The Theater: New Revue in Manhattan, Dec. 10, 1956

Cranks (by John Cranko; music by John Addison) is a pint-sized English revue with a Jeroboam’s worth of frills. Three men and a girl squeal or kneel or sit with their backs to the audience, climb things while they rhyme things, weave about or dance or contort while singing ballads or blues. In a welter of shifting lights, one revue number slithers into the next while the performers act as their own stagehands.

Now and then—with a telephone, a pair of gloved hands, a package addressed to one actor that drives an inquisitive fellow actor mad—the essential idea is fresh, amusing and satiric. Here and there the production embroidery is ingenious and witty. But too often it is obvious that beneath all the sauce piquante there is leftover meat or no meat at all; and in time there results an awful sameness of effect from so many frantic efforts to be different.

Cranks tries so hard to be different that there are no real skits at all—which are the lifeblood of a revue. Except for Actor Anthony Newley, there is no touch of that special drollery which is the backbone of British humor. And despite a good deal of moody strumming, there is little in the way of tunes. With its self-conscious patternings and posturings, Cranks, at times, less resembles a revue than the rites of some such sect as the Stanislavsky methodists.