Television: Rubberlegs

An animated rag doll bounded onto the television screen, ogled the camera lens, wagged a pair of aileron ears at the audience and wrapped his rubber legs around the lilt of a song. Ray Bolger, the greatest U.S. comic dancer and a veteran of 30 years in show business, was back at work in TV—and just in time to inject some merriment into TV’s procession of tired clowns. In a $1,500,000 musical potpourri called Washington Square, a sentimental paean to Manhattan’s self-consciously picturesque Greenwich Village, Hoofer Bolger is making his second attempt (his first live series) to win on TV the success he long ago won on the stage.

Washington Square (14 alternate Sundays, 4 p.m., E.S.T., NBC) casts Bolger as friend or nursemaid to such village regulars as Comedienne Elaine Stritch, Singer Kay Armen, Comic Arnold Stang, and such one-shot shimmers from uptown as Martha Raye, Abbott & Costello. The première was overplotted and a little cluttered (“It was all we could do to find who belonged in the Square and who didn’t,” Bolger confessed). But with less emphasis on a running story—which tripped Bolger in his filmed TV efforts—and more on the infectious didos of its star, the show can be the charmer of the current TV season.

Trampled & Triumphant. This week Charles Laughton will join Bolger in a floppy London music-hall version of With a Little Bit of Luck, from My Fair Lady. Tipping a pixy toe at his audience, Bolger will also invite a nostalgic following to join him in the happy choruses of Once in Love with Amy, a great vaudeville song from his 1948 Broadway hit, Where’s Charley?

Dancer Bolger is a mobile piece of American folklore. Boston-born, warm and witty, he has a sort of Ichabod Crane appeal—he is trampled on but triumphant. At 52 he is still as nimble as he was back in 1936 when Broadway gave him stardom, for his part in George Balanchine’s difficult Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet, in On Your Toes. Eventually he emerged as a character comic who could also deliver a wistful lyric. By Where’s Charley?, he was translating most of life into impish leaps and droll gesture. “In show business,” says Bolger, “whatever one can do with one’s body is infinitely better than what one can do with words.”

Don’t Get Trapped. Bolger has a pleasant mishmash of old favorites (The Old Soft Shoe, Window Dresser Goes to Bed) and some skittish originals stored up in his dancing pumps, and is not worried about burning up material—the perennial worry of TV comics. “I’m mostly concerned about my own personality running out,” he says. “These TV shows whirl around like a revolving door. You have to watch out you don’t get trapped in it.”