I Can Get It for You Wholesale. The
years have marshmellowed Jerome Weidman. His 1937 bestselling novel stingingly chronicled the rise of a Manhattan Garment District amoralist named Harry Bogen who was sharper than a Seventh Avenue lapel. In fashioning a musical from that book. Weidman has turned his whole-souled heel into a halfhearted villain, poured sentimental goo over the satire, and given Harry a last-scene redemptive delousing unmatched since the Hays office took in ethical cleansing.
Harry Bogen (Elliott Gould) is a fox in a chicken coop. He breaks his fellow shipping clerks' strike, raids his former employer's staff to start his own dress firm, ditches his loyal girl friend for a platinum-pated actress, rooks his partners out of their life savings, and check-bounces the firm into bankruptcy to keep his sleek chick's wrists warm (with bracelets). But most of the time Harry is too homey to be unwholesome. He rushes home to Mama (Lillian Roth), counts on her for cooking, and sweeps her into an Oedipalsy song and dance number called Momma, Momma.
He throws a bar mitzvah for a partner's son and intones throatily. "To a boy. fare well. To a man, hello!" The boy's father, thanks to Harry, is about to say hello to a prison warden when Harry's Mama breaks misty-eyed into a song called Eat a Little Something (suitable subtitle: :I'll Cry To day), chiding her son for neglecting his character. It falls to Harry's old boss to give him a second chance and a hearteningly fresh moral viewpoint. In one sentence: it is better to be rich and honest than rich and crooked.
Wholesale relies heavily on Jewish folk and speech ways. But as comedy, Jewish dialect is in awkward transition, no longer funny and not yet English. Harold Rome's score is drab and his lyrics re semble either singing dialogue or nursery rhymes. Dancers are blown about the stage like vagrant autumn leaves, but Harold Lang and Sheree North (Bogen's folly) make a scorching sex rite out of What's In It for Me? As Miss Marmel-stein. a secretary with absolutely no sex appeal. Barbra Streisand trips the show into stray laughs. For the rest. Wholesale is as quiet as Seventh Avenue on Yom Kippur.