (Norman Patz), in France with his wife and eager for excitement, explaining to fluffy, pixie-like Dulcie, (Sally Ryder), one of Mme. Dubonnet's unfinished creations, that It's Never Too Late to Fall in Love. Then the wife (Judith Orchoff) appears and the spell is shattered.

Marianne Purdy plays the wonderful worldly-wise French head-mistress with charm, coyly leads millionaire Percival Browne (David Pursley) about the stage with a wave of her fan. Mr. Pursley's Percival is British to the hilt, dry and witty and essentially comic, and in some scenes it's a wonder he can keep a straight face.

The girls as a group are a bouncy crew, with Dulcie the bounciest, Fay (Abigail Liggett) and Nancy (Alexandra Hilford) lively enough, and Maisie (Margaretha Walk) not quite with it though she tries very hard. The boys--Robert Hatfield, David Kopelman, Norman Fox and Herbert Parsons--have a grand time mostly playing themselves and dancing with the girls; but on the whole they failed to impress me.

The central pair of young lovers--"poor little rich girl" Polly (Alice Therese Burns) and rich little messenger boy Tony (Pare Lorentz, Jr.)--also left more than a little to be desired. Miss Burns, who joined the company just two weeks ago, was sweet but not sufficiently at ease, and her singing voice, while pretty, was sometimes lost in the accompaniment. Mr. Lorentz's voice suffered no such indignity, and was among the best on stage, but his acting was otherwise awkward.

The Boy Friend is well worth seeing, and the Friday and Saturday sell-outs leave tonight as a last chance. Or almost as good, one of these balmy evenings stroll by the House, listen to the music, and watch them change sets through the Common room windows.