Theater: Three Men on a Hearse

Let It Ride!, is a song-and-dance adaptation of the John Cecil Holm-George Abbott 1935 hit play Three Men on a Horse, about a gentle soft-spoken greeting-card poet named Erwin Trowbridge, who has an infallible talent for doping out horse-race winners. As the Poet Trowbridge, George Gobel should have been a natural. Instead, the only thing that stands up in his performance is his crewcut. He is so meek, mild, and mousy as to seem spiritless. Composer Jay Livingston and Lyricist Ray Evans have concocted some tender little lullabies for him to croon, but Gobel’s singing voice scarcely carries the length of a baby’s crib. Gobel is a comic miniaturist, and a Broadway stage is too wide-screen for his TV-styled gifts.

As the much-harried racing tout who “manages” Gobel, Sam Levene plays Sam Levene—and is a welcome comic relief. His eyes are poached eggs that have seen the rise of a thousand false dawns. And with the underworld on his shoulders, he can give Atlas shrugging lessons. But Sam can’t sing either.

Deep in Act II. Let It Ride! breaks out of the starting gate with a funny, frenetic song-and-dance item, Just an Honest Mistake, in which a stageful of cops update A Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One. The rest of the production has about as much zip as Churchill Downs in December.