The Theater: New Musical on Broadway, Nov. 2, 1959

Take Me Along (music and lyrics by Bob Merrill; book by Joseph Stein & Robert Russell) sets to music Eugene O’Neill’s only pleasant, nostalgic play of family life, and keeps it pleasantly nostalgic. In Ah, Wilderness! O’Neill traded tragedy for Tarkington, Freud for the Fourth of July, tom-toms for small-town brass bands. Take Me Along keeps much the same small-town look, 1910 flavor, horse-and-buggy pace. Its drinking is confined to a likable bachelor and a would-be sex-bad boy; its passion consists of the same boy’s book-fed notions of it. Even in its parading, the show never turns brassy. Its tunes are offhand but full of lilt; and those who fill its period roles are mostly actors rather than musicomedy performers. That is why, at their best, they perform so engagingly. Take Me Along itself has less the effect of a full-scale musical than of a show much enlivened with music.

Jackie Gleason is the one overt performer in Take Me Along, but he displays more of a vaudeville than a video air as he and Walter Pidgeon do a delightful soft-shoe dance, or as he says: “There are 14 saloons in this town, and I’ve never set foot in one of them—the one on 4th Street.” But Actor Pidgeon, with his plaintive middle-aged joke in Staying Young, and Robert Morse, with his just-right teen-age theatrics in I Would Die, and Eileen Herlie, hilariously spinsterish about the facts of life in I Get Embarrassed, are refreshingly personal rather than professional in their way with a song.

Take Me Along could do with more dancing, but a gay Aubrey Beardsley ballet, a sort of absinthe-coated peppermint stick, wickedly whirls all Actor Morse’s callow, adolescent sex fantasies—Salome and George Sand, Lysistrata and Camille —into one. As the show proceeds, certain scenes are repeated, certain songs are reprised. But from the outset, Take Me Along puts its trust in mood rather than momentum. Rather than shattering the funny bone, ravishing the ear or dazzling the eye, it just leaves a nice taste in the mouth.