The Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Nov. 9, 1936

Red, Hot and Blue (words & music by Howard Lindsay, Russel Grouse & Cole Porter; Vinton Freedley, producer). This first brand-new star to rise in Broadway’s 1936-37 musicomedy firmament was judged by most observers to be of the second magnitude. In terms of a college musical show, the libretto wrestles with the story of a nation-wide search for a girl with a waffle-iron burn on her fundament. She has been lost since 1918, approximately the year in which Messrs. Lindsay’s & Grouse’s puns, concerning souls and heels and counterfeiters who forge ahead, lost their bloom. Also second-best in the opinion of most listeners is the score Cole Porter has composed for his 12th musical show. Victim of his own previous high standards, Composer Porter will doubtless have the misfortune of hearing Red, Hot and Blue’s comic number, “It’s De-Love-ly,” unfavorably compared with “A Picture Of Me Without You” which he wrote last year for Jubilee, and his current torch song, “Down in the Depths, On the 90th Floor,” rated way below his “I Get a Kick Out of You” in Anything Goes (1934).

The authors of Red, Hot and Blue may have slipped, but the performers manage to hold the altitude of their past achievements. As “Nails” Duquesne, a rough female diamond who thinks that a man with two wives is committing bigotry, Ethel Merman lifts a brazen voice, rolls a comic eye. Roly-poly Bob Hope (Roberta} is coyly engaging as the young-man-who-has-lost-the-girl-with-the-iron-burn. Jimmy Durante, sprung from the penitentiary against his will to speed the search, has never been funnier. He cross-examines himself, gets into a frightful wrangle with an interior decorator, sings a song called “A Little Skipper from Heaven Above,” in which he experiences frightful difficulty making his accompanying octet let him take the high note solo. Nevertheless, age has evidently made a slight nick in Durante’s notorious rhetorical self-assurance. At one point in Red, Hot and Blue the magniloquent clown emphatically declares of one turn of events: “It’s propitious!” Then a cloud dims the glint in his mad, beady eyes as he adds: “I think.”