The Theater: Old Favorite in Manhattan

Blues, Ballads and Sin-Songs brought Libby Holman back to Broadway in a one-woman show. A quarter of a century after Body and Soul and Moanin’ Low, Libby still looks youthful, her voice is still throaty and smoldering. Last week’s music noticeably differed, however, from the songs the siren sang in The Little Show and Three’s a Crowd; her present program—some of it suggesting what might be termed musical American primitives—sets her where the nightclub singer merges (or clashes) with the recitalist.

Vocally, Libby does well with many of her blues and gets something quick and laughing into lighter things like Cindy and Roily Trudum. For a classic ballad like Barbara Allen, she has neither enough simplicity nor enough style; but the chief trouble with the evening as a whole is the unharmonized nature of the evening as a whole. In not giving a plain recital for those who want blues and ballads straight, Libby accepts the challenge of the far more precarious one-woman show. And she hasn’t the expert showmanship; she just isn’t actress or sorceress enough. She manipulates herself, and the kitchen chair that is her only prop, in all sorts of bold, mannered, ingenious ways; but they call too much attention to themselves, or seem too cute, or wear thin too soon, or don’t really blend with her songs. It is her voice that is true theater, not these stage tricks; and when she sings the old favorites as encores, the voice is all that is needed.

Libby Holman’s private life has given her a right to sing the blues. In 1931 she married 20-year-old Z. (for Zachary) Smith Reynolds, heir to a $28 million cigarette (Camels) fortune. Eight months later, he was shot through the head at a drunken party. With a splash of tabloid headlines, Libby and Reynolds’ male secretary were indicted for murder, then freed for lack of evidence. Six months after his father died, Christopher Smith (“Topper”) Reynolds was born. He inherited $7,000,000 (Libby got $750,000).

As her son grew up, Libby turned from Moanin’ Low to higher-brow efforts: American folk music, serious drama. In 1945 her second husband, Actor Ralph Holmes, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Five years later Topper, who had become a popular, intelligent youth and the center of Libby’s life, died in a mountain-climbing accident on Mount Whitney (TIME, Aug. 28, 1950).

Last week, in her East Side apartment, 50-year-old Libby Holman, no tragic figure, was happily immersed in her “theater piece.” Why did she change to ballads? “The songs are much richer and deeper than smarty-pants Tin Pan Alley.” The mixed critical opinion? “I never read the hatchetmen. You can’t change what you’re doing just because some people don’t like it.” From Broadway Libby will take Blues on a brief East Coast tour, then perhaps to India and Japan. “No retiring to a chicken farm for me,” she says. “I’m going to keep on singing as long as I have a voice.”