Word: freedley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Written for a production at Catholic University, "Count Me In" should have stayed there. On Broadway it falls flat and can hardly bear comparison with a Freedley, Wiman or Abbott musical. At any moment you expect someone to come out with a crack about the Dean of Women's red woolies, but you have to be satisfied with the humor of a Back Bay sitting room. Compensating for the poor dialogue is some top-notch dancing (Hal Leroy's tapping is the best thing in the show), an original story and a couple of good performances...
...Eddie Dowling and a $645,000 budget. Buzzing around the Caribbean bases last week was an Army planeload of Camp Shows talent: Funnymen Laurel & Hardy, Singer Jane Pickens, Actor John Garfield, Dancers Mitzi Mayfair and Ray Bolger. Producer Dowling expects to send Broadway hits, cast by George Abbott, Vinton Freedley, other Broadway producers. Most ambitious Camp Shows idea: sending a stock company to Iceland for an eight-to ten-week stay...
...Face It! (book by Herbert & Dorothy Fields; music & lyrics by Cole Porter; produced by Vinton Freedley) is the first musical of the season to stir the critics to half-hysterical admiration. The show, a good routine musical, didn't fully rate it, but its headliner, mop-haired, magic-tongued Danny Kaye, did. Last season, in Lady in the Dark, he was almost brand-new to Broadway, but he would have stolen the show from any one less than Gertrude Lawrence. In Let's Face It! (for which he up & quit Lady) he rides off with the show...
When two big names like Vinton Freedley and Cole Porter appear on the same showbill, people expect more than just a good show; they crowd to see one of the season's "hits." With a little more cutting and polishing "Let's Face It" should be one of the season's hits, but it is more than the work of Messrs. Freedley and Porter which promises to make it so. Admitting that the lines, music, casting and chorus work are all good, it's the punch of a young lad named Danny Kaye which furnishes most of the "hitting...
...cast. Eve Arden does a creditable job of cracking lines and is very definitely in place all through the show. Mary Walsh is better than good as Jerry's finance, and stands out singing "Jerry, My Soldier Boy." Most of the other supporters are adequate; in fact, Mr. Freedley seems to have had so much talent on hand that he has had to go to discordant lengths to work in a pair of good dancers, whose dances simply don't fit. Subtraction of such superfluities will make "Let's Face It" much easier to face...