Best Foot Forward (produced by George Abbott; book by John Cecil Holm; words and music by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane) skips tunefully along with a cast that is, for the most part, barely out of its nonage. But if the performers are short on years, they are pleasantly long on talent, and under the shrewd direction of Producer George Abbott, they see to it that Best Foot Forward never lets its title down.
The well-worn but still resilient thread on which the new Abbott musical strings its bright songs and scenes: what might happen if a waning cinema sweater girl were to accept an invitation to a prom at a modest Pennsylvania prep school. Known as “Winsocki,” this institution of middle learning is full of agile juveniles, whose antics make anyone over voting age feel a trifle creaky.
As the sweater girl, Rosemary Lane is just what the Hays office didn’t order. With complaisant charm she allows herself to be unfrocked by adolescent souvenir hunters, submits to the unlikely proposition that she is old enough to be slipping. Her best number: That’s How I Like the Blues, which she tosses around in the fine style it deserves.
Some stimulating bits by the stimulating tyros: Nancy Walker as a rowdy blind date, putting over a gutbucket ballad The Three Bs (boogie-woogie, barrelhouse and blues) with Co-workers Victoria Schools and June Allyson; Maureen Cannon as a forsaken lyrical young lady, singing of her desire to be a Shady Lady Bird, and stopping the show dead in its tracks; triple-talented Betty Anne Nyman as a tap-dancing, singing, acrobatic prom date; a rousing Buckle Down, Winsocki, with a full chorus led by minuscule Tommy Dix.
The first show Producer Abbott and Playwright Holm have done together since Three Men on a Horse, Best Foot Forward gives every sign of being durable. Handsomely set up by Jo Mielziner, it is bolstered by some fast dance routines tapped together by Gene Kelly, lately the hoofing heel of Pal Joey. The whole show demonstrates once again George Abbott’s peculiar knack of making innocence lively.
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