Theater: Officemanship

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, Willie Gilbert; music and lyrics by Frank Loesser) is a light, bright spoof of corporate wheels and wiles, and its up-from-window-washer hero, Robert Morse, is a superlative, tousle-haired, triple-jointed comic wonder who could coax laughs out of Mt. Rushmore.

Morse (age: 30) plays J. Pierpont Finch, a lad who is eager to score on the inside, instead of scouring the outside, of the Mies van der Rohe palace that houses the World Wide Wickets Co. Finch enters the mail room armed with apple-cheeked guile and a handbook to success that makes him the greatest ploy-boy in the history of officemanship.

With posies for the boss’s secretary and ruses for the boss, J. Pierpont goes sonic. The boss is “J.B.” Bigley, a pince-nezed P.G. Wodehouse caricature of a corporation president, which is precisely the way ex-Crooner Rudy Vallee (age: 60) plays him. J.B. knits for relaxation; Finch ar ranges to be caught knitting. J.B. warms, bumble-tongued, to his dedicated under ling: “I like the way you thinch, Fink.” Naturally, there are booby traps in the corridors of power. There is J.B.’s nephew, Frump (Charles Nelson Reilly), who has the looks and the instincts of a praying mantis. There is J.B.’s mistress, Hedy La Rue (Virginia Martin), a carrot-topped vixen with a 14-karat heart. And there is the mating-call girl, played by raven-haired Bonnie Scott, who is all ready to be an office widow in the suburbs, “basking in the glow of his perfectly understandable neglect,” even before she becomes an office wife.

Big trouble looms for Finch when he gets his own “Chinese provincial” executive hot suite as V.P. of advertising. But when he makes silver-dollar eyes at himself in the executive-washroom mirror, and sings I Believe in You, a passionate aria of self-love, it is clear that there will be no doom at the top for Finch.

Totally animated, Robert Morse never merely speaks lines. He dives after an ordinary joke with a twisting one-and-a-half gainer and makes it look like a pearl. With his mischievous small-boy charm, he is the most ingratiating eager beaver who ever gnawed through someone else’s rung on the ladder of success.

How to Succeed succeeds chiefly by its light touch. Abe Burrows might have tossed satiric vitriol at the corporate image; instead, he paints a mustache on it. Bob Fosse might have whipped the dance chorus into the routine cattle stampede; instead, he stop-motions his dancers like mannequins in a shopwindow, and scatters them like parched, tormented acolytes around the ritualistic idol of an empty coffee machine in Coffee Break. Rudy Vallee cups his hands, megaphone-fashion, around collegiate Grand Old Ivy to give it just the kiss of the hops from Stein Song days, and the rest is a delectable kiss-off of all that nostalgic ’20s razzmatazz. Frank Loesser’s score does not entrance, but it does cleverly enhance the book, as in A Secretary Is Not a Toy (“Her pad is to write in, and not spend the night in”).

As a musical, How to Succeed is a model of the temptations it resists, and under Robert Morse’s comic power drive, it is practically irresistible.