Broadway: Farce de Frappe

When the girls of the Folies-Bergère filled out questionnaires for the benefit of the American press, many listed their measurements as 90-60-90. Mere reporters have seldom been entrusted with information of such magnitude. But with a second long look, they realized that the girls were only thinking in centimeters.

That about says it for the Folies-Bergère: in one sense, it promised to be the biggest bust in memory, and in another it is. The French revue of flesh and spectacle opened last week in Manhattan. Even beforehand, Peeping Toms began to swarm and cluster around the Broadway Theater because they had heard that some of the girls were rehearsing without so much as a sequin to outflash their natural splendors. But, alas, even a relatively small sequin could do just that.

Near the outset, the girls begin to yip like Chippewas and throw their skirts in the air while the orchestra saws out some Offenbach, and they kick up their legs in what can be precisely described as the can’t-can’t. Georges Ulmer, the man who wrote the ballad Pigalle and who acts as M.C., tells a joke: “The Folies-Bergère is an old institution, nearly 100 years old. Of course, lately we have changed some of the girls.” He does not say which ones, and without radioactive carbon it is absolutely impossible to tell.

The overall evening is actually part fraudville and part vaudeville, and the vaudeville is quite good. A skillful little dog stands on one paw on its master’s outstretched thumb. A girl spins and whirls in the middle of a rope whose ends are held in the teeth of two men. The sexiest item of the evening is a stripteasing marionette, who bumps, grinds, twists, and removes her bra to reveal the best shape on the hot side of the footlights. Patachou, the evening’s headliner, is a once-great stylist who still has a touch of Piaf—but not enough.

France has stung America with a farce de frappe.