The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 12, 1942

Strip for Action (by Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse; produced by Oscar Serlin, Lindsay & Crouse) is a ramshackle play and an uproarious evening. Playwrights Lindsay & Crouse plunged into work with a good idea: turning loose a burlesque troupe in an army camp. To this half-tropical, half-topical brew they add colorfulness, craziness, sex and laughs—they know how.

If getting—and keeping—burlesque in barracks required a musicomedy plot too complicated to explain and too silly to bother about, Lindsay & Crouse never stopped to worry. They tossed in gags—their own, burlesque's, the Army's—by the...