Icetime (produced by Sonja Henie & Arthur M. Wirtz) is the latest, though not the liveliest, of their Center Theater's mammoth skating parties (It Happens on Ice, Stars on Ice, Hats Off to Ice). It is so much like the others that it should have no trouble repeating their success.*
Like the others, it seems largely dedicated to doing almost everything with skates (dancing, singing, clowning, somersaulting, dueling, romancing) that Broadway does without them. Like the others, its long suit is lavishness and its trump card Freddie Trenkler (TIME, July 3, 1944). Combining amazing . skill with amusing slapstick, Trenkler dashes madly round the ice, tears toward the audience, stops dead on his heels a half-inch south of the pit. Amid much that is pleasant, Icetime suffers from too little display of skill and too much display of scenery. Every so often pretty Joan Hyldoft or fleet Jack Reese or such a team as Buster Grace & Charles Slagle gives the show a fine outdoor tingle; and once, in a deep-stage formation called "Setting the Pace," the ice ballet sweeps into action. But too often the skaters just go prettily round & round —or worse still, are frozen inside a lot of hollow hunks of pageantry about hussars, Cossacks, fairies, fauns and flowers. At such moments, Icetime slows down to the speed of a glacier.
*The three previous Center shows played to 5,440,332 ice-skating fans and took in more than $7 million. Last year the three big road shows (Ice-Capades, Ice Fotlies, Hollywood Ice Revue) played in 23 U.S. cities, together grossed more than $12,000,000.