Word: lorelei
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (book by Joseph Fields & Anita Loos; music by Jule Styne; lyrics by Leo Robin) lets the famous Lorelei Lee of the '20s gold-dig once more-this time to music. The blonde is played by Carol Channing, who last season rocketed from nowhere to minor fame in Lend, an Ear. Last week she drew rave reviews; one critic ecstatically called her "the funniest female since Fanny Brice and Beatrice Lillie...
That Comedienne Channing is now heading a smash hit there can be little doubt; nevertheless, she is often the sole support of an ailing show. Where Blondes gets hold of a good thing, it suffers from Lorelei's belief that you can't have too much of it; even without a good thing, it follows the same general line...
Strapping (5 ft. 9 in.) Actress Channing herself represents a triumph of miscasting. She can be a very funny female indeed, but in Blondes she suggests the football-playing "heroine" of a varsity show more than the deceptively fragile Lorelei. With her tremendous saucer eyes, her exaggerated mincing steps, her voice that goes suddenly Dixie and suddenly husky, and her simultaneous suggestion that butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and steel bars would bend in her hands, she is not so much a broad caricature as a pure original. She is forced to overdo the whole thing...
While Actress Channing is a happily blown-up Lorelei, the script is a sadly watered-down Blondes; and the score is almost everywhere commonplace. Lorelei's less rapacious pal Dorothy (Yvonne Adair), after having all the life knocked out of her in the script, takes up a lot of dull romantic room in the show. And Dancer Anita Alvarez, who is always good for an eccentric specialty or two, is foolishly converted into a standby...
...seek its end. The first is to press for a four-power control setup with a Russian veto over German affairs (including the Ruhr). The second, and far more effective way, is to win German sympathies and establish conditions favorable to Communism. The Russians can warble a Lorelei song to woo German nationalism, as they have consistently done since war's end, by passing themselves off as champions of German unity...