The Theater: New Musical in Manhattan, Oct. 15, 1945

Polonaise (music by Frédéric Chopin & Bronislaw Kaper; lyrics by John Latouche; book by Gottfried Reinhardt & Anthony Veiller; produced by W. Horace Schmidlapp in association with Harry Bloomfield) is a sumptuously messy musical that involves a chronological partition of Poland. Eighteenth-Century Polish Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the freedom-loving volunteer of the American Revolution, supplies the plot; 19th-Century Polish Frédéric Chopin contributes most of the music; and 20th-century Polish Jan Kiepura (The Merry Widow) leads the singing.

The story begins with George Washington warmly saluting Tadeusz as a hero, shifts to Poland, where Kosciuszko unsuccessfully leads a people’s uprising against the Tsarists, and ends with Washington warmly receiving Tadeusz as an exile.

All this, along with a highly vocalized romance between Kosciuszko and a Polish girl (Marta Eggerth), is drenched in thicker-than-usual musicomedy mulligatawny. Crowds of peasants, more Ruritanian than Polish, whirl about with almost frightening energy; court balls are halted by the alarums of war; battlefields, bathed in lurid crimson light, are agitated by frantic flag-waving ballets.

The humor in Polonaise, is even cornier than the hurlyburly. Far & away the best thing in the show is Chopin’s indestructibly melodious music. Even so, the nocturnes, waltzes and mazurkas are vulgarized into schmalzy songs. If the Poles knew what was being done to Chopin, they might well start another uprising.