The Theater: New Musical on Broadway, Feb. 16, 1959

Redhead (book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields, Sidney Sheldon and David Shaw; music by Albert Hague; lyrics by Miss Fields) puts musicomedy's million-dollar baby Gwen Verdon in a five-and-ten-cent storehouse of old theatrical gewgaws. The proof of her impishly awesome talent is not that she stops the show, which she does, but that she starts it—and sometimes startles it—into an amusing show of life.

Set in a turn-of-the-century London waxworks, Redhead casts Gwen as Essie Whimple, a mouse-humble cockney-accented taxidermist of crime sensations. When the wax cools on her tableau of a purple-scarf murder...

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